WoW: Warlords of Draenor

[TheFeniX]

I don't know about other profs, but Blacksmithing has some sort of training project system. I didn't need it since I came back at 525, but it looks like you can level from 0-600 with only ghost iron. I haven't seen anything like this for any other primary professions and, if there isn't, it shows how much incentive Blizz has to offer BSs to make it worth taking.

Something needs to be done about all this casting on the move shit. It's getting quite tiresome. I know Mages are the golden-boys at Blizz HQ, but a Fire Mage should not be able to outrun a melee class all day while still keeping up 80% of his DPS. The guy didn't kill me, but he damn well could have if I hadn't just said "fuck it, not worth the time" and broke off my pursuit. Don't get me wrong, I applaud the skill of someone who can run, jump, turn 180, fire off a spell, turn another 180, then keep out-running you. However, like most MMO PvP, it looks stupid as fuck. Meh, I got enough caster heads back in cata.

This is supposed to "get addressed" in WoD, but Blizzard won't touch it mid-expansion to protect the balance of the game. They'll probably fix it by making all melee attacks cast-time.

[Minischoles]

The problem with casters vs melee has been getting steadily worse since WOTLK, primarily because they started handing out interrupts like candy, meaning casting became a lot harder (looking at early expansion warriors in most cases) if not outright impossible. Which means instants get buffed, but then people complain at instant cast spells violating you. So then in an effort to get people casting, casting on the move was given out (although typically wasn't given out to every class equally).

So now you have this situation where some casters can run around like they're on acid doing 75% of their normal damage and melee can't do shit, as we're currently on the 'nerf interrupts' part of the buff/nerf cycle.


And I would definitely agree cooking did the catch up right. Barely need to move, all the recipies/materials are vendor brought and the only investment is a little gold and maybe 20-30 minutes. No muss, no fuss and you're caught up - instead of something like leatherworking or alchemy which (depending on your server economy) can mean hours of gathering low level materials or spending thousands of gold.

[Highlord Laan]

Leveling Blacksmithing by ghost iron is hugely cost prohibitive. Caese in point; my DK has Blacksmithing of around 370 at the moment. The ghost iron project (ghost iron bells) nets 4 skill points per bell, and costs 90 bars each.

Then add in cross realm farmers and assholes on the AH, and suddenly the shortcut is useless.

[Civil War Man]

The problem with casters vs melee has been getting steadily worse since WOTLK, primarily because they started handing out interrupts like candy, meaning casting became a lot harder (looking at early expansion warriors in most cases) if not outright impossible. Which means instants get buffed, but then people complain at instant cast spells violating you. So then in an effort to get people casting, casting on the move was given out (although typically wasn't given out to every class equally).

So now you have this situation where some casters can run around like they're on acid doing 75% of their normal damage and melee can't do shit, as we're currently on the 'nerf interrupts' part of the buff/nerf cycle.

I do know this is one of the major complaints I've heard concerning Death Knight PvP (as opposed to the lackluster DPS with little raid utility complaints about PvE). Instead of being a mobile melee class like, say, Warriors, they are an anti-mobility class. So while Warriors use gap closers to keep up pressure, DKs have to rely on roots and snares. Unfortunately, a lot of other classes have anti-anti-mobility spells, so the DK has trouble keeping up pressure unless they have a caster on their side to keep them alive or counter the other caster's counter.

Of course, comparing DKs to Warriors may be unfair, since Warriors are their usual end-of-expansion selves.

[Darmalus]

And for those of us who don't PvP in WoW at all, it only makes us hate PvP even more, since we are losing something fun (mobility) for the sake of PvP.

And yes, the current BS catch up is worthless.

[TheFeniX]

I do know this is one of the major complaints I've heard concerning Death Knight PvP (as opposed to the lackluster DPS with little raid utility complaints about PvE). Instead of being a mobile melee class like, say, Warriors, they are an anti-mobility class. So while Warriors use gap closers to keep up pressure, DKs have to rely on roots and snares. Unfortunately, a lot of other classes have anti-anti-mobility spells, so the DK has trouble keeping up pressure unless they have a caster on their side to keep them alive or counter the other caster's counter.

