Honestly, I can’t believe we haven’t done this one yet!
This might be the most controversial and difficult Big Question yet. Everyone, please. Maintain your sanity.
I never really played much World Of Warcraft, but when I did I played Alliance.
Please don’t kill me or judge me or hunt me down and torture me.
Comments
76 responses to “The Big Question: Horde Or Alliance?”
But the Alliance doesn’t even get any cool ships!
<.<
My reasoning is simple.
Sometimes, back in the old days of Vanilla WoW (presumably also more recently, but I gather that most people fly their own way these days), when you hopped on a flightpath, the NPC would say “For the Horde!”
But since by this point you were travelling away from them, the final syllable would sort of be cut off, leading to immense amounts of entertainment when it sounded like “For the whore.”
The Alliance can’t hope to compete with that.
Thrall’s Balls!
I don’t understand the question.
I play both, at the moment I prefer Alliance but my heart is with the Horde!
Third option – never touched WoW.
So you’re the one…
You should play the Warcraft strategy games. They’re great. It’s a shame we’ll probably never see another.
I did play Warcraft 2 I think for a little bit?
I’m Ron Burgundy?
Heretic… heathen… get him!!!
Doubleagent had the right idea….
LOK’TAR OGAR
Alliance, tho I never really played long enough to form any real loyalty to either.
Alliance. Forever.
I CHOOSE LIFE!
So Alliance is Humans and Horde is Orcs?
I never played WoW, but loved Warcraft I and II.
I vote for the game called The Horde, I friggin loved that game.
http://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-horde-22q
None shall pass!
Zug Zug forever
ME NOT THAT KIND OF ORC
Any game that lets me choose to play a dwarf then I will do so. Alliance for me!
FOR THE ALLIANCE!
That’s tough…
Horde because my first Rags kill was on my troll priest but…
Alliance because of Dwarf hunters…
Horde – just
FOR THE HORDE!
I haven’t played in years, but my heart will always belong to the Horde.
FOR THE HORDE!
/whisper: but I do like some of the Alliance landscapes and people.
Yeah, the Alliance garrisons in Warlords were much prettier. Kinda sore that as a great Blood Elf general, I had to put up with slap-dash-looking Orcish ‘architecture’ for most of my buildings. They should’ve let it be racial-themed, so I could have shimmering magical elven towers everywhere. Live for the pretty!
Ha!
Vigil ftw
Like this is even a question. Big green hulking monsters or tiny little goblins. Horde duh!
Zug zug!
Double post woops
Alliance Players, do you remember even winning a BG?
No… no i dont….
back in the day, on cenarius when afterlife/dawn eternal/eternal ascendants were running premades in their T3 I remember, as a troll priest, that alliance won a helluva lot. feral druid flag runners and 9k health prot warriors -_-
since then though, it seems whatever faction you aren’t playing currently are the ones winning in BGs
AV called. It can’t remember the Horde ever winning there.
Gotta give you that one. Anything else, no… but AV, I know in the last couple years it was pointless to try compete with the Alliance in that competitive timed PVE race pretending to be PVP.
Back in vanilla as a 14 year old kid i naturally played a NE Hunter. Then Oceanic servers came out and some mates at school were playing so i joined them. I really wanted to play horde at that point but my mates were alliance so i was stuck. I still think horde races are soo much better but when i played horde alts in bc and WotLK imo alliance leveling zones and capital cities were way better.
Alliance were notorious (pre cata) for being a bunch of noobs, and they were. Surprised there are so many here, thought aussies were more horde-inclined. Shame 😉 Oh and Barrens Chat!
Depended on server really
haven’t played since 2008, but barrens and org were the best places to be.
I think the demographics of the factions were interesting.
One of the more telling things is probably when you enter the starting zones at Borean Tundra.
If you’re Alliance, you see a queue of volunteers for the military, and some officials come running up to practically [CENSORED] your [CENSORED] and fawning over how they’re so honoured that the esteemed hero [You, Alliance scrub] is lending your might to the cause. No waiting in lines for YOU, oh hero!
