A massive faction imbalance problem in raiding

[ello]

Well, Blizzard said they are gonna rework Arcane Torrent right? I guess we'll see what happens then.

[Jaewalk]

I think the interesting thing is that for many of the specs the alliance racials/passive dare superior.. for example for elemental shaman dwarf is the best..

I’d love to see a breakout of the top simming race for every spec and then determine how much the split is between each faction.

I’m willing to bet that the overal difference would be less than .05%.

Now, the utility horde racials provide for mythic + is better...but this is about raiding.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Top guilds are Horde because Horde racials were massively superior to the Alliance racials from the launch of WotLK to the launch of WoD. The biggest offender was Trolls who had Berserking when it was 25% Haste and snapshotting was still in the game. Troll Aff Locks at the end of MoP was probably the reason why snapshotting was removed from the game.


Since the launch of WoD, racials have been very balanced, but the dmg was already done by that point.

[potis]

snip

Your first mistake is posting in the "General Discussion" and not "Raids and Dungeons".

General Discussion and General Offtopic are plagued by some very weird people that probably consider LFR as the epitome of their gaming life and they have never played at a level to understand how worthless they are at the game they are paying for, therefor they cant understand server balance =/= raid faction balance.

Secondly, your are absolutely correct and half a decade late, even after the nerfs/changes, horde racials are still better, there has been such an item power creep however that they dont matter as much.

They do matter at the start of the expansions usually because of low-gear and slowly become irrelevant, like the troll racial.

Now the most obvious imbalance is Blood Elves and M+.

A 5 Blood elves party has a huge advantage in M+ as example for the obvious reason.

[Synthium]

Your first mistake is posting in the "General Discussion" and not "Raids and Dungeons".

General Discussion and General Offtopic are plagued by some very weird people that probably consider LFR as the epitome of their gaming life and they have never played at a level to understand how worthless they are at the game they are paying for, therefor they cant understand server balance =/= raid faction balance.

Secondly, your are absolutely correct and half a decade late, even after the nerfs/changes, horde racials are still better, there has been such an item power creep however that they dont matter as much.

They do matter at the start of the expansions usually because of low-gear and slowly become irrelevant, like the troll racial.

Now the most obvious imbalance is Blood Elves and M+.

A 5 Blood elves party has a huge advantage in M+ as example for the obvious reason.

Yeah I noticed it in the first part of the thread.

[Seneca]

I really think horde racials are better than alliance ones most of the time (so also including all non-raid activities). Even ignoring the "low" gain in dps (e.g. orc with pet classes/specs), the utility racials are really too strong to pass up. What I think seem to be supported by statistics too, though:

Raid (check the difference between % 2+ boss and % L110 players, the higher the former, the "better" the race; on your right you can see the faction balance, check again the difference between the two parameters)
https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/pve-stats/races

Raid (can easily check the ratio of the factions, concerning all the top guilds)
https://www.wowprogress.com/

M+ (can easily check the ratio of the factions, concerning all the top M+ players)
https://www.wowprogress.com/mythic_plus_score/

3s Arena (check the difference between % 2200+ and % L110 players, the higher the former, the "better" the race; on your right you can see the faction balance, check again the difference between the two parameters)
https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/pvp...es/2200-rating

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Your first mistake is posting in the "General Discussion" and not "Raids and Dungeons".

General Discussion and General Offtopic are plagued by some very weird people that probably consider LFR as the epitome of their gaming life and they have never played at a level to understand how worthless they are at the game they are paying for, therefor they cant understand server balance =/= raid faction balance.

Secondly, your are absolutely correct and half a decade late, even after the nerfs/changes, horde racials are still better, there has been such an item power creep however that they dont matter as much.

They do matter at the start of the expansions usually because of low-gear and slowly become irrelevant, like the troll racial.

Now the most obvious imbalance is Blood Elves and M+.

A 5 Blood elves party has a huge advantage in M+ as example for the obvious reason.

Dps racials were very imbalanced in the past, most notably during WotLK, Cata and MoP. Every single Dps racial have been within 1% of eachother since the launch of WoD.

Since then, the only thing relevant has been the utilty racials, not he Dps ones. As stated earlier, the dmg was already done by that point though. Horde simply has a way bigger recruitment pool.

[Daedius]

Absolute top progressive raids are pure min/max'ers... naturally they'd go with Horde which have more PvE oriented racials, even if it's a 0.1% increase in DPS.

For everyone else, the gains are so minuscule... and as mentioned already, overall population balance is pretty much 50/50.

[potis]

Dps racials were very imbalanced in the past, most notably during WotLK, Cata and MoP. Every single Dps racial have been within 1% of eachother since the launch of WoD.

Since then, the only thing relevant has been the utilty racials, not he Dps ones. As stated earlier, the dmg was already done by that point though. Horde simply has a way bigger recruitment pool.