DKs aren't all that bad. Unholy has mad damage and dispel pressure through pets and Glyph of Icy Touch. This is only because it turns into a quasi-ranged class that can spend most it's time in Blood Presence so it doesn't explode and not lose a lot of damage/utility.

The problem is that Frost is just. not. viable. BP means you can't Frost Strike at all. Trading Howling Blast for Icy touch means your damage will be even worse than it already will be while you are endlessly kited. You're basically a Necrotic Strike bot and you'd be better off rolling Unholy for BGs or Blood to carry a flag.

Of course, comparing DKs to Warriors may be unfair, since Warriors are their usual end-of-expansion selves.

Queue standard B.net poster reply: "Melee is fine, look at Warriors." Ret and Frost aren't Warriors. They are built completely different, DKs slow you down, Ret should just out-mobility you through anti-root and anti-snares plus movement speed increases. However, since WoW manages to be a bigger root/stun/snare-fest than even SWTOR, this doesn't work in practice.

Not to mention the metric fuckton of utility Warriors have in PvE. Skull Banner alone is just amazing.

And for those of us who don't PvP in WoW at all, it only makes us hate PvP even more, since we are losing something fun (mobility) for the sake of PvP.

That's kind of biting the hand that feeds you though. All the casting on the move stuff came along due to PvP balance concerns which then bled into PvE. Yes, it's more fun to be able to move and maintain DPS, which also makes mechanics easier to handle. You also get to ignore what's supposed to be a limiting factor of your class. If you wanted to DPS on the move, you used to have to roll melee or certain ranged classes/spec like hunter. The problem is that those ranged mechanics then make ranged a more viable type of DPS than melee. For a case in point, take two raid groups:

2 Tanks, 3 Healers, 5 Melee DPS
2 Tanks, 3 Healers, 5 Ranged DPS

Not only is one viable in most PvE content while the other isn't, the raid group filled with ranged is actually preferable, especially since you can cover raid wide utility for things like Devotion aura with your tanks or healers. Also, just take 5 fucking hunters because they have every buff in the game now. Since all this class homogenization started, you're left with very few differences between them. And if one difference is "this class can DPS at any range, this class cannot" it makes for an easy choice for what to bring.

The PvP arms race is almost exclusively to blame for this situation, yet the forums are routinely filled with ranged DPS complaining "don't nerf us because of PvP."

If Blizzard had stones, the war would have ended in Panda Land and PvP/PvE servers would all go PvE except for the ability to flag and maybe only in certain areas and if it was unbalaced, who gives a fuck? BGs/Arenas would exist by it's own special rule-set, then they could actually balance out PvE without breaking PvP and vice-versa.

[Darmalus]

My usual response to the homogenization argument is this: WoW has too many classes. Their niches are too small, but each class needs to be fully functional in every part of the game.

It's far too late to fix this sort of design flaw, there is no solution. You just have to hope you characters come out of each wave of change-for-the-sake-of-change in a form you can still enjoy playing.

[Civil War Man]

The problem is that Frost is just. not. viable. BP means you can't Frost Strike at all. Trading Howling Blast for Icy touch means your damage will be even worse than it already will be while you are endlessly kited. You're basically a Necrotic Strike bot and you'd be better off rolling Unholy for BGs or Blood to carry a flag.

The problem is certainly the most acute with Frost, but it runs a bit deeper than that. I think most of the issues with DKs boil down to a) the class not being allowed to live down the Season 5 debacle, b) the devs refusing to do anything interesting with the class (possibly due to the devs regretting adding the class, losing interest after Wrath, or fearing a return of the aforementioned Season 5 DK), and c) the change to rune mechanics in Cataclysm.

Queue standard B.net poster reply: "Melee is fine, look at Warriors." Ret and Frost aren't Warriors. They are built completely different, DKs slow you down, Ret should just out-mobility you through anti-root and anti-snares plus movement speed increases. However, since WoW manages to be a bigger root/stun/snare-fest than even SWTOR, this doesn't work in practice.

Not to mention the metric fuckton of utility Warriors have in PvE. Skull Banner alone is just amazing.

