its not that they broke it, its that the rules keep changing randomly and more importantly quickly. in 2004-2005 nerfs took 6months
Maybe, but I can only see one word in ahead.
Nah, they broke factions and that is the real problem now that they fixed hunters.
he class nerfs being quick is absolutely a good thing. Everyone would have quit in a week if hunters pets werenât nerfed. Insane to suggest something totally busted should be running around for SIX months. LOL. Wtf?
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I played pally through vanilla in a guild that was in the top 10 (iconoclast) Our job was literally to cleansebot, blessing and judge, toss a heal when needed. Druids and priests were the big guns. Horde shamans had much more healing throughput but had mana issues. Pally power and cleansebot were literally the addons for it. It wasnt until aq40 that pally healing really came online.
Its hilarious that youre whining so much over alliance getting windfury (horde got kings too) when the reality is, it could be completely homogenized on both sides and most people still wouldnt want to play horde. Theyre hideous.
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Just feels cringe playing a game-mode in which theyâre massively favoring the faction the lead dev and his streamer friends play.
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I played pally through vanilla in a guild that was in the top 10 (iconoclast)
Either lying or just being disingenuous since anyone that good would know Paladins were the best Raid healers in Classic WoW. period.
Druids
LOL. Iâm not going to take anyone who is playing up Druid healers in Classic seriously. Maybe the only one worst than Shammy because HoTs donât stack. Youâre right that ONE Druid maybe will put up impressive healer numbers but not 3 or 4. You will always have most Paladins and Priest than druids really and it would be that way even if Druid werenât less common based on comp desirability.
Horde shamans â had mana issues.
While Paladins were the very last of any healer class to go OOM. That is HUGE. Essentially giving every Alliance raid more healing and more time to kill a boss before healers run dry. Obviously not a thing that bothers top raiding guild but beyond massive for the vast majority of guilds so itâd be disingenuous to pretend the top 1% raiding is all that matter anyway. Generally on average Pallys were the best healers in WoW classic flat out and it isnât really debatable at all unless you wanna be really disingenuous and and talk about the top 1% of guild exclusively maybe.
Then the Pally Buffs which were the best in the game. And yes Horde got Kings but not Salv and the Pally is still a better raid healer so all SoD has done by also giving allaince WF is make the PvE imbalance of Classic so much WORSE as to be flat out broken and thus the faction imbalance. IE SoD looks a total failure unless they remove WF from Alliance ASAP.
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Just feels cringe playing a game-mode in which theyâre massively favoring the faction the lead dev and his streamer friends play.
This 100000%
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a lot of half answers so far.
Alliance are the better faction for all pve content because of humans and paladins.
Humans need less hit rating using swords and maces. Swords are the most common weapon end game
Paladins are the most powerful class in the game bar none. Their utility is off the chart. giving horde kings did not fix anything. Horde still has no answer to blessing of freedom, blessing of sacrifice, judgement of wisdom and light, a single healer being able to clean 4 of the 5 debuff types in the game, out of group salvation (tranquil air totem can hit the tank as well as the melee ie. why bother), out of group mana regen (shaman donât get mana spring totem until 26, paladins have blessing of wisdom at like 14) and now with these runes paladins provide even more mana to their groups and will likely become the strongest tanks in the game given ardent defender was baked into their new tanking rune.
horde is popular in pvp because undead hard counter alliance warlocks and sometimes the 25% stun resist on orcs can give rogues and paladins a hard time but thatâs about it. paladin utility also reigns in pvp.
this disparity continued into tbc when they gave space goats a racial hot and a party wide 1% hit aura but gave the horde elves a pbaoe silence that restores a little bit of resource.
oh and of course - dwarf fear ward
there is a reason why in SoM most servers were 80/20 alliance/horde.
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Played Horde in classic for the first time on era and this defintiely struck me. Itâs insane how much smother Horde leveling was. By 30 Alliance characters will have a half dozen times they run out of a logical quest flow and have to start hoping to literally every corner of the planet to avoid massive grinding. Horde just flow and flow through hubs.
