Proof the Horde faction is inherently more powerful, kind of long post.

[Illana]

LSD has been broken since wrath and will continue to be broken until that synergy is brought back to sane levels. Double dark soul, random shaman damage, each person not a real kill target, soul swap not requiring any setup or brain, hybrid heals, instant aoe cc. The list goes on and LSD remains broken.

[Cobaltius]

The thing is, we have the ability to measure exact damage and healing output, mana regen, health, crit rates and every other "power" metric in the game.

This would be so incredibly simple to test that I'm amazed you made a post about it.

Blizzard developers are not stupid;

If the alleged covert Determination type buffs are real and sure makes more sense than 90% of the best players in the game miraculously all on the Horde side they would only be in effect in instances, raids, BG's, dungeons, etc... as to not be blatantly obvious in side by side target dummy testing for example.

Now correct me if I am wrong but data mining faction comparison damage and healing output, mana regen, health, crit rates and every other "power" metric in just instances is limited to the scoreboards at the end of BG's and that data tends to be ridiculously tilted toward the Horde.

[Deleted]

Blizzard developers are not stupid;

If the alleged covert Determination type buffs are real and sure makes more sense than 90% of the best players in the game miraculously all on the Horde side they would only be in effect in instances, raids, BG's, dungeons, etc... as to not be blatantly obvious in side by side target dummy testing for example.

Now correct me if I am wrong but data mining faction comparison damage and healing output, mana regen, health, crit rates and every other "power" metric in just instances is limited to the scoreboards at the end of BG's and that data tends to be ridiculously tilted toward the Horde.

Yo no disrespect but this is one of the craziest things I've ever read.

Some of us use dps meters - my average starsurge hits vs players are the same in PvP as they are in PvE once you take resilience into account.

[Mikael123]

Since the horde dominate in ordinary battlegrounds and alliance dominate in arena, it could indicate that the Alliance just have more casual pvp'ers in their BG groups compared to horde. But when you take the best Alliance players and match them against the best horde players in arenas, it's actually the Alliance which is "more powerful". So I don't agree what the OP has "proof" for his claim.

[Cirayne24]

Blizzard developers are not stupid;

If the alleged covert Determination type buffs are real and sure makes more sense than 90% of the best players in the game miraculously all on the Horde side they would only be in effect in instances, raids, BG's, dungeons, etc... as to not be blatantly obvious in side by side target dummy testing for example.

Now correct me if I am wrong but data mining faction comparison damage and healing output, mana regen, health, crit rates and every other "power" metric in just instances is limited to the scoreboards at the end of BG's and that data tends to be ridiculously tilted toward the Horde.

You're being silly. There is no "hidden buff" for horde otherwise it wouldn't have taken 9 years and a random addon for you to prove it. With the amounts of datamining and people making their own servers, this would have come out years ago...

Especially since there are PvP tournaments for real cash. Blizzard doesn't pay for everything, sponsors pay the overhead, enrollment fees, ect... the backlash, both publicly and financially, if this mysterious power was one sided would be devastating to Blizzard.

[Cobaltius]

Yo no disrespect but this is one of the craziest things I've ever read.

Some of us use dps meters - my average starsurge hits vs players are the same in PvP as they are in PvE once you take resilience into account.

Unless you have a dps meter that can track both Alliance and Horde at the same time inside a BG it would be useless for comparison purposes.

[Sliske]

In the roughly 7 years I've played WoW I've been Alliance and Horde. And quite frankly I can't seem to get rid of these people who want to throw in the fact that <Insert opposing faction> is so much better. I get the same thing with Russians now, even though they're usually not that great.

I've never noticed a huge difference when I play on the other faction and I keep winning 2/3 of my BGs.

See. From personal experience I can now conclude that there is no difference. But actually I can't come up with any conclusion since somebody else may have a whole different experience than me.

So why are we still trying to come up with these false conclusions when BG win ratio is different for every individual?

So much this.

Swapped half a dozen times in my 8 years or so playing this game and I can say without a doubt that both sides are so equal short and long term that it doesn't even make a noticeable difference (PvP speaking of course.)

You, the player are the biggest factor in winning or losing. Not your race or gear or class. Playing for the objective and solely for the objective which seems to be a lost art these days will net you more wins than the current best class, spec, race or faction ever will.

- - - Updated - - -

Still clinging on to the most recent tournament....

Also, has Talbadar lost any tournament in the last like - five years?

I'm not sure I'd agree that LSD is broken, any more than the WMD's and Shatreeplay's and KFC's and Thugcleaves they played against? PvP has been pretty horribly unbalanced all expansion - but I wouldn't list LSD as an exceptionally broken comp at that time. Top tier? yes. Broken? no.

A few blizzcons i think.

[Cobaltius]

You're being silly. There is no "hidden buff" for horde otherwise it wouldn't have taken 9 years and a random addon for you to prove it. With the amounts of datamining and people making their own servers, this would have come out years ago...