No disagreement here. Though my comment was more on the lines of Warriors scaling with gear at a level that DKs never will. Whenever your secondary stat priority boils down to stacking whichever one is the least garbage, chances are you are going to have trouble keeping up at the end of the expansion.

[TheFeniX]

My usual response to the homogenization argument is this: WoW has too many classes. Their niches are too small, but each class needs to be fully functional in every part of the game.

This is a newer thinking WoW popularized that I don't personally agree with. Aside from that, Blizzard didn't even really believe this until they picked up a load of subscribers. And every class is fully functional in the game, some are just more functional than others. But, for just one example, tossing every class a "kick" ability is lazy. I remember having to time Avenger's Shields in case my DPS was too shitty to handle interrupts. Now, it's really just a ranged interrupt on top of my kick.

It's far too late to fix this sort of design flaw, there is no solution. You just have to hope you characters come out of each wave of change-for-the-sake-of-change in a form you can still enjoy playing.

There is a fix: make all DPS capable of DPSing, but makes sure to separate some abilities in the melee/ranged divide and make more melee friendly mechanics or give melee a decided advantage in a department to make it an actual choice whether to bring more or less rather than filling spots with melee because no ranged are available.

The problem is certainly the most acute with Frost, but it runs a bit deeper than that. I think most of the issues with DKs boil down to a) the class not being allowed to live down the Season 5 debacle, b) the devs refusing to do anything interesting with the class (possibly due to the devs regretting adding the class, losing interest after Wrath, or fearing a return of the aforementioned Season 5 DK), and c) the change to rune mechanics in Cataclysm.

It's a shame. DK is the only class Blizz didn't rip from the D&D player hand-book and it's a pretty interesting class at that. Seriously, who doesn't want to be Lord Soth?

No disagreement here. Though my comment was more on the lines of Warriors scaling with gear at a level that DKs never will. Whenever your secondary stat priority boils down to stacking whichever one is the least garbage, chances are you are going to have trouble keeping up at the end of the expansion.

That's a byproduct of crit scaling. Crit works for 2h Frost, but all it does is give you more damage. Same with DW and Mastery. When you get enough crit on a warrior, it just gets insane due to all the abilities it affects. Ret may be in a bad spot right now, but at least Haste can actually change things up for you: the rotation gets faster, your procs get more numerous, etc. DW Frost gets even dumber at high gear levels because it's worthwhile to just pull OB off your bar completely because Rime is shit and OB does less damage and costs more runes than HB.

I get that the average DK player is mentally handicapped, but come the fuck on.

[Darmalus]

My usual response to the homogenization argument is this: WoW has too many classes. Their niches are too small, but each class needs to be fully functional in every part of the game.

This is a newer thinking WoW popularized that I don't personally agree with. Aside from that, Blizzard didn't even really believe this until they picked up a load of subscribers. And every class is fully functional in the game, some are just more functional than others. But, for just one example, tossing every class a "kick" ability is lazy. I remember having to time Avenger's Shields in case my DPS was too shitty to handle interrupts. Now, it's really just a ranged interrupt on top of my kick.

I vastly prefer the newer thinking to the old thinking. Do you remember vanilla? I do, and it sucked.

Less homogenization means more dumbing down of the content outside Mythic, where Blizzard assumes one of each class is present (that's their official design strategy in WoD). They've actually said they scrap mechanics (including raid mechanics) when they can't be sure all raid comps will have the tools to handle them.

If even one class doesn't have an interrupt, you can't have any single player content based on mandatory interupts, or any content where you cannot be sure a class with an interrupt will be present. You can't hope players will team up to make up for individual class failings either. Time has shown players just won't group up in the world, that's why they removed group quests, most players would simply abandon those quests and never complete them.

On the plus side, in WoD Mythic difficulty should have some interesting mechanics, since every fight will assume you brought at least one of each class to every fight. They won't be able to do that for any other raid difficulty.

[Minischoles]

Anyone complaining about homogenization probably didn't play all that much during Vanilla and TBC, when we really did have incredibly tight niches for some classes - and even that affected raid comps. It made some classes mandatory for fights, because other classes simply couldn't do it (take Illidan for example, flat out couldn't be druid tanked).
The only things I dislike now are the incredible amount of crowd control present in PvP - in an effort to be fair they gave everybody CC, most of them instant and it makes pvp unbearable sometimes as you flat out don't get to play your character for large chunks of the game. However that's something Holinka (the pvp dev) has said they are trying to work on and for the most part he actually makes sensible changes.

