Splitting the difference between Red and Blue
Or, seeing how the other half live for a change...
So, you may have noticed, if you've been following my recent tweets, that I've been playing a lot of different alts and a lot of them are on the Alliance side of the fence.
I've decided that come Legion, despite the fact that I'll be maining a Guardian Druid for my horde guild, Thunder, it's time for a bit of a change.
Quick history lesson for new readers: I began playing in Vanilla (NO WAIT! COME BACK!), but I only played for about 6 months before I got bored off my tits and quit the game to go play City of Heroes (RIP) for 2½ years. At the time I played an Alliance Warlock. And, as regular readers will know, it was of course a Gnome. A male gnome though ;)So after CoH ceased being fun (IE when content dried up for more than a year and the devs jumped ship), I started back up with WoW, but this time came back on the other side of the fence and went Horde.
Now in the 7½ years since, I've been consistently subscribed, constantly playing (yes, even through all the long content droughts such as the current one) but only on the Horde side of the fence.
In all those years I saw next to nothing of the Alliance side of each ensuing expansion. I missed out on the blue side of Wrath, Cataclysm, MoP and to a large degree, WoD. That's a lot of missed content, even if a lot of the endgame content is replicated across both factions.
However the stories told by Blizzard have been becoming more Alliance-centric over the years, in an effort to balance out their previously mooted Horde favouritism. Long time players will have no doubt that until WoD, the Horde definitely had the better story lines and more attention paid to them.
So, in order not to miss out, and to get full value for my sub money, I've decided that in Legion I will be spending my time across both sides of the factional divide equally. Outside of raids I will be splitting my in-game time evenly:
- Horde: Sarcrux (Guardian/Resto Druid) & Judge (Prot Pally)
- Alliance: Mechaspark (BM Hunter) & Ragespark (Prot Warrior, in header image above)
Of course the other reason for the many alts is to play about with the new class changes, and see what's changed first hand. For example, I rolled Ragespark (female Gnome, duh) yesterday and boosted her for Legion to 100. Even in 640 gear Prot Warriors are brokenly OP at the moment, and soloing stuff on her is an absolute blast, as you take bugger all damage.
That's all purely due to one new ability for Prot Warriors: Ignore Pain. It gives you a massive absorb shield, without cooldown, for anywhere between 20 and 60 rage. Obviously the more rage you use the bigger the absorb. But in Legion Beta, on a 110 PvP geared Prot Warrior, I'm getting absorbs worth nearly 3 million in size. I have 2.5m health at 110, so that's an absorb bigger than my actual health pool.
Effective Health is not just the remit of Guardian Druid's in Legion!
Thunder in Legion
You'll have noticed that there's now a distinct tank flavour to my choices for Mains & Main Alts, as opposed to my earlier thinking, which was going to be heavily Healing-centric. But after a full year away from it, I've missed tanking somewhat. I've done a full tier of being one of the top DPS in raids, and over most of the past year that's amounted to Pugs for the most part, given Thunder have been on hiatus for a lot of the last 9 months.
Which was disappointing, and whilst I've cleared Heroic HFC several times in Pugs, Thunder have yet to clear it as a guild. And even with the recent HFC nerfs (-40% mob damage / -50% mob/boss health), too many of our raiders seem to struggle with even the most basic of premises and mechanics.
Zakuun examples, such as don't stand in the group with Befouled, or allow the debuff to be healed off you whilst you're in the group, as it will cause an explosion hitting everything within 6 yards. Or try to soak a 2nd fel spire or a wake of destruction when you have the Latent Energy debuff, as again, you will explode.
Simple, correctable mistakes like these going repeatedly uncorrected by the players in question (despite it being pointed out at the time) leading to wipes. Even with the nerfs, this happens time after time after time. It is something about Thunder that has frustrated me on many occasions over the years. We have a solid, reliable core of very good players, make no mistake, but this is only a good handful of players. Certainly not enough to run a single raid with. Hopefully Legion's class changes will bring in some new blood, because no matter what Legion brings, raid mechanics won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
I feel sorry for that core of competent players that they're being let down time and again by silly mistakes that shouldn't be happening on pull #18 for the night...
Perhaps we'll just have to get a lot stricter about competence and reinforce strict gear level requirements, because that has worked in the past.
In terms of roles, I think we'll be ok for tanks, but we may need a couple of top-notch healers though, as a couple of our WoD healers have gone DPS for Legion.
Tree Hugging Hippies in Legion
Tree Hugging what now? Well, when I put the call out on Twitter that I was on the lookout for an Alliance guild for alts in Legion, I was invited to join a guild called False Gods on Silvermoon-EU. Silvermoon is the busiest PvE Alliance-heavy server in the EU, so i joined up and was having a blast. Silvermoon is really populated, and playing on the busiest server in the EU for Alliance PvE players is very nice indeed.
However, things soon took a turn for the worse in False Gods when one of the raid leaders, in alliance with the GM, decided to run things his way, promptly ousted long-time raiders from the main raid team without speaking to them and literally told those that complained "If you don't like how I'm running my guild, leave". Raid Leader. "His guild"? Eh?
What was more galling I think for the long-time raiders who suddenly found themselves sidelined, was this RL had been out of the game for over a year, and these guys had joined, or simply stepped up in the interim and kept the guild raiding and active. Then this guy suddenly turns up out of nowhere and suddenly starts throwing his weight around and telling people to leave if they didn't like what he was doing.
So over a dozen people left, and by all accounts from some of those still there, False Gods /g is virtually now dead.
So those of us who took exception to this guy's attitude and /gquit formed a guild named Treehugging Hippies, still on Silvermoon.
Sadly we lost a couple of people back to their original servers, as they had originally moved servers to join False Gods on Silvermoon, but we have a nice core of active players, and talk of raiding is already cropping up. These are players, that in FG, were 9/13 Mythic cleared, so I hope that we can bring in some new blood and get those who had been raiding Mythic HFC previously back to that level again in Legion.
Which way to lean?
So you're probably asking yourself, will I be raiding with my potentially Mythic Alliance guild, in addition to, or instead of, my Heroic Horde guild?
A bit, is probably the best answer. My focus will be on Thunder, as it has been for over 7½ years since coming back at the start of Wrath, and of course come October my degree courses will kick off again, bringing 30 point Maths & Technology modules to the table.
Raiding will be, as it always has been thanks to Wife Aggro, something I'll be doing twice a week at most. So if that means I'm running 2 raids a month on Alliance side, in comparison to 6 Horde side? Probably sounds about fair. But if Thunder suddenly collapse again as they did in HFC only a few months in and raiding becomes an aspiration, rather than a regular thing...?
