Not twice, just said the Alliance treatment is equally bad as the Horde but at a different angle, as a friend said, one dies by dehydration while the other is drowned
I think the same and wish we got back our BC time where every faction while have the same fetch and kill boars, at least it was done by our npc and a small side plot that differed(Mag’hars and Kurenei)
I understand you now and I fully support this as the Alliance has enough ingredients to be a very compelling struggle between factions pushing their own ideas of the “greater good” but instead of blows, there are unhandled sabotaging to undermine the other parts and get better benefits and position of the matter at hand (Exploiting new lands, position key people in the army, etc)
More like a lot of Alliance players are against change, just check the Vulpera threads or even during Legion, a lot of people were blaming the Horde for the Broken Shore despite their own “master spy” was replaced by a dreadlord.
Although Blizzard has people like Golden that has some twisted vision of the Alliance as soy people without personality but then again many people want that kind of characters or else Anduin and Jaina would be really hated as Sylvanas currently
I prefer actually they go full neutral exploring like they did with the Pandas because that’s the peak of neutrality we can reach and without giving too much spotlight to characters that are “polemic” like Saurfang with his cinematic made a lot of people cry rivers of salt.
People whined about how much The Horde drove the plot at the previous expansion, this zone it’s just another symptom from Legion where the Horde was barely a footnote while Alliance characters took all the spotlight which in other expansions wasn’t like that. This is a downgrade for what we used to play
Ah don’t be like that, lots of people still today complain about how biased was Blizzard with making 4 cinematics about a popular Horde character with the message “The horde is bad and evil but the Alliance gave me a pep talk about what the good side would do”
If only Blizzard made the zone more varied with Jungles or shared the spotlight with a Loa, all of this mess would had been dodged
So, we’re going to ignore the convenant quest where vol’jin becomes Loa’jin, we rescue one of the loa and we nurture several pods that contain both wild gods and loa?
This happen in the campaign and even that is still 60% Nelf story as everything is about searching materials to exorcism Tyrande form spooky Elune. Bwonsamdi is just 2 chapters that Ysera says “I can give you a break, go to help the Loa of Graves”
As I said I’m glad the Nelves get some story as theirs need a resolution, what I’m not ok is going with Legion 2.0 because that only guarantee another faction war “to make it up for the lack of balance in spotlight”
Also no story about Worgens or Wolf wild gods to learn more about Worgens or Gilneans Harvester witches that were a proto-druid for Gilneans?
The problem with this of course is, you actually have to join the faction in order to experience that. True, you also have to join the faction to experience the Tyrande questline as well, but despite what some insinuate here … Ysera is very much an NE adjacent character at the very least. Truth is, there was no real way to even know Bwon, Jin, or the Loa were a part of that setting unless you actually choose to be a part of that world first.
Truth. Heck, I did join the night fae and I still haven’t seen any of the Bwon/Vol’jin stuff. Everyone tells me it’s there, but all I know if I helped hatch Ysera from a seed and got a really dang fun play out of it.
inb4 someone says I’m “crying” because I mentioned content I haven’t gotten around to doing/haven’t opened up.
It actually does, a lot. I was starting to get a li’l frustrated. I even ran my elf butt to “de Other Side” entrance, thinking maybe I needed to go there. Then when I found it and it looked decidedly not-very-trolly, I thought I went the wrong way and maybe ran off the world again.
Now I can stop running off the world trying to find it. I shall have to content myself with running off the world for no reason at all.
I really love nuance when it’s done well but I don’t think nuance works well in a persistent escalation of threats format, and I personally like good guys being good. I stopped playing Horde as main because I want to be heroic and I never felt that way as Horde after Wrath.
Even if I fail constantly at making the world a better place IRL, I get to enjoy a fantasy where I’m working with good people to do good things in WoW. I know I’m at odds with other people here on this, but while I think it’s very possible and necessary to expand the Horde beyond their “zugzug oopsie I did a genocide” run, when they’ve got fascinating characters like the Zandalari royals, Voss, Thrall (at his best), Tauren internal politics, and the Every Man status of Gazlowe… I like the “soy” heroics and resilience. I want Baine to be better, I want Voss to be center stage for Forsaken, but I pretty much like all the Alliance leaders and I’m glad they rescued Jaina from the murderous vengeance barrel.
Not a big fan of Malfurion and Tyrande but I feel like Blizzard has never really known what to do with the Night Elves as part of the Alliance, and they reached their heights in WC3.