The problem with DK pvp is mobility and control. They have plenty of gladiator viable comps, but you'll be working much harder and you'll be queue dodging a lot to avoid certain comps (wizard cleaves can kill you straight through AMS sometimes) however in most cases, the classes you can play with would be better off just playing other comps.

You have some mobility, but not a great deal of it and your control is really good for peeling (double DG is great for peeling a healer) but not so great for holding a person in place to dps them. You can then compare then to warriors and rogues (at various points, they tend to experience a very rough buff/nerf cycle sometimes) who get massive amounts of mobility, control and damage

[Sharp-kun]

Before the current thinking fights like Nef (Cata) would have been horrible. That bit where you split into the 3 platforms and each needs an interupt or you wipe? Would have been horrible on 10M if interrupts weren't common.

[TheFeniX]

I vastly prefer the newer thinking to the old thinking. Do you remember vanilla? I do, and it sucked.

Whoops, got off on a rant there and didn't finish that thought. My comment was more about how games like Galaxies had "classes" that couldn't do combat to save their lives (literally). There's more than a few players who take much more enjoyment in outfitting or doing other thing than dealing with combat. It was more than a little off-topic anyways, so you can ignore it.

Less homogenization means more dumbing down of the content outside Mythic, where Blizzard assumes one of each class is present (that's their official design strategy in WoD). They've actually said they scrap mechanics (including raid mechanics) when they can't be sure all raid comps will have the tools to handle them.

There's a problem right there though: balancing based solely on classes. You have spots that will be filled by 4 DPS, no matter what since they only have DPS specs: Mage, Hunter, Warlock, and Rogue. You're already ranged heavy and you haven't even decided if you want to 2 or 3 heal. So mechanics will likely continue to favor ranged over melee.

I definitely don't want to see another gear-check DPS-race situation like a lot of older raids were. But something does need to be done to bridge the gap that has been created between melee and ranged.

If even one class doesn't have an interrupt, you can't have any single player content based on mandatory interupts, or any content where you cannot be sure a class with an interrupt will be present. You can't hope players will team up to make up for individual class failings either. Time has shown players just won't group up in the world, that's why they removed group quests, most players would simply abandon those quests and never complete them.

I have to agree here. However, I just wish they did it in some round about way instead of "here's your kick."

Before the current thinking fights like Nef (Cata) would have been horrible. That bit where you split into the 3 platforms and each needs an interupt or you wipe? Would have been horrible on 10M if interrupts weren't common.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember tanking that fight a lot and I didn't have a free kick because Rebuke wasn't part of the standard pally tool-kit. I had to time my Shield if DPS was too stupid to kick. And that part was horrible because our DPS was too stupid to kick, or even get to the right platform. God damn we were a shitty raiding guild. I'm glad our guild lead server transfered.

[Civil War Man]

WRT homogenization, there is a balancing act. It is nice to have some differentiation between the classes, so the act of choosing one's class is actually relevant in some way. But there are all sorts of horror stories of times when a certain class would get benched because its niche did not fit the current content, and the raid needed X of some other class in order to progress. Stuff like stacking enough Shamans for totem coverage and maintaining a rolling Bloodlust while the Mages and Paladins are left outside the raid to buff everyone going in.

The best example of this is looking at how they changed Naxx when they changed it from the 40-man level 60 raid to the 10/25 level 80 version. People complain about the level 80 raid being faceroll, but it would have been insane if they required 10-man raids to field multiple priests (to MC the Razuvious adds) and at least 4 tanks (for the Horsemen). You probably would have gotten fewer guilds completing the 10-man version than the 40-man.

[TheFeniX]

I think that class balance at least for the most part is pretty much where it's at. My problem is really where melee falls behind ranged and not even that: melee can usually do the job just fine, but the community is of the mind that Ranged > Melee and that really hurts for pugs.

