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New WoW Alliance Race Revealed 109

Posted by Zonk from the finally dept.
Now.Imperfect writes "The New York Times is reporting that Blizzard has slated the Draenei to be the new Alliance race in the up-and-coming Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. The article also states that E3 visitors will also be able to test the new flying mount."
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New WoW Alliance Race Revealed More

New WoW Alliance Race Revealed

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  • So, the Hoard gets a cute race, and the Alliance gets the cool race. Seems par for the course.
    • Horde. Dang it. I should never type while eating. Really bad for spelling skills.
      • You knew it had to be that way...So far Alliance have gotten all the types who were interested in pretty characters, and Horde have gotten all the types that were interested in pure carnage, so by flipping the expansion races they're hoping to even out the players between the factions.

        I'm all for it if it lowers the bg queues.
    • Well, actually, I think my Troll Shaman is kinda sexy in her own cute little 3 toed way ;-) Now, if only Blizzard's artist would give us trolls some fine-art love like the other races do.

  • Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Captain Kirk ( 148843 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @12:25PM (#15301741) Homepage Journal
    One of the bigh imbalances in WoW is that far more people roll "cute" Alliance characters and the Horde is played by people who think about issues like Stun resistance, enhanced melee speed and so on. This makes a HUGE difference in battlegrounds where Horde usually win because they have more thinking players and Alliance have interminable queues becasue there are often 3 to 1 alliance to Horde population imbalances.

    I'm an Orc Shaman and we win in battlegrounds 90% of the time. My hope is that this will lift the level of Alliance players a little while encouracing more peope to try Horde characeters.
    • Hey, maybe if my entire faction were composed of races that had innate resistances to stuns, fears, mind control, and all other manner of crowd control and the other faction weren't entirely dependant on the ability of one single class on clicking one single blessing of freedom button when instead they're all toting 2h weapons instead of healing/shielding/blessing, I'd win more BGs too!
    • Not to mention of course that Shaman are inherently better for PvP then Paladins are.
      • Um, not really, just that most paladins don't know how to play their class... including the guy above you who somehow thinks paladins are damage dealers, and that hate means anything in PvP.

        Oh wait, did I say that?
        • Hate does mean everything in PvP.

          Your character is driven by mana/energy/rage/whatever-makes-him-happy.

          YOU are driven by... hate. And pretzels. And beer.

          I've wished, many a time, that I could affect my character's healing, damage-dealing, speed, etc simply by shrieking and howling into the microphone. It sure seems to work on team members in teamspeak.

        • Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde! (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Paladins are "holy warriors who are always at the front line of the battle" according to Blizzard. Or, at least, that used to be what Blizzard said they were. It changed at some point in the last year.

          The parent poster most certainly knew what he signed up to play. The fact that it isn't what he wanted it to be is Blizzard's fault. The more you play WoW, the more apparent it becomes that no one on the Blizzard QA team actually played the content from the Alliance side, and soley focused on the Horde cla

          • Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde! (Score:4, Informative)

            by Incoherent07 ( 695470 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @05:16PM (#15304179)
            To be perfectly honest, if you were expecting a paladin to be simply a warrior with healing spells, that was never the case to begin with. Paladins sacrifice the damage of a warrior to gain quite a bit of survivability: healing spells, an invulnerability shield, immunity to most kinds of debuffs, and a short range stun. Yes, paladins can dish out some decent damage with the right gear and spec, but part of playing a character is playing to their strengths as they are. The paladin class hasn't changed significantly since release; their review merely shuffled some talents around.

            As for your assertion that shamans are superior to paladins...

            In the PvE game, paladins are far superior to shamans. Four paladins can give more mana regen, more threat reduction, and more attack power to EVERY MEMBER OF THE RAID with blessings than eight shamans can with totems, and even without the greater blessings the blessings last longer than the totems. Paladins themselves have the most efficient, lowest threat heals in the game, and can remove three different kinds of debuffs with one fairly cheap spell. About all shamans have going for them is Windfury/Grace of Air, which only apply to the shaman's group and cannot be used at the same time as the threat reduction totem or each other.

            In PvP, they're opposite sides of the same coin. Paladins are by far the dominant PvP healer class simply because of their survivability, and can leverage their heals and Cleanse to make their group that much more powerful, even if a paladin by himself isn't much of a threat. Shamans are an excellent offensive class with some capacity to heal and (against bad opponents) buff their groups.