I thought of Darnassus, but I gather it’s kind of an anomaly in story terms–it looks much, much older than the few decades that Teldrassil has been around. Makes me wonder if there was some miscommunication with the art team back in the day.
But would be nice to see the start or at least where the druid nelf got the idea as I think he passed long time ago(or his pack was encased at some part of the dream or other realm. I don’t remember much)
Nah, the problem is not who gets more screen time than the other. It just the natural reply from the laziness of Blizzard in overusing a single theme that is heavily tied with one race(Nelves with Celtic folklore) and most important to giving enough room to breath while pushing lore from other races. Ardenweald is not like Val’shara, that’s true but we still need to push for true equality and to make sure Blizzard keeps a work of quality or else we get BFA and WoD all over again.
Glad for you and please don’t take this as an attack. It just a lot of people from the Horde side wants to have participation as Tauren and Trolls have a lot of nature themes in their lore and being absent again at a “druid zone” is like a slap to the face.
I think it can, it works in FFXIV and ESO, it just blizzard not being courageous enough to do so and glad you like feeling like ahero
That should be saying more of the game design and the devs than the Faction tbh. I can’t feel heroic with the Alliance either, most of the quest feels like playing some story filled with propaganda to the point it breaks common sense(I’m seen and treated as a hero for exterminating kobolds that were living at a forsaken mine)
I will be blunt here and may sound offensive but duuude are you for real? We play a game where we exterminate people for shinies, kill Troll whelps, kill native people to claim their lands while the questing reads like a frigging book from Cortez and Pizarro justifying his atrocities.
Nothing that we do is heroic at any sense and it just Blizzard gaslighting the player with the “heroic actions” and could change at any second(See Yrel and Grommash at the start of BFA)
Agree here exploring back the Horde would be the right direction but considering the Alliance players in general likes factions wars as long the game writes them at the top of the moral high ground, we aren’t getting out of this vicious cycle. Just even look how everyone reacted to the nightborne joining the Horde and I hate elfies but a lot of threads were ridiculous(Why would the Niteborne join a genocidal faction?)
Well that’s because they copy Warhammer and wood elves stopped existing in Warhammer so not hard to know the reason of that and also Blizzards gives them Saiyan boost which makes them harder to write in the plot without the obvious “Why doesn’t this dude make a huge storm and be done with it?”
Or, they could of simply sourced material from the nearby ruins of darkshore to build, perhaps? That is always what I had thought. I mean all that nice marble was just laying around. The half mad ghosts did not seem to be enjoying it or anything.
I always thought it was just already there and when the tree grew up it took the ruins with it.
I’d be interested in an all wood temple though, I never feel like they go far enough with nelf architecture when it comes to shaping wood and not cutting down trees. It’s there but it could be there more.
I mean, yes, I’m not blaming an entirely fictional faction for being poorly written. The fact that I want Baine, et al. to be written better I would think would signal that.
When was the last time you bothered to do an ‘exterminate the kobolds’ quest and remotely cared about it? For me it was… never. Literally never. Starting with the fact that I was Horde almost exclusively for the first three phases of the game, and didn’t really engage in the story at all until Wrath, which is when they actually made a story for the MMO rather than a setting in which I could play games and RP.
Those quests decline sharply after BC, are pretty much gone after the Cata phase of the game, and the only Cata content I do is Gilneas and Echo Isles. TwiHigh sometimes. I’ve never been ashamed¹ to skip quests if I find them morally distasteful (I flat-out refuse to do the gratuitous torture quest in Borean Tundra), and until BFA, I don’t think there were any High Production Value Cutscene Quests (read: storyline focus) where you do utterly reprehensible things. Cata and MoP had some absolutely awful quests but like the torture quest in Borean, they’re usually avoidable.
Yeah, the amount of goodness we’re proclaimed to do can be overwhelmingly saccharine, yeah, it’s not realistic, but 90% of the time Warcraft has tried for both ‘realistic’ and ‘has a continuity’ it has been crap, so I’ll eat my sugar cereal since I do know what a balanced diet actually looks like.
Pet peeve: Inconsistent writing is not gaslighting. That term means something very specific and I think it’s not useful to use it simply for poor decisions in continuity.
I don’t know anyone on Alliance who actually likes the faction wars as a storyline. Not even the PvPers, and I used to exclusively run on RP-PvP servers. The last time I met anyone who really cared was like… Cata. Horde I’ve always known people who cared up until BFA squeezed them dry of all passion. I’m sure there’s some holdouts, but I feel safe saying the overwhelming mood of the playerbase is “we are done with this faction war crap.”
