Yes, but who will be super sad with Anduin? Who will mope about how the elements don’t love him as much as they love Aggro and they totally abandoned him?
… As I typed that I realized both him and Anduin have the same problem with their magic juju, and a little blue pill could fix their problems so we don’t have to hear about it anymore.
Rexxar isn’t technically Horde, but I get what you mean.
I have mixed feelings about him actually joining. On the one hand, he might as well, since he’s strongly Horde-identified. But on the other hand, we have so few Horde-flavored neutral characters that I hate to lose another one.
Counter-point: We have so few Horde-flavored Horde characters that haven’t been killed off, retired or turned villain!!
Very true, but the number of Horde-flavored neutrals is even lower. I can’t think of anyone apart from Rexxar and maybe Chen Stormstout since Lillian Voss went factional. (Which I am still salty about.)
Beryl guy too. But Chen shouldn’t even count since Pandas are neutral. He’s less Horde-flavored Neutral and more Neutral-flavored Horde-ish.
…
But then you got me thinking about how many Horde-flavored Alliance NPCs there are.
Alonsus should count, since he’s Church of Light, and the Horde… Has none of that. V-something Sanguinar (the blood elf rogue). Dang, if I’m missing just one more then arguably more Alliance characters have a Horde flavoring than Neutral ones.
As a Night Elf huntress, my reaction of late has been WTN, Elune, could you not have done us a bit better with Teldrassil? And there is that whole thing with that Scythe named after you.
You mean Meryl Felstorm? I don’t count him for the same reason I don’t count Alonsus Faol. He’s undead but was never allied with the Forsaken. In fact, IIRC he fought in the Troll Wars.
Valeera. And I agree that she counts as Alliance-leaning rather than neutral, since she’s sworn to the service of the Wrynns.
is the coolest mage azeroth ever produced. When death came for him he went “Yeah… This cramps my style” and invented a form of undeath completely on his own.
I might like him if he wasn’t a hero of the Troll Wars. As it is, I’m glad I’m not a mage so I don’t have to take quests from him.
That’s fair. If someone said the same of Belmont, I would likely feel more or less the same.
There’s Grizzek, who defected from the Horde and went to work for the Alliance. (Possibly also Renzik “the Shiv,” although I’m not sure which cartel he belongs to.)
I respect Baine. He went above and beyond to save his tribe.
(his tribe being The Alliance)
I get what they were going for with him, but it didn’t work for me.
I dont play horde. Is leadership only an Alliance thing?
Baine notoriously puts The Alliance (and Anduin in particular) before The Horde.
Blizzard is in between a rock and a hard place because when they actually do Horde content, people complain about it or don’t do it, or ignore it entirely. People underestimate how much the writers do pay attention to feedback, even if they often don’t take the right lessons from it.
People hate Garrosh and think he’s stupid back in Wrath and Cata? Okay he’s a villain and a loot pinata now.
People complain about too much Thrall in Cata, MoP, and WoD? Okay he gets a booboo in Legion and is gone for the next 4 years.
They give Baine an entire quest chain where it’s just tauren lore and him destroying an entire army of centaur, people still don’t like him? Okay, no Baine in TWW.
Lillian isn’t liked in her appearances in DF? Okay no Lillian in TWW.
People don’t like Zekhan? Also gone.
When players vocally express dislike of a character repeatedly they either get villain-batted, killed, or shuffled off once Blizzard has tried and failed to make them work. This isn’t restricted to Horde characters, the same happened to Fandral Staghelm, and eventually to Varian. And introducing new characters to replace them is difficult because players are much, much more finicky about new additions than they were in earlier years. With two notable exceptions (Vol’jin, because he’s still baking in the Loa oven, and Rokhan), pretty much all the major or notable Horde character absent right now are those that the community has voiced dislike for or has proclaimed as ‘not real Horde’.
So we get Thrall.
Bit of a minor correction; Lillian is in fact in TWW. She showed up along with the reinforcements that Jaina and Thrall brought, and subsequently aids the player during a questline in Azj-Kahet.
Don’t you mean “Alliance players” complain.
This is (I suspect) an unintentional indictment of the writing, because you’ve essentially outlined the fact that The Horde is continually boiled down to a binary of two extremes. Pre-Cataclysm did not have this problem. Instead of blaming players for hating bad writing, just … stop writing bad stories and inconsistent characters. There are occasional glimpses in the game of writers who get it (usually quest designers), and players respond positively when they do. The Kosh’harg, as I will continually remind, was very well done. Amplify those voices within cdev or watch your playerbase become apathetic and abandon you altogether.