            The reason so many people think shamans are more poweful than paladins is because 90% of paladins keep thinking they're a warrior with healing spells, instead of using the rest of their abilities. It's like playing a hunter in PvP without a pet, or a druid without using forms.
    • queue thousands of horde players complaining about fscking alliance swapping over to horde.

      over than that, a very much needed change in balance. i agree.
    • ugly vs cute, useful vs useless is a STUPID debate. I get NOTHING out of being a night elf priest, wit hthe shadowmeld nerf, the NE priest racial nerf I could stand to have SOME utility. No way in hell are you gonna tell me that because my character is 6'8" and blue that I don't deserve some utility from my race. Yes I think it'll be cool to have something pretty to look to while you're in Org, but other than that looks shouldn't be an issue. Race should've even be an issue, racials should merel mirror a p
    • Yes there's a population imbalance.

      However your post makes it seam that alliance are full of idiots.

      They both have good players and they both have non-thinking players.

      The population imbalance just means its harder to find the good alliance players.

      More likely though is that it will cause the Horde to slowly become more like the alliance as the new flood of blood elves hit the servers,
      where the good players are harder to find amids all the lesser ones.

      --
      60 gnome mage
    • Lucky for me, I'm cute *and* skilled. (and for what it's worth, the only race that can't be made sexy (enough for me..) is orc..)
  • ...no-one saw that coming

  • For What It's Worth (Score:3, Informative)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @12:31PM (#15301794) Journal
    This was posted on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] quite sometime ago as a rumor. I use them for a lot of my information (old and new).

    In addition to Thottbot [thottbot.com] (quests) and Allakhazam [allakhazam.com] (pricing and searching), a lot of the WoW Wikis [theamazonbasin.com] out there provide for me a lot of my World of Warcraft information.

    It seems they're introducing more "middle styled" races that are akin to the otherside. Perhaps they're planning to allow draenei to be warlock and blood elves to be palladins? This is all speculation but I know that I, for one, am very much looking forward to this expansion.
    • Draenei races are Paladins, Warrior, Priest, Mage, Hunter. Both sides already have Warlocks, maybe you're thinking Shaman?
    • Blood elf classes, if I remember correctly, are Hunter, Rogue, Mage, Warlock, Warrior. That was from a gamespot preview I read a few weeks ago.

      I doubt they'll move the faction specific classes around...that's one of the few things that will drive you to play one side or the other. I was wondering for a while if we'd get new options for druid, but that seems to not be the case either.
  • Thing is, it ain't Draenei (as much as I would like it, they were my prediction).

    There is a leaked video from the E3 floor (filmed during setup). And it shows a video playing on the show floor, with the new alliance race -- which was originally misidentified as Draenei but was really Erador.

    Nobody predicted it, because the Erador are evil demons. These (alliance) Erador are somehow the wisps that killed Archimonde (an Erador himself) at the end of WCIII, or something like that.

    Either that, or someon

  • I want to see how armor is going to look on them. It sounds quite disgusting.
  • ...the Pandaren [wikipedia.org]?
    • Pandaran WERE the original idea. China objected to seeing a national icon murdered in a video game.
      • Has this ever been cofirmed? I've heard it stated that this reason was a load of bullshit and that the real reason was that there was too much interest in playing the Pandarens and that it would have lead to further imbalance in Alliance versus Horde numbers. It's obvious that the Blood Elves are a way to attract gamers to the Horde by allowing them to have a "pretty" race.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • no more triple-fun for me...

  • Dude... (Score:2, Funny)

    by E-Sabbath ( 42104 )
    I'm sorry. I know about the rumored china issue...

    But I wanted pandaren. I would so have played a Pandaren. And then I'd attack every PvP and Penny Arcade player I could find. Cause... you know, giant panda.
  • It doesn't make sense that the Draenei are a sub-race of the Eredar. Did they migrate to the Orc homeworld ages ago, or something?

    I was under the impression that The Broken (pic here [worldofwarcraft.com]) were the unmutated version of the Draenei. The new race pics [wowwiki.com] don't look anything like that. The head shape is all wrong, not to mention the number of fingers and the lack of a nose.