Perhaps, perhaps not, I have no idea how it would work, or whether or not it would even be in affect on private servers for it to be data mined.

I do know this: either way; if there is a buff or out of the millions of players the majority of the vastly superior PVP players play Horde it is safe to say the Horde PVP player base has never earned anything, not HK, not a piece of PVP armor, PVP title, a PVP achievement not a PVP related thing!

Why?

Because they were accrued by a developer cheating for them via a secret buff or the all "best" players ganged up on one side like cowards to run over a weaker opponents in order to gain their PVP accolades thus undeserved ill gotten gains any way you spin it.

Would you not agree?

[Illana]

Yeah but there's no secret buff so you're just speculating on a ridiculous premise

[GareBear]

IMHO this has more to do with other factors.

One I would consider is the que time for horde vs alliance. Alliance is almost instant (in my experience) but horde have to wait a bit. Surely someone who waits longer would have more incentive to win vs someone who could just que again. This may also cause horde players to more often form groups and then que, while the alliance playerbase may largely solo que.

I have also noticed a better flow of more consistently and appropriately geared players in the horde's favor.

Horde seem to usually have a better healer-to-dps ratio as well. (which makes a huge impact).

Just personal observations, biased and fallible.

[Deleted]

Make racials not work in PvP {BG, RBG, Arenas} but work in World-PvP and PvE and all problems sorted.

[Cirayne24]

Perhaps, perhaps not, I have no idea how it would work, or whether or not it would even be in affect on private servers for it to be data mined.

I do know this: either way; if there is a buff or out of the millions of players the majority of the vastly superior PVP players play Horde it is safe to say the Horde PVP player base has never earned anything, not HK, not a piece of PVP armor, PVP title, a PVP achievement not a PVP related thing!

Why?

Because they were accrued by a developer cheating for them via a secret buff or the all "best" players ganged up on one side like cowards to run over a weaker opponents in order to gain their PVP accolades thus undeserved ill gotten gains any way you spin it.

Would you not agree?

You aren't saying anything but what ifs. What if the Illuminati really runs the U.S. and all Presidential races are facades to mask the true puppeteers. That would mean that all the presidents have never earned anything!

/sarcasm

You're fishing and don't have anything to show expect that Horde usually wins the majority of BGs. But you seem to forget that most top PvPers have both Horde and Alliance toons and both are usually 2.2k+.

Most of those players have been Horde for years and years because before EMFH, Horde had the PvP racials; although Perception was amazing against Rogues. Every class was better on Horde because racials were imbalanced. Do you remember that Devouring Plague used to be Undead Priests only?

I play Horde because above all, they literally just look better than Alliance. Orcs look amazing in plate, Undead are good concepts for Warlocks, Trolls shoot bows like gangsters, and Org is better than Stormwind.

Bottom line is you have to look at the ladder with a grain of salt. All the top players usually only play when other top players aren't playing. When was the last time you saw two top 10 teams playing against each other multiple times? They all know the system and they game it well.

[dak1]

http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2014/03...d-populations/

Read it. It's a far better hypothesis for the disparity, and one that I happen to think is largely correct and accounts for the vast majority of the disparity people see.

[Cirayne24]

CASE 1: THEY’RE THE BETTER TEAM

It doesn’t matter how this idea originates. This could be through an early legitimate imbalance in a smaller population. It could be through a bad sample. It could be through some vocal members of the community repeating it. It doesn’t matter if the seed is real or not – all that matters is that players believe it.

If one faction is perceived to be better than the other, we should observe a slight shift of experienced players to that side.

Funny how that's the first reason... which is exactly what the OP is doing to anyone that agrees there's stupid mysterious secret buff.

[MrExcelion]

IMHO this has more to do with other factors.

One I would consider is the que time for horde vs alliance. Alliance is almost instant (in my experience) but horde have to wait a bit. Surely someone who waits longer would have more incentive to win vs someone who could just que again. This may also cause horde players to more often form groups and then que, while the alliance playerbase may largely solo que.

I have also noticed a better flow of more consistently and appropriately geared players in the horde's favor.

Horde seem to usually have a better healer-to-dps ratio as well. (which makes a huge impact).

Just personal observations, biased and fallible.

Good observations, I made a reply in the news post about it last month, and yeah, you covered most of what I've said already. There also seems to be more bots on Alliance because of the instant queues, and bots will hurt a team more than anything. People also afk out on the Alliance at the first sign of falling behind, and I'm guilty of it myself, but I wouldn't be doing it with a 15 min deserter + 15 min queue time on top of that

[damescool]

Having played both sides since vanilla- Horde is more PvP oriented, and Alliance is generally better at PvE (including raiding, esp LFR, horde tend to not give a fuck).

i too play both sides, alliance and horde endgame progression and rbg cap both, this is far from true, horde pvp players that progressively raid dominate wowprogress shows only 6 alliance in the top 20 for both 25 and 10 man progression http://www.wowprogress.com/

i can also tell you that while on my alliance main its so painful to queue randoms bgs as i win maybe 3/10(blacklist strand n mines), on my hordie i maybe lose 3/10(blacklist av ioc) so now i mainly do rated bgs, i cant stand randoms, too many fresh 90s not caring, not gemming, not enchanting, not reforging, not giving a crap about their teammates, but i find this on both sides, horde truly tries harder because of the 20min queues, those afk'rs alliance gets don't make the 20min queue pop for horde. pretty sure this is correct, but its only my opinion from my personal experience playing both sides every week.