They still are, 1% on every member, comes out as a small DPS increase overall.

Even so thats not the only point.

Now that M+ is a relevant thing, the horde racials are obviously better for many situations, even Warstomp is.

[Orby]

It's been like that for over 10 years. Horde have always had the higher ground on high end raiding progress.

[Tradu]

Well, Blizzard said they are gonna rework Arcane Torrent right? I guess we'll see what happens then.

Nothing will happen, because there's no incentive to go Alliance, so population will stay similar to how it is now, meaning Horde will still be the preferred faction, simply because of a larger pool of potential recruits(because adding a faction transfer on top of server transfer adds a lot of extra cost, both in terms of money and in terms of being cut off from friends on your old faction)

[Jazzhands]

Horde have better racials. Racials don't matter if you aren't the top 1%. Their dedication to min/maxing forces them to horde. That's really it. The 1% can waste all the time and money they want, they bring it upon themselves, it doesn't effect me or your average player in the slightest.

[RobertMugabe]

Racials are not the problem anymore, so removing them won't fix anything as the damage is already done. Obviously some individuals would faction change, but no entire guild would do it (you just can't ask all your guild mates for faction changes, because aesthetics)

[Tradu]

Racials are not the problem anymore, so removing them won't fix anything as the damage is already done. Obviously some individuals would faction change, but no entire guild would do it (you just can't ask all your guild mates for faction changes, because aesthetics)

Pretty much. It's too late at this point, there's basically nothing Blizzard can do about it short of giving Alliance broken racials(which would just cause the opposite trend, with Alliance being the dominant faction). Not sure if there was ever really a time they could've fixed it before the damage was done, honestly. Maybe if they'd balanced racials in Cata or even Wrath, that would've helped, but I'd expect one faction to have become dominant regardless just because of ease of recruitment.

[Enosh]

Pretty much. It's too late at this point, there's basically nothing Blizzard can do about it short of giving Alliance broken racials(which would just cause the opposite trend, with Alliance being the dominant faction). Not sure if there was ever really a time they could've fixed it before the damage was done, honestly. Maybe if they'd balanced racials in Cata or even Wrath, that would've helped, but I'd expect one faction to have become dominant regardless just because of ease of recruitment.

if they did it before Method and some other big guild switched factions 8iirc that was in late Cata or early MoP, can't remember exactly) it would probably be more even now, or at least a case of US being more horde heavy and EU being more alliance
now it's basically way too late, if you want to do high end raiding you roll horde, the end

[RobertMugabe]

Pretty much. It's too late at this point, there's basically nothing Blizzard can do about it short of giving Alliance broken racials(which would just cause the opposite trend, with Alliance being the dominant faction). Not sure if there was ever really a time they could've fixed it before the damage was done, honestly. Maybe if they'd balanced racials in Cata or even Wrath, that would've helped, but I'd expect one faction to have become dominant regardless just because of ease of recruitment.

Maybe they could fix it by giving Alliance far superior racials for some time... but we all knows how the playerbase would react to that.

[Deleted]

Faction imbalance matters only locally imho.
On a realm it can be a real problem, especially the smaller ones as that usually means the smaller faction is left hanging with little to no recruitment options.

In other words, people care way too much about the 1%.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

They still are, 1% on every member, comes out as a small DPS increase overall.

Even so thats not the only point.

Now that M+ is a relevant thing, the horde racials are obviously better for many situations, even Warstomp is.

You missed the point. Horde racials aren't better. They haven't been since MoP. At this point, racials are as balanced as they can possibly get, the next step would be removing them altogether.

The reason why some Alliance guilds are STILL changing to Horde, is because of the much bigger recruitmentment pool and X-guild communites between top guilds, as the vast majority of hardcore raiding guilds are Horde (because most switched when Horde actually had better racials during WotLK, Cata and MoP).


Nobody are going Horde for the Dps increase nowadays (because there is none). They are going Horde because "everybody else" are playing Horde.

[corebit]

Faction imbalance matters only locally imho.
On a realm it can be a real problem, especially the smaller ones as that usually means the smaller faction is left hanging with little to no recruitment options.

In other words, people care way too much about the 1%.

Wrong, it's not just a local server problem. At the Mythic level server transfers are a common occurrence, because finding a raiding guild that fits your time and schedule is far more important than the reasons for staying at a particular server. The pool of players that does Mythic raiding and other high-level content is already limited, so it's very convenient for everyone to be one faction.

Horde racials used to be strong for the longest time, and that influenced most of the raiding community to switch to Horde. Right now racials are no longer so tilted towards the Horde, but this is a case of "too little too late."

The only way now for Blizzard to correct their shit is to make cross-faction raiding possible.

[Airwaves]

In 13 years of playing. Horde has always been better at PvE and Alliance at PvP. This shouldn't surprise anyone.