If you’re Horde, you have surly orcs calling you a useless scrub and forcing you to go work to pull your weight because ‘bitch, you ain’t shit’.
The difference was quite striking. Seemed to me like the devs were almost admitting that the Alliance is full of players who need their ego stroked. 😉
Playing as Alliance, I felt so outgunned by Horde players in terms of quantity and quality.
Both. Depended on my guilds at the time.
Both!
How do you like them apples?
Liked alliance in vanilla and bc because my friends played there and the lore was better imo. Now the last few xpacs have been more entertaining as horde. I never liked most of the horde race designs though.
Alliance. One can only look at so much brown.
Whoever’s winning.
Mad props to that Pandaran player who managed to stay neutral right to the max level…
What makes a man turn neutral … Lust for gold? Power? Or was he just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Maybe the inability to make a decision….maybe…. I dunno…. possibly…. probably……*shrug*
The horde has the best battlecry. FOR THE HORDE!
The Alliance doesn’t have anything even close. Go play your WC2 sound-file of an Elven ranger whispering, “For the Alliance…”
Yeah. Real inspiring.
https://youtu.be/nxxG-4WG_co
I still frickin’ love this.
Horde without a question!
I always found the way the Horde was written to be a real turn off. Blizzard wanted them to be evil and brutal and cool, but at the same time the faction was their favourite so they constantly made them the good guys. I dunno, it wasn’t always bad and countering tropes helped make Warcraft stand out in an ocean of generic fantasy worlds, but I could never quite shake the way a lot of Horde stories felt like fan fiction.
Horde for life. Vanilla barrens chat, and being an undead that eats an alliance victim to regain up in PvP
Horde have better players and less idiots, But I started Alliance so that’s what I play. If Blood Elf was an option in Vanilla I’d probably be Horde.
Alliance, but I still think both factions are dumbasses that perpetuate war when constant threats could be dealt with by being adults, putting on big boy and girl pants and teaming up.
FOR LORDAERON!
Pfft. Lordaeron is currently in the hands of its original owners. These Johnny-come-latelies wanting to take it out of the hands of their elders over something as discriminatory as whether they have a pulse? Height of bigotry.
Horde. I never understood anyone wanting to play as the ‘good guys’ in anything. Seems utterly boring to me. And aside from that, the races of each faction spoke to me as well. I don’t wanna play as a Dwarf, Elf, or any of that cliched fantasy stuff. Oh, and playing as a human? WHY? I’m playing a fantasy MMO, why on earth would I want to play as a human?
Forsaken, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins – they’re just way more interesting/fun. The united/tribal aspect of the Horde spoke to me as well.
The only thing I’m jealous of Alliance for is Worgen – they’re cool as hell. Totally not Alliance-like at all.
EDIT: Oh and the obscenely overpowered Human racial will probably skew the results a little. Humans in PvP are rife for that single reason. Waiting desperately for the inevitable nerf.
EMFH is confirmed gone in Legion. The ability is folded into PVP talents instead so everyone gets access to it. A long time overdue frankly, since EMFH is the same as the old Will of the Forsaken, which was nerfed years ago because everyone complained it was OP. Yet they went and gave the same thing to humans. Go figure.
Horde always had the best pvp racials. WotF was stupid good, and although things have changed over time, EMFH shares a cd with the pvp trinket(which is accessible to all races). Perception is also gone. Meanwhile Aoe silence, aoe stun, stun reduction, etc. Go figure.
The pvp trinket also has stats on it, so it’s not like you get a 100% bonus trinket for being a human in pvp. Racials + passive stats on pvp trink = EMFH + trinket? That’s actually fairly balanced. When WoW first came out, there was no EMFH, and forsaken rogues could kill squishy priests for absolutely free. People rerolled horde because they were sick of losing, and when you’re on one side enough, you tend to stay there. What races or classes are OP is subjective and really comes down to stats and how vocal the community is. Nobody is rerolling humans to wreck battlegrounds.