I tend to think the Nightborne being anything other than a neutral race was a weird mistake, as I don’t see good reasons for them to strongly align themselves with either group. They definitely have common cause with blood elves, but politically it feels like a dumb choice to me.
I think what we saw was a mixture of a few things: we developed an intensely psuedo-personal relationship with Thalyssra where we saw her as, in-game, a personal friend – much moreso than Khadgar or Mayla or Velen or any other character that’s flirted between neutrality and faction alignment over their history – who now cuts ties with us on the eve of an expansion advertised as being over faction war. This caused a very visceral response.
The power issue is true but I also think the bigger problem is that the night elves were created as a more … hm. Edgy? Realistic? Neither word is what I want but dance around the edges on it – take on a nature-dwelling race. The majority of their writing when Tyrande isn’t front-and-center, however, has been more about being gardeners – more tame, generic elfy stuff. Tyrande amps it up to 11 but then never does anything, so she just comes off as ragingly impotent. If they let her do anything, it screws over the Horde, etc. It’s a bad cycle they are caught in. I don’t care about Warhammer, so I don’t know how much Blizzard actively continues to draw influence from it, though I certainly find it believable.
¹ This does not mean I never do quests that I find morally reprehensible, there are various reasons I might. Usually because it’s mandatory to get something else I want and this is a game with limited choice. But … I don’t enjoy those and I try to avoid them.
So Vol’jin comes back as a literal Loa/Wild God now. Big power-up. So the Horde never really lost him, he just went away for a bit, only to come back way more powerful. His counterpart death, Varian, is still dead. His counterpart power-up, Tyrande, is going to have to give up all or some of her power just to survive.
Kind of seems lopsided, but you know what? I am okay with that, the horde need it. As long as we get a satisfying story and resolution with Tyrande and the Night Elves; I’ll be okay that in the end the Horde made gains while the Alliance only really lost. Again; as long as we at least get proper justice for that loss.
But I can’t say as I have any real faith the Blizzard is going to actually pull it off. it actually looks like they might be doing everything they can to permanently deny that justice. But atm we’ll just have to wait and see I guess.
Ehh. I am also dubious that Vol’jin will really stick around with any story presence, though I hope to be surprised. I think even if he does, everything about Vol’jin’s death was a net loss and unnecessary for the game as a whole; we were robbed of seeing how a troll-led Horde would run differently from an orc-led Horde, it led to a disastrous faction war expansion no one enjoyed, the plotline behind his replacement made Sylvanas inescapably unlikable for a huge portion of the playerbase. By contrast, I had very mixed feelings on Varian, but his death made his final moments positive and set up some enjoyable story and development for Anduin, even if I feel it was all a bit too fast.
Teldrassil… is a cluster. I don’t know if they can close that plotline in any way that is meaningful without screwing someone over and more likely both sides. Frankly I’d like to just call a mulligan and have a new tree pop out of Malfurion’s behind and pretend that all never happened.
Maybe I’m weird here but I don’t actually consider it much of a feather in the cap as to how actually powerful faction leaders are, esp. when everything has power levels as the plot demands. The New Horde is a superpower like ten years after it was even conceived, with its capital in the middle of a desert, Stormwind gets destroyed and rebuilt more often than a Dragon Ball Z character, pretty much every playable race should be on its death bed in population except dwarves, Vol’jin being a loa only matters imo if that means Vol’jin shows up in a lot of quests.
That said I have seen the power of Jaina and Malfurion individually come up a lot as a problem people dislike, so if loa power makes some people happy, cool.
At the end of the day I just feel like the loa plotline is the best of a bad situation, not something that was cool and beneficial.
Honestly I would have preferred if Vol’jin just stayed dead. As much as it sucked to have him knocked off for BFA’s stupid plot, he’s just forever going to be “that tool who nominated Sylvanas” now. But I think I’m in the minority among horde posters for that opinion.
I don’t share that opinion entirely, but I can hardly blame you. My opinions on Sylvanas before Legion was more positive, but like… there was absolutely no angle I looked at that at the time and could say with a straight face ‘ah yes, Sylvanas warchief, this is definitely a good thing that will not end bad in any way.’
AND IF I CAN DO THAT, THE HECK WERE YOU THINKIN’ VOL’JIN?!
