It was my understanding that people picked them on Era because of Salv and Kings. I seem to recall that Horde were the dominant faction in PvE back in the day and seem to have universally agreed upon “OP PvP racials”. With Classic and meta-gaming, preference has swung in favour of Alliance as they are thought to provide advantages, meaningful or otherwise.
However, we’re now in SoD and it still seems like there is a strong preference for Alliane. Both factions have kings and neither faction has Salv. It seems like folks are saying that Paladins and Shaman are equally awesome.
I know why I’m playing Alliance… because that’s what I played in 2004 and I’m a set-in-my-ways grump, but what about the rest of folks? I don’t understand why Alliance is the preferred faction in SoD phase 1.
Does anybody have any insights here? I’m actually a bit confused!
Vanilla was the only time when Alliance was dominant due to a few reasons. One would likely due to things like their leveling hubs are very friendly such as Elwynn, Redridge, Westfall and Duskwood. All four are right next to each other and there’s not a whole lot of roaming you need to do to get to lv 30.
I’d say the other reason is their position in PvE is better when compared to Horde. Humans having things like weapon skill bonus or gnomes with INT bonus is more beneficial overall vs a click % damage buff.
Those are a couple off the top of my head, but overall it really boils down to what players like. I think both sides have their merits, though I have always played Alliance
Alliance racials for human and dwarf priest were a large part of it, but the levelling experience is much more streamlined on horde for most of the starting races except undead.
You can literally bang out to level 35 just by being in the first 3 zones for orc, troll and tauren, and their quests are much more efficient in general.
A lot of people just dont like being big uglies living in mud hovels. Theyd rather castles, woods and nicer areas
Not just that, but because of the caps, the Gnome bonus to engineering is giving them access to game changing tools that no other race will have access too in each current phase.
Also, the access to Windfury and Tremor totem effects without the worry of someone auto attacking it away is the proverbial putting the thumb on the scale in favor of Alliance.
I made a thread predicting this before SoD launch. It was very apparent. They gave alliance windfury. The biggest reason to roll horde was windfury. Alliance was already the most popular streamer faction and was the most popular in SoM and HC. This only made it worse.
So immediately, most of the most active players rolled alliance.
Blizz locked down factions after the fact, so now the super super casuals (who started playing this a week later) all roll on horde. So no one shows up to Ashenvale, and alliance walk all over horde with a zerg 10 times larger than what horde can put together.
And the devs now blame the horde player base for “lacking organization” instead of their own design choices.
Well, they got rid of Brian Birmingham so we can only hope they get rid of Aggrend too. Maybe the game can start moving in a healthier direction away from streamers and RMT once new devs are brought in.
In OG Vanilla it was primarily because most players liked to play human type races. Ally gets Humans and Night Elves. Once Horde got their Human type model with Belves things started changing.