I have to fight tooth and nail to get into a Flex 3 as a Frost DK. Leads will constantly take undergeared and underperforming Ranged DPS over melee because it just makes fights that much easier, or so they think. One of my raid groups field 5-6 ranged, depending on if they want to 2-3 heal a fight and it works pretty well when they aren't all dieing to stupid shit. My DK murder-rolls fights like Spoils, doing upwards of 280k sustained with a decent tank staggering boxes. No one catches me in flex, even ranged with >= gear. Malk I can soak melee puddles for free RP and more DPS. I can somehow manage to keep 180k up on Thok. I also manage to never die to stupid mechanics (like having Thok turn me into roadkill) because I know one fuckup like that can get me kicked because I'm melee. Of all the fail flexes I've been in there, melee tends to out DPS ranged on Thok consistently. How? I have no fucking clue. Yet "lol melee sucks for Flex 3, get moar ranged!"

I would be a much bigger fan of mechanics that don't necessarily gimp you nor make content a faceroll depending on your comp. Just for one thought I had: Nazgrim. Make melee able to DPS him during defensive without a rage increase. To compensate, say every X% of damage done by melee DPS without causes another add to spawn that ranged will have to deal with. Maybe make him throw another bonecracker that healers with have to contend with. Your strat wouldn't be so much about cheesing mechanics as it would be about picking a route to maximize your group's potential.

The problem is that all the interesting or not so interesting mechanics I've seen in ToT or SoO (admittedly, that's when I came back) all favor ranged and makes their gameplay more interesting while melee just glues itself to the bosses ass and stays out of the fire. Yet to read posts on the b.net forums (I know, I know, it's idiot central, but bear with me) you'd think dealing with mechanics was the worst thing ever and that entitles them to top DPS slots. You'd think none of them ever rolled a tank class (and likely haven't).

Thankfully, the straight run of raids in MoP is liekly going away with WoD. Blizzard is focusing on more "Wing" designs of raid content:

We can see the map for Blackrock Foundry above, and understand what Watcher means with regard to the ICC-esque layout. The circular room at the top is likely to be the room you're looking to unlock by completing wings. And a Firelands-ish layout has much the same effect on raiders. While the world first progression guilds will dislike it, as they thrive on assessing who's behind and who's ahead in the race, they're a tiny percentage of the total raiding playerbase. For the rest of us, it's incredibly frustrating to get stuck on a boss, for whatever reason, and feel like there's nothing you can do but repeatedly throw yourselves at that same encounter.

I like Firelands and I loved ICC and Nax. There needs to be more raiding like this. As it stands, we've farmed 8/14 SoO to the breaking point. I don't want a free Garrosh kill, but I can't even get to some of the other bosses unless we hold a lock because I just cannot raid that much, even if we didn't deal with wipes due to stupid shit.

Personally, I'd love the idea of "Soft Locks" where you can lock out a wing one week, then start on another. At any point, provided you haven't jump "past" where that wing lock would apply, you could unlock it and just down the bosses because you can't get past the gatekeeper.

[Minischoles]

You can't really judge class balance based on flex - it's like trying to judge balance based on how people used to take people into PUG ICC groups. It's completely determined by the person or people making the group and how much they read into what the 'community' has said is best.

Best example for flex is for how long people were convinced you could only take a certain number and not one more, under the false impression one more player made it harder. This in spite of repeated CM and GMs coming out and telling them they were completely wrong. The actually were forced to change the thresholds to be much higher, just so people wouldn't act like idiots.


I actually love the wings layout, it's part of the reason ICC and to a lesser extent Ulduar worked so well. Ulduar wasn't so wing based, but it did give you a lot of choice in how you tackled the bosses - you could chose who to progress on.
ICC worked better in that regard, in that you could chose which wing to do heroic or which wing to complete first - but you still ended up with the same problems regardless. There will always be bosses that you hit a wall on in heroic, no amount of raid design will change that.

[TheFeniX]

You can't really judge class balance based on flex - it's like trying to judge balance based on how people used to take people into PUG ICC groups. It's completely determined by the person or people making the group and how much they read into what the 'community' has said is best.