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Yeah, you are making stuff up. No one wanted druids in raids in classic for the same reason no one wanted Warlocks as DPS. DOTs/HOTs donât stack and there was a cap on active effects on both players and mobs due to the hardware limitations of the time.
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2 druids for brez, 2-3 pallies for cleanse bot/buff (maybe 4) rest dwarf priests for fear protection and heals.
Pallies most certainly did oom on certain fights And would have to go into melee range to attack if they wanted the judge mana regen, where priests could wand. Thats what was used through most vanilla progression on alliance. Most people rerolled from pally because if you wanted to play an actual healer you went priest, if you wanted to tank or damage you went warrior. I started warrior in vanilla and didnt look back.
But after thinking back on the progression and thinking of pallies now, youre 100% right⊠there is an imbalance with the new toolkits and runes. Lol. So i digress with the initial argument. Giving hunters kings doesnt make up for the new pally toolkit
Yea, I think a lot of people who didnât play back then either donât realize, or forgot, that things were different. We werenât playing on the same client with the same balance we had now, and people didnât have BiS lists that they followed. It was a very differnt game.
Thereâs no denying that Paladins are very strong in Era now though. I played in Classic 2019 Phases 1 and 2 and Pallies absolutely crushed it on the healing front.
With that said though, SoD is a different beast. From what I can tell DPS (melee?) and Tank shaman are doing extremely well, right up there with Pallies. Horde should be in a much better position.
With that said, a couple things were raised in this thread so far that stand outâŠ
- BFD has a lot of swords but no axes, so the weapon racials heavily favour Alliance. The actual scope of the damage difference here is unknown.
- Paladins get Blessing of Wisdom while Shaman donât have Mana Spring yet. Alliance have access to a 15 mp5 buff and Horde donât. So far as I can tell, Horde donât have anything that Alliance doesnât.
Iâm not really sure either of these would have contributed to players choosing Horde at the outset, but I think itâs a fair bet that it would contribute to players not wanting to choose Horde after the fact.
While I donât know the scope of the difference the weapon skill makes (I never play humans anyway :P), itâs easy to measure the difference BoW makes. Itâs not a lot but at a minimum it results in a couple extra heals in a fight where players already donât have a lot of mana to go around.
In a game where people will very much meta the ever loving crap out of things and pursue any advantage, I do think there may have been some Blizzard oversights here. Does that mean Blizzard ruined faction balance? No, I donât think so⊠but an axe on the BFD loot table and some kind of mana regen ability would have been a good idea.
Taking a quick look at the runes, a âquick fixâ might be to extend a portion of Water Shieldâs mana regen to the group. That might be a separate thread thing though.
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Dont know if you played og classic, but horde had some HUGE advantages, the most egregious being the Alterac Valley âbalanceâ if you can even call it that, also horde are the only ones that can get war cheifs blessing without there being extreme collusion.
AV is favored horde in a defensive game, but itâs favored alliance in a rush game. Everyone trying to get honor or in a premade rushes. Warchiefâs is available to alliance without much difficulty, itâs not extreme at all, and it doesnât balance out paladins.
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Which every game was a defensive game after the first week, i did the exhalted grind on 3 chars, the first one took like 3 days, the next 2 took weeks, because all horde had to was jump the alliance initial rush and they basically won unless it was a premade
The itemization goes into endgame as well with quel, maladath, thunderfury, etc. favoring alliance. All of the best tanking weapons are swords.
I play horde because I like orcs and windfury, but Iâm under no illusion Iâm playing under the massively disfavored faction. I MT raided alliance in all content in 2019 classic.
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Thereâs an expression⊠âOffense wins the game, Defense decides by how much.â
This is very true in AV. Alliance may be able to win in an outright rush, but if Horde choose to play defensively they will win every time. Thereâs a reason Alliance had a 1% win rate when Classic launched in 2019 
Iâm not disputing the balance on Era, only inquiring as to the why of things in SoD, where those end-game weapons donât exist yet and we donât know what itemization will look like. Though to be fair there could very well be speculation to those ends and that could be a driving factor as well.
because noobs love paladins and hunters xD
also people followed the big streamers.
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because we donât have scoliosis
do you have a source on where the devs said that?