Alliance racials are better for PvE.
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Fear Ward carried my terrible ass through raiding in Classic, lol.
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And even people who actually played vanilla have been saying it: Paladins + Fear ward are just too good for PvE making alliance the better pve faction, especially in AQ & Naxx when casters are getting better gear aswell and start competing on damage - horde has no buffs for them. However horde has the better pvp classes and racials - orc stun resist + windfury that can just "onehit" + undead will of the forsaken
It's all going to come down on what your main focus will be on, PvP? Go horde! PvE? Go Alliance
Alliance better racials???? WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF XD
Minmaxer raiders will go alliance because of paladins (BoS)
But i'm pretty sure on pvp servers the horde will massively outnumber the alliance.
Their racials cant even compare to the alliance ones, it's crazy.
Plus, everyone wants to join the cool kids bandwagon.
For dedicated PvPers it's a tie imo.
On alliance side you will have much shorter queues, paladins, and a much easier time getting to rank 14.
But on horde side you will have OP racials and half a dozen exploits in WSG.
Tough to choose.
Except for streamers of course.
They need to join the more marketable/popular faction and shout furduhuuuurrrdd 24/7.
It's mostly because paladins can buff an entire raid while shamans can't. I believe you get every major blessing with just 4 paladins (might, wisdom, salvation, kings), while horde would need a shaman in every group.
Let's just assume that threat doesn't exist (it does).
For melee DPS it's 185 AP from might and 10% to strength/agility. King's isn't super massive, and while I'm omitting other gear slots, all 9 pieces of Bonescythe give 114 strength and 154 agility. This is mostly because Vanilla doesn't tack on an absurd amount of primary stats between tiers, primary does on average incrementally increase, but most of the budget generally goes towards swapping primary stats out for things like crit and hit percentages. Also some pieces of gear just have primary stats aside from stamina, and just have pure attack power or spell power.
For casters on alliance side they get the benefit of kings and wisdom.
For melee DPS on horde you get 77 strength from SoE and the choice between 77 agility from GoA, or windfury totem.
For casters on horde you get mana spring totem, which is the horde variant of wisdom, yet a little bit worse.
The above is highly simplified because there are numerous problems with how shamans work as opposed to paladins. To get maximum benefit of shaman you need them in every single group and totems only have a 30 yard range. Paladin buffs work regardless of what group they sit in, and aren't restricted to range. For the "most" part, the range really isn't a huge deal in PvE as most encounters don't require massive amount of movement (a lot of encounters are mostly stationary). An additional problem with shaman totems however is that they only have 2 minute duration, where greater blessings will absolutely last any fight length in Vanilla WoW.
Throwing threat back into the picture and all the disadvantages that totems bring (in addition to Alliance having more freedom to have mostly whatever healing composition they want), casters easily win on alliance compared to their horde counterpart. Mana spring is worse than wisdom, tranquil air is worse than salvation, and there is nothing that compares to BoK for horde casters.
Horde side for melee actually gets quite a bit more interesting because the above limitations aren't exactly as I laid them out to be. In TBC it was pretty well known, especially once Sunwell hit, and with enhancement shaman actually being a desirable spec, that you could effectively have both windfury totem and grace of air down at the same time. You would lose slight uptime on GoA (not really noticeable), but due to how windfury totem actually worked, you could actually twist totems, dancing between the two every 10 seconds to keep both of them up. This effectively removed the limitation of one air totem, and allowed horde DPS to actually have both totems.
If you're talking fully min/maxed raids using every buff and consumable known, fight times are pretty short, and any shaman could effectively spend a couple GCDs twisting totems even in Vanilla, while still healing somewhat effectively. In this scenario, WF/GoA/SoE is superior to might and kings that alliance enjoy (keep in mind, alliance rogues/warriors can use sharpening stones or poisons too). The problem however is again, threat. While this isn't nearly as big of a deal for rogues, it's a pretty big limitation for warriors and warriors as most know are generally the best DPS in the last tiers of raiding. You could twist WF and tranquil air totems instead of GoA (and for warriors, this is probably still superior to what alliance get), but at the end of the day tranquil air is still worse than salvation.
I didn't really math this out but I think on paper, where threat isn't a thing, a Horde raid group would have higher theoretical DPS. Totem twisting shaman in a world where threat doesn't exist is pretty strong. That said, I don't think it's super massive advantage either way, but if you're talking about min/maxing, Alliance is the way to go for raiding.
The bane of horde raiding compared to alliance in vanilla was simply salvation. Tranquil air was a response late in vanilla to shaman and horde complaints for well over a year until Blizzard finally caved. Threat while always an issue, wasn't as much of an issue in the earlier raiding tiers because warriors were still gearing up, and because people were generally bad at the game, you generally didn't have a billion DPS warriors (most of them were ghetto tanks, in the event that your primary tanks died). Once the general raiding population saw the potential of warrior DPS (both through gearing, and the lack of a need for a shit load of tanks), people started realizing that threat was actually a pretty real problem (at least horde groups noticed this). Seriously, if you could take a time machine back to 2004-2006, it was just filled with "totems have baby dick range" and "blessing of salvation is way too good".
Last edited by Tojara; 2019-06-16 at 07:05 PM.
Well the Alliance has Paladins and dwarf priests that have Fear Ward, so in PVE they should be the better faction. Also afaik gnome casters do have a somewhat important dps gain too.
In PVP, the Horde will be the stronger faction, as always. Paladins are amazing in PVP, but so are shamans as well and the Horde simply has way better racials that are also easy to use and applicable in any situation.
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Seeing a lot of folks talking about going Horde. I think that ultimately what you played on Retail is what you'll play on Classic.
Plus I believe Method is already comitted to Horde soooooo yeah.
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In the era when threat actually meant your dps had to hold back being able to have paladins to put salvation your dps was huge. In the era when a feared tank lost all aggro and bosses went wild being able to have a dward priest with fear ward was huge. Those two things, among others.
And you would need like 3-4 worthless shaman buff bots to cover a job handled by 1-2 Paladins lol.
But anyways min-maxing in classic is a silly and bad idea. Nothing in the game is hard enough to warrant it. Guilds will play what they want to play, being horde or alliance won't make 1 single difference in who kills KT first. Geared tank, smart healers and dps who can look at a threat meter and handle 1-2 mechanics per fight and congrats... you can clear classic raids.
Min maxing as we know it today really wasn't a thing until Cata. Guilds that try that hard in classic are going to blow through content and be bored with the game in record time.
Last edited by Tech614; 2019-06-16 at 08:59 PM.