I can't find the blue post, but Flex is pretty much planned to be expanded in WoD and be "where it's at" as an alternative to the meatgrinder that is LFR. There's supposed to be major improvements to the "Other Raids" Tab to make it more than "Hey, I'm a DPS, pick me!" and make it so 3rd party addons like oqueue go away.

In the case of melee vs ranged, the "community" is not wrong when saying more ranged is better. I'm damn good at what I do as a DK. But my performance as a DPS would be vastly improved if I could perform the same as a ranged DPS, with only a few notable exceptions such as DKs and Warriors being able to quickly swap presence/stances to soak wayward mines without resorting to actual cooldowns and having a Blood spec on backup to 3 tanks Shamans. My utility comes from being tanky, not from being a better DPS for certain situations.

That's the problem: 2 tanks, 2-3 heals, and 5-6 Ranged DPS is not only completely viable in MoP, it's actually preferable than bothering with melee DPS. And this isn't just due to the standard advantages ranged has over melee. Blizzard has been buffing ranged DPS mechanics constantly since Cata and we're at a point where moving doesn't cost them a substantial portion of their DPS like it used to, most wiping mechanics are forced to be dealt with by ranged, and since many mechanics only affect ranged, having more means there's less chance a healer will be targeted by a mechanic. Also of note is that with the smashing of buffs, you don't need certain classes for certain buffs (hence my joke about just bringing 5 hunters) while not a bad thing in of itself, it has ramifications.

Don't get me wrong, this has been an issue for years in WoW and am not saying Melee isn't viable in a raid because it damn well is. I'm saying there's no benefit to running a melee or two in your raid group if you have a choice between equally geared/skilled players. That's a problem.

[TheFeniX]

News on the updated female Orcs. Also, going way back, I didn't realise there's already stuff released for male Gnomes, Dorfs, and Orcs, among other things. As my mains are male Human and Draenai, sure would be nice to see something on that. Also, I'm playing my Fem Nelf Rogue again since the arena season ended to get welfare PvP gear, so I wonder if there's anything on that front. Although I run full Nightslayer, so there's not much to see anyway.

New facial expressions are good. I never really bothered to look, but the /laugh on my draenai is hella creepy and not in a good way. Also, add a fucking facepalm emote already.

New patch yesterday. $60 for a lvl 90. Arena season over, as said. Base Resil up to 77%: TTKs still very low. With the new PvP gear out, it's likely to get even lower.

Battle.net is having issues, so the Orc news may not load. It's off and on for me.

[Darmalus]

Yeah, "flex" was an experiment that worked out well. In WoD there will be 4 difficulties going forward. LFR, Normal (equal to current flex), Heroic (equal to current normal), and Mythic (equal to current heroic).

LFR, Normal and Heroic will all be flexible, scaling from 10 to 25 players. Only Mythic will have a static raid size of 20.

Last I heard female orcs were giving them trouble, my guess is the 3d tusks stretch the mouth out in ways the artists don't like.

[TheFeniX]

LFR, Normal and Heroic will all be flexible, scaling from 10 to 25 players. Only Mythic will have a static raid size of 20.

That sounds awesome. So awesome they should have done that years ago. Right now, an old gaming buddy got back into the game and I'm hassling guild lead to gear him up in Flexs because he's pretty damn good at what he does. However, there may be no room in our 10-man group for him and that's a shame. But since I've always been more of a normal-mode raider due to time constraints, this setup would be pretty much perfect because you can also carry more people than you could in 10-man to get them geared up.

[Darmalus]

LFR, Normal and Heroic will all be flexible, scaling from 10 to 25 players. Only Mythic will have a static raid size of 20.

That sounds awesome. So awesome they should have done that years ago. Right now, an old gaming buddy got back into the game and I'm hassling guild lead to gear him up in Flexs because he's pretty damn good at what he does. However, there may be no room in our 10-man group for him and that's a shame. But since I've always been more of a normal-mode raider due to time constraints, this setup would be pretty much perfect because you can also carry more people than you could in 10-man to get them geared up.

I'm in that boat. My friends and family guild died when they increased the difficulty of normal in MoP (everyone doing LFR together just wasn't the same) so I basically haven't done anything past LFR and a few random Flex runs. I keep hearing/getting invites to normal runs, but to be honest I'd rather do dailies or play Minecraft than be a bench warmer. Maybe in WoD I'll bother raiding again.