[Lyllian]

I don't know about the other battle grounds, but this week I have run 24 Silvershard Mines random battlegrounds and lost every single one, all of them by a huge margin.

I'm only in there for the Legendary quest, but even so I went and got myself a full crafted pvp healing set, gemmed and enchanted it, watched many videos of SM and read several guides. Usually I'm the only healer on Ally, whereas Horde usually have at least 3. Frankly at this rate I will never get the cloak.

[Cobaltius]

Funny how that's the first reason... which is exactly what the OP is doing to anyone that agrees there's stupid mysterious secret buff.

I just find it hard to believe and I can not be the only one, that when considering the cookie cutter nature of the game today and only slight variations in talent builds, gemming, reforging, rotations, and gear that an immeasurable anomaly called skill can translate to much higher damage, heals, KB ratios etc... I don't mean a little but to such a degree that no one on their team even dies once and I have seen that happen on several occasions and that was in RBGs never mind the massive disparity of those ratios in normal BGs.

Then when you see how just two stacks determination transforms a failing LFR group it is not hard to imagine what that same affect would have if it were given to one of two equal factions, it would pretty much look like the PVP landscape today. That to me is certainly more within the realm of possibility than 90% of the Horde PVP population not just miraculously being better players but so vastly superior that they can produce more damage and heals than their opponents in a virtually clone like environment, not to mention occupy 145 out of the top 150 RBG slots.

[dak1]

I just find it hard to believe and I can not be the only one, that when considering the cookie cutter nature of the game today and only slight variations in talent builds, gemming, reforging, rotations, and gear that an immeasurable anomaly called skill can translate to much higher damage, heals, KB ratios etc... I don't mean a little but to such a degree that no one on their team even dies once and I have seen that happen on several occasions and that was in RBGs never mind the massive disparity of those ratios in normal BGs.

Then when you see how just two stacks determination transforms a failing LFR group it is not hard to imagine what that same affect would have if it were given to one of two equal factions, it would pretty much look like the PVP landscape today. That to me is certainly more within the realm of possibility than 90% of the Horde PVP population not just miraculously being better players but so vastly superior that they can produce more damage and heals than their opponents in a virtually clone like environment, not to mention occupy 145 out of the top 150 RBG slots.

I'll do 2-3x as much damage as any other ally in most random BGs (10-15 mil usually, as a Rogue), get 20-30 KBs even when other people on my team only get 1-3, and at most die once, if at all. And I'm ally.

The disparity doesn't exist at all in RBGs. It's skill (and gear) and nothing else.

And if you're going to obsess over how many people in the US ladders are Horde, go look at the EU ladders where it's the exact opposite.

[Cirayne24]

I just find it hard to believe and I can not be the only one, that when considering the cookie cutter nature of the game today and only slight variations in talent builds, gemming, reforging, rotations, and gear that an immeasurable anomaly called skill can translate to much higher damage, heals, KB ratios etc... I don't mean a little but to such a degree that no one on their team even dies once and I have seen that happen on several occasions and that was in RBGs never mind the massive disparity of those ratios in normal BGs.

Then when you see how just two stacks determination transforms a failing LFR group it is not hard to imagine what that same affect would have if it were given to one of two equal factions, it would pretty much look like the PVP landscape today. That to me is certainly more within the realm of possibility than 90% of the Horde PVP population not just miraculously being better players but so vastly superior that they can produce more damage and heals than their opponents in a virtually clone like environment, not to mention occupy 145 out of the top 150 RBG slots.

You're being ridiculous. You're crying that the sky is falling, only you can see it, but you have proof and we should just believe you even though our experiences are different. You remind me of the South Park episode explaining the origin of Mormons.

I've been in plenty of BGs/RBGs/Arenas where Alliance characters have completely dominated the Horde team to the point where they were GY camping and Horde was unable to land a KB.

I can't get on the WoW site from work, but here.. the first horde character in the EU ladder is ranked 88. Are you telling me that this hidden buff is only on US servers now?

http://www.arenamate.net/?region=EU&...200&ladder=3v3

And just for FYI, according to this site, the first Alliance character on the US ladder is ranked 40th.

http://www.arenamate.net/?region=US&...200&ladder=3v3

So yes, skill does matter in this game. I'm proof of that. I had no clue how warriors worked I literally thought it was just use buttons on CD... I didn't understand the concept of a C.Smash window and pooling rage. My partners wondered why my damage was terrible. The minute I actually understood when to do damage I was an actual threat.