    We need Blizzard's official announcement and press release to make sense of this, I think.
    • You got it in reverse. Those drainai are called "The Broken" because they have been corrupted by thier world. They have reverted to thier most primitive state because of the magics of the twisting nether. Thier ancestors who I imagine looked very similar probably split off from the Eradar eons ago when they began to practice demonic magics and settled on a new world founding Dreanor. Then as the Dreanai evolved into what we see now in the new WoW video the Eradar became what we see in Warcraft 3, similar bu
      • Man, Blizzard really mangled this one. They've previously stated that the Draeni in their original, un-mutated forms, looked nearly identical to humans. This was an emergency lore bashing to handle the fact that the famous "half orc, half human" assassin Garona was infact too old to be an orc/human mixbreed (having been born long before the dark portal ever opened). So then they changed her to "half orc, half draeni" with the subtext that "uncorrupted" Draeni looked startingly Human except for having green
    • The official Blizzard announcement came out, and looks like I was wrong.

      But the new background lore of the Draenei is totally screwed up. The old lore said that the Eredar were corrupted and evil before Sargeras turned bad. But the new backstory says that the Eredar were corrupted by Sargeras.

      They've got to fix it one way or another. Either way could have the Draenei splitting off.
  • You'd think this'd rank higher than just a headline note on the front page...

  • HUrm. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Churla ( 936633 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @01:08PM (#15302107)
    I just don't get how Blizzard are calling whisps that "corrupted" and "posessed" demons (SAtyrs in this case) and twisted their appearance to match the demons from outland (Eredar) as Draenei. Makes no sense whatsoever..

    Oh.. wait... forgot who I was talking about.

    It's a real shame to see what was a great backstory and lore in a gameworld being so shamelessly bend over and violated for the sake of fitting game dynamics they'd like into the game world.
    • Except that's not even close to what they're doing. Read the lore on the site. You're citing some made-up crap that was debunked several days ago.
  • When the big buzz in an online game is a new *race,* you know that the playerbase is starved for new content. Blizzard has already failed to bring that content to the masses; all of their new content-patches in the past year or more have brought nothing but new grinds or new raid-instances.

    I left two months ago for that reason, and haven't looked back.

    • Most of the bigger MMORPGS (before WoW), released new content/expansions every year, or even 6 months. It's been almost two years for WoW. That's on par for Blizzard. They take their time, but they do things right. It's their philosophy. And it seems to work. Even though it's a painful wait.

      Thankfully, I didn't play for the first year. I'm only 6 months into the game.
      • "That's on par for Blizzard. They take their time, but they do things right. It's their philosophy. And it seems to work. Even though it's a painful wait."

        The thing is there is such a huge difference in power between level 60 characters without epic gear and those with. Blizzard has released BWL, ZG and AQ all of which have very powerful items (OK ZG is more pain in the ass than getting epics from MC) and long term raiders have been at it for a year. How will they balance Burning Crusade content for both ha
    • I agree to some extent.. all the "new content" is for 60s. I want to run a new low level instance!
  • http://videogames1.mtv.com/pages/news/story.php?id =6150056 [mtv.com] Draenei :( Not ogre. Now all the change in the ogre artwork is worthless. They were much better as big fat ogres.
  • My Concern with the New Alliance Race is this. What are the female models going to look like? Seriously, males aren't the only gender to play as. I was just thinking that Blizzard needed a lot of time thinking of a race which needed female characters. I hope Blizzard shows us a female model of the Draenei.
  • Troll on over to the game's website [worldofwarcraft.com] and have a gander at the first news listing.

    Or for the impatient, check the Draenei [worldofwarcraft.com] page directly.
  • ... that in 2006 the Paper of Record can print an article asking, with a straight face, "So how do you feel about itemization?" Its like I'm seeing a brave new world with strange new technology becoming part of the general knowledge you assume people have about society. I'm having one of my "WoW, I'm feeling kind of old, I remember when they had to explain concepts like 'e-mail' so that the masses would get it" and I only turned 24 this month...
  • As a horde player, I feel cruelly ripped off by our having gotten Blood Elves as a new character. They're just regular old night elves with a different texture. The model looks identical. Way to go, Blizzard, you certainly put a lot of work in on that one.

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