[TheFeniX]

I'm in that boat. My friends and family guild died when they increased the difficulty of normal in MoP (everyone doing LFR together just wasn't the same) so I basically haven't done anything past LFR and a few random Flex runs. I keep hearing/getting invites to normal runs, but to be honest I'd rather do dailies or play Minecraft than be a bench warmer. Maybe in WoD I'll bother raiding again.

Man, I am so ready for this change to raids. There was some inter-guild drama rumbling, but I somehow kicked it into high-gear by pulling my pally out of a 10-man to go Flex with my buddy. I did the first wing, so I figured they wouldn't be mad about it, but this caused a massive shit-storm because they can't find another tank, or at least one who knows his class. I just... when the fuck did my alt get so fucking important? I don't want to be important anymore, I just want to hit things and get shinies.

Instead, I supposedly did this due to my loyalty to the other guild. An idea laughable for two reasons. 1. I specifically told this guild I only reserve my DK for one raid group because they were cool enough to run with me to get him to a gear point where I'm now carrying others and that if I have a chance to run my buddy through content, I will take it. 2. Are you fucking serious? "Loyalty?"

Anyways, there's a little vanity applet on B.net that let's you see the progress on the new models. As of right now, only a few are working. Orc and Gnome Males and Dorfs. I would totally race-change my pally to Dorf now, but I'm not dropping cash on that. Oh and more realm connections are on the way.

EDIT: I should add, that link is basically that "what's what" of WoD news that I've been searching for. Also, "ALLIANCE! Here's your EXPANSION!" Aaaaahahahaha!. I guess 3/10 representation would count as an Alliance heavy expansion. Oh man, cheap shots that aren't even funny. What have I become?

[Darmalus]

EDIT: I should add, that link is basically that "what's what" of WoD news that I've been searching for. Also, "ALLIANCE! Here's your EXPANSION!" Aaaaahahahaha!. I guess 3/10 representation would count as an Alliance heavy expansion. Oh man, cheap shots that aren't even funny. What have I become?

3/5 representation, 5 of the 7 orcs are raid/dungeon fodder. Alliance heroes go neutral, horde "heroes" become loot pinatas.

[TheFeniX]

EDIT: I should add, that link is basically that "what's what" of WoD news that I've been searching for. Also, "ALLIANCE! Here's your EXPANSION!" Aaaaahahahaha!. I guess 3/10 representation would count as an Alliance heavy expansion. Oh man, cheap shots that aren't even funny. What have I become?

3/5 representation, 5 of the 7 orcs are raid/dungeon fodder. Alliance heroes go neutral, horde "heroes" become loot pinatas.

If there's one thing Horde and Alliance players can agree on: Orcs of Orccraft needs to die. At least the Trolls get a token release through the Zandalari/Drakkari every expansion and they represent one of the smallest playerbases, but has there been any non-orc related shenanigans of note since..... ever? It honestly boggles my mind that, at least it seems, the Dranaei are getting their foot in the door over Blood Elves which, as much as the Horde would like to ignore, encompasses the largest Horde playerbase from what I know.

I get why Gnomes and Dorfs get ignored, even if Blizzard doesn't: few people play them and Humans are overrepresented in the playerbase and the lore (for what little Lore Alliance seems to get) and humans are so generic it's easy to write trite garbage for them that's passable. But Belfs. Belfs get next to nothing and they're the most popular Horde race and one of the more interesting ones since Orcs became green humans. Further, from what little I've seen, their leader Captain Eyepatch would make me roll a Belf. He's more of a leader than any other Horde asshat and he gets shunted into the background after ToT.

Whatever, they'll get sexy new female models and everyone will watch more Green Jesus and his Orc Apostles save the world, and Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans (but mostly vs Other Orcs) will continue on.

[Lord Revan]

at least the new warchief of the Horde isn't an orc (shame that it'll probably get reconned out by this expansion).

it's a damn shame how under represented the sin'dorei are in lore with them still being essentially an alliance race culturally, even more so then the forsaken, so you could get some interesting stories about that contrast.