Since Pie hasn’t yet posted about his Pally’s recent changes, I’m usurping his natural right to blog about it, claiming the requisite 5 day rule. (Said 5 day rule exists somewhere and now the onus is on you to prove that it doesn’t exist. Anywhere.) Anyways, ‘he’s’ gone through Blizz’s new Character re-customization procedure (read: De-frobed). Pie’s main is the sturdy Orc Hunter of old, but ‘he’s’ been running a Pally lately, attempting to get ‘him’ to end game to give us more tanking options. But since ‘his’ early days in Silvermoon, Gertbfrobe has been a staunch Blood Elf MALE Paladin (well, as male as Blood Elves can be to begin with). But now, Gertbfrobe went in for ‘his’ surgery and has come out of the operating room as a smexy BElf chick. So smexy in fact, that a certain other Blogger who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty (cough*Sylus*cough) has been whistling at ‘her’ during instance runs. And by ‘her’ I mean Piepal of course, our new FEMALE BElf Paladin. ‘She’ is now trucking along quite nicely in Northrend, currently sitting at 72 I believe. So if you’re oot’n'aboot on the Blogoshpere, stop in at ‘For the Pie’ and give a little /whistle to Piepal. Although, all you buggers may be disappointed… Rumour has it that a certain Nuggerfrumper is pretty smexy himself, and already has his foot in the door. Just ask Jaina.
So the impetus for this post was my getting caught up on all of the podcasts that I’ve missed out on. I have been delinquent in keeping up on them, and I’m pretty sure I had about 8 or 9 episodes of TNB to listen to, so its been a lot of Bre and Fim lately… Not that there’s anything wrong with that… Anyways, funny thing. I started listening to episode 27, in my car, while waiting in line for my standard Double Double (its a Tim Horton’s thing) when Fim conducted the intro to the episode. He offered his guests a coffee, and after Bre pointed out to him that ‘we’ are virtual guests Fim basically told us to get our own coffee. Luckily for me, I was. Anyways, in one of the episodes previous to that, Bre gave a shout to Episode 14, One 4 the Horde, where Sy and myself sat down with them to talk about this here blog. The reference, of course, was to the double ding, and all the joking we did about that while talking about the recruit a friend. Well, I has a confession. I had one last linked account available before the holidays and I rocked it, Alliance style. Yes, its true, For the Horde has dirty ally alts. I decided to run up two Pally’s a Dwarf and a Human. Me Dwarf Pally, Bannock, he’s a Protadin, and my Human Pally, Ambrosius, he’s Healadin. After hitting 80 within 10 days of Wrath, I found that I was extremely bored. Most guildies were only level 72 at the time and I didn’t have much to do at 80. Being on a brand new realm, there wasn’t a lot of options for PUGs, at least not Horde side and so I got extremely bored very quick. I suppose I could’ve got started on one of my other Horde 70s, caught up to all of my guildies and started running low level instances, but after powering through Northrend in 10 days, I didn’t feel like rushing right back into leveling so quickly. So I decided to use up the last few weeks of my triple xp from recruit a friend doing the one thing I’ve never been able to do before, namely, level Alliance side.
With that, my two Ally Pallys were born. I think I only spent about two or three weeks on them, and they are now currently sitting at level 62 or 63. Nominally, I was taking a break from the game, playing much less than I normally do. It allowed me to recharge after the powerleveling of Brak. But it also let me see some things from the other faction that I’d never experienced before. What did I find? Well, I’m probably going to forget a lot of the stuff since its no longer fresh in my mind, but here’s a college try.
1. The Horde raids Ironforge. A LOT! Pretty much every time I went back to IF to train, work on professions, or sell anything on the AH, IF was getting raiding. It was quite funny, and annoying. During one raid I actually saw one of my guildies in the throne room.
2. The Horde gets stomped in Ironforge. A LOT! Pretty much ever IF raid I witnessed ended in abysmal failure. Now, I know there are Hordies on my server who have their Black War Bear and completed the ‘For The Horde’ achievement, but it seemed that every time they were in IF, they pretty much got stomped down. Including my guildie. Now, my guildie is what BRK would term a ‘cockroach’ class, so he lasted for quite a while. He was the last one standing, I believe, during that particular raid, but he still got put down like the rest.
3. Things aren’t as one sided as they originally appear. There is the ‘belief’ on the Horde side, that Blizz loves the Alliance and that the Horde is like the ugly stepchild. (My apologies to stepchildren, you’re all beautiful in my books). But not like this stepchild, who wasn’t really ugly… Wait a minute, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Anyways, there are a lot of things that appeared to be favored to the Alliance while playing for the Horde. At the same time, there seems to be a similar feeling while playing the Alliance. I guess its like the whole question of which class is OP. If every class is complaining that another class is OP, then Blizz has done something right in balancing them all together. Similarly, if both factions complain that the other is getting preferential treatment, then obviously they’re just two spoiled siblings both wanting their parents love and affection. Good jorb blizz. Yes, I said jorb. Shout out Nim!
4. Things are pretty similar, and yet different. A lot of quests from neutral areas are similar. Even quests with two different quest givers (one for each faction) can be pretty darn close. That being said, its nice to go to a zone that is basically an Alliance zone (ie, Wetlands) and get pretty different quest chains from what is avail Horde side. Now, different is a relative term. You’re still going on to get object ‘A’, or kill mob ‘B’ for NPC ‘C’, but the story behind why you’re doing generic quest # 3,752 for that specific NPC is generally different, and thats cool.
5. Alliance architecture pwns Horde architecture, hands down, IMO. I don’t know if anyone will agree with this, because aesthetics are generally such a subjective topic, and maybe I’ve just grown so used to all the standard Horde architecture that a change was nice, but I love Alliance towns. Basically, anything that is a Big Honking Castle is cool. (Your UFI for the day: Big Honking ____ is a standard military term. At least around here. I’m going to need some independent verification if I’m going to confirm that this is Pan-NATO terminology.)
6. Writing RP stories for Alliance based characters seems easier. At least for me. I’ve written some (as of yet unpublished) RP stories based around my two Ally Pallys and intertwined in WoW Lore from WC3 through to WOTLKEE and its golden as far as I’m concerned. The hard part is working in any Horde involvement to these stories. That being said, my favorite WoW fiction novels are still “Rise of the Horde” and “Lord of the Clans”. I don’t know, I’d like to work in my Horde characters before I finalize the stories, but it ain’t easy.
Right now, I’m in a bit of a doldrum trying to figure out what I want to do next in game. I think the problem is that I have too many options. Stupid altaholism going and making me have to decide stuffs. Anyways, I’m thinking that Juris, my BElf Pally, is next on the levelling express. We’ll see what happens.
– Fikkle
May the Horde be with you.
I was wondering if the 90 day bonus counts for all characters or only for 1? The Blizzard site isn’t clear for me and the Zhevra mount, how is it used? Mailed as an item? Can it be given to the friend or how does it work all together?