The real reason for the popularity of humans is that they look good and are relate-able. Also, orcs are overdone and not interesting. Far too much exposure with the last few expansions and movie.
There are vastly better trinket options out there when you’re not bound by the PVP one being required.
Your whole response seems blind to the actual state of PvP right now and for the past few expansions. Look at the arena charts, humans dominate them the same way Forsaken used to dominate PvP when the original WotF was around. Right now 56% of the top 50 2v2 players are human, 50% of top 50 3v3 players are human, 58% of top 50 5v5 players are human. Yet only 22% of active characters are human. Next you’ll tell me that there being only 3 Horde in the top 200 3v3 players is just coincidence or that there’s some ethereal ‘good at PVP’ magical powers Alliance has that has nothing to do with EMFH.
There’s no way that kind of disproportionate representation can be explained away with a simply “humans look nice and are relatable” handwave. The PVP distribution wasn’t like that before EMFH was introduced, they became that way afterwards. The charts look the way they do because the top end PVPers went to Alliance and went to Human to get the racial.
Vastly better trinket options? Really? What would they be?
Currently you need to wear two pvp trinkets for the 15% damage reduction. If you wear a cc trinket, you might choose +875 Versatility for the regular arena one. If you were a human, you could wear the +389,1104agi/20s one. That means the non human has a net +486 Versatility, plus their racials, and the human has a chance at 1104agi/20s. 450 Versality will increase your dmg by about 3.45% and reduce damage taken by about 1.73%. The temporarily agility buff on the human will increase their AP so they hit slightly harder too.
This is where you have fun with math and you say well is it better to do +3.45% and take 1.73% less overall PLUS have a racial like escape artist or wotf, or have that random 20s agi buff? And if you assume that it’s better to have the random agi buff because it can do more dmg and “all the top players do it”, then how MUCH better is it? Is it SO much better that it’s overpowered? Because that’s the issue. EMFH can be balanced by the stats on the pvp trinket and it already has been.
So why (do you think) is there a more humans in END GAME pvp? Because of things like active perception, which was clearly OP in arena. But it’s gone now, why haven’t the hordsies gone back to horde? Because where’s the incentive? As eloquently put by someone on the forums:
“This lead to the top PvP’ers, who were mostly Horde in MoP to change to Alliance. This lead to the lemmings going Alliance too. Blizzard finally did something about it in 6.2, but at that point it was too late. Medallions were buffed, but being the middle of the season, no one was going back Horde.
Now we’re in S3 and no one was willing to pay to be Horde again. Their teammates and friends are still Alliance. In fact, top PvP’ers play Horde in tournaments.”
The proc on the PVP trinkets isn’t random, it’s pretty much guaranteed to proc when the cooldown expires, giving it a 33% uptime. So your options are like this:
Human:
Stat+Vers (+389 stat, +387 vers averaged)
Vers+Stat (+389 vers, +368 stat averaged)
Averaged total: +757 stat, +776 vers
Non-human (option 1):
Medallion (+875 vers)
Vers+Stat (+389 vers, +368 stat averaged)
Averaged total: +368 stat, +1264 vers
Non-human (option 2):
Medallion (+875 vers)
Stat+Vers (+389 stat, +387 vers averaged)
Averaged total: +389 stat, +1262 vers
Your net differences between the options are:
Human vs Option 1: +389 stat, -488 vers
Human vs Option 2: +368 stat, -486 vers
The difference between 1 and 2 versatility-wise are minimal, so option 2 is mathematically better. Vers difference then is a 3.74%/1.88% advantage to the non-human. The stat increase is harder to quantify but for top end PVPers it averages around +8%. Main stat gains are almost directly proportional to DPS gains for most DPS specs, so as a non-human you’re buying 1.88% increased survivability for a 4.26% loss in damage output. Cancelling them out, you end up with humans having a 2.38% damage dealing advantage because they’re not locked in. That shaves a second off a 45 second fight for every human involved. 3 humans, 3 seconds, 7.14% higher DPS on the human 3v3 team over their opponents. A significant advantage.
