Going Under the Knife: Faction Changes Druid Style
The WOW community has been abuzz since Blizzard announced an upcoming change which has been heretofore unthinkable, the ability to change your character’s faction from Horde to Alliance and vice versa. Of course, much is still up in the air about how exactly this will work, such as whether your completed quests and achievements will remain the same. But Blizzard has said that once you switch over, your character will be roughly equivalent, just running with the kids from the other side of the tracks. I’ve seen many, many posts about this in recent weeks, most analyzing topics such as meta game impact, server impact, logistics, motivations, and so forth. While I think that it is a good change generally, my stance on the topic itself is largely one of wait and see. However, I thought that it would be interesting to take a look at what Druid specific advantages and disadvantages there might be for trading in horns for floppy ears and vice versa. Because Druids can only be Night Elves on alliance side, and can only be Taurens on Horde, the comparison largely comes down to one between these two races and between the factions themselves.
Racial Traits
Tauren – Taurens get Warstomp, a nice little 8 yard AOE stun that gives you a 2 second head start when running away, fixing your hair, you know… whatever. They have an endurance advantage that increases their health by 5%. Herbalism gets a 15 point boost for them, and they have a 2% increased chance to avoid being hit by nature spells.
Night Elf - When I was just a wee little elf Shadowmeld was sort of useless except to hang out by a tree, hide, and go afk for a minute. Now it’s so much nicer! You can hide from enemies in the middle of a fight ands shake off threat. Melee and ranged attacks are 2% less likely to hit night elves. N.Elves also have a wisp spirit when dead, which speeds up corpse runs. Elusiveness reduces the chance of detection by enemies when night elves are stealthed or shadowmelded. They also have the same 2% reduction in chance of being hit by nature spells as taurens do.
Professions
There are a handful of recipes that are only available to one faction or the other. I imagine that Blizzard will take out faction specific recipes from your old faction if you switch sides, but it’s possible that they will not, making achievements like Chef de Partie easier to obtain. You can find a list of faction specific recipes for all professions here.
Mounts
Each faction has specific mounts available to them, although you’ll have a bit of a rep grind in front of you if you are looking to ride faction specific mounts that are not sabers (Night Elves) or Kodos (Tauren). Other alliance mounts are horses, mechanostriders, rams and eleks. Hordies can ride skeletal horses, wolves, raptors and hawkstriders. Of course, if you’re like me, flying mounts mean very little to you at all since, you know, you’re a bird when you want to be. But if you are interested in flying mounts, as an alliance player you can ride a Griphon, while as a horde you could ride a Wyvern (and thank goodness you weren’t a hordie when their cat form looked like one of these silly mounts!). If you are really a mount connoseur, at 100 mounts the dragonhawk you get to ride will be red if you are horde, blue if you are alliance.
Pros and Cons
In all, there are not so many official differences between Tauren Druids and Night Elf Druids. Druids are druids. But clearly there are a lot of differences in flavor between the two factions. If you are mulling over a faction change, it might be a good idea to put together a list of pros and cons for each faction. Here’s one I put together to get you started… (warning! If you are looking for actual information, this *might* be a good place to stop reading. You’ve been warned.)
| Alliance Pros | Horde Pros |
| All your friends will have elbows | You’ll have that sort of cool smugness of knowing you’re rolling with da horde. |
| People won’t follow you around with a knife and a bottle of A1 Sauce. | No one in your party will dance the Macarena. Ever. |
| You won’t ever have to learn the layout of Undercity. | Your animal forms will have pupils in their eyes. |
| Your faction zones aren’t mostly arid wastelands. | KEK is way cooler than LOL. |