And that’s only using averaged numbers. In reality the trinkets proc near the start of the fight, and the first 20 seconds is crucial to an arena battle. The human advantage increases significantly in that period, but I’ll write out the numbers on that later, have to help out with mythics.
This might be true if you’re auto attacking a raid boss, but pvp is a different kettle of fish. You don’t get 45s of dps uptime on a player. If the human player gets cc’d during this period, they will be fighting at a disadvantage after the buff wears off. And you STILL ignore the racials which everyone else has after all the calculations are done. Blood Fury? Berserking? What value do you put on a forsaken negating a priest fear? An orc getting out of stun lock early? A dead or cc’d player does no dmg. Lastly, the buffs and stats may be easily tweaked by Blizzard or yourself to algebraically determine what’s a “fair” value for the versatility and/or buff. You also can’t trade off dmg and survivability interchangeably. A tauren has 5% more hp than a forsaken, so it is better. Not exactly.
You can only run numbers on base data. Anything that can apply to the human team can apply to the other team so in terms of uptime percentages it remains even. The human player isn’t likely to get chain CCed because of EMFH and because it’s rare in arenas so that’s kinda moot.
If Horde racials were really better, you can be sure there would be more than 3 Horde in the top 200 3v3 players. But there aren’t.
Nightelf Hunter since Beta!!
Alliance. I’ve played Horde, and I do love me some Goblin ladies, but Draenei, Dwarves and Varian. My heart lay with the Alliance.
I went with Alliance but truthfully, it’s all about the Draenei to me. So perfect. So waggle. Yes. Couldn’t give a hoot which team they were on tbh. My friends are horde, so that’s me atm tho. Maybe one day they’ll drop the horde/alliance being decided by race and go with ideologies.. nah, metzen wouldn’t be able to jesus that.
Although I have played both I leant more towards Alliance they had better locations, nicer environs as well in vanilla especially
My biggest gripe was Horde seems to perennially attract the “I need to be a big tough evil looking mutha fucka” type of nerds, where if you understood wow lore the alliance races are actually a little more evil so to speak (depends on perspective)
But nothing compares to a Gnome DK, just pure acid in Pvp first week of wrath
also can we vote Ebonheart Pact instead kthnx!
Alliance, but i’m known to play Horde on occasion.
Alliance
Depends, which one has the best racials at the moment 😛
I got pretty annoyed towards the end of BC/start of LK when joining Horde for 1337 PVP became a popular thing to do, I stuck to my cards though and have tried playing horde but I can’t handle the ugliness.
I still live for the glory days of Vanilla PVP, still so sour I was two weeks off Grand Marshall before BC came out. Alliance for life, I ain’t giving up my gold GM xmorg on my Humane Warrior.
I was a horde player for my entire 7 years playing WOW, I was always draw towards the Tauren, but my greatest disappointment was that I never got to wield a tree trunk as a weapon. Damn you blizzard, you are disrespecting your own lore!
When I started playing, all my friends played horde so I was forced to play horde. However I still maintained a strong alliance side of max level characters. Looking back over the years, I have found that I was most addicted when I played horde, and a lot of nostalgic memories are from when I was playing horde. Memories of alliance seem to feature a lot of depressing grinds, self doubt and ultimately questions of “why am I playing this game?”.
So horde has my vote.
over this whole WOW thing my game was sold to my best friend and have deleted from Hdd never to befoul my pc again unless they bring a finale to the series as i have got sick and tired of expansions finish it and be done with it.
I’ve played more Warcraft 3 than WoW and I’m definetly more a fan of the Horde than the Alliance. Zug zug all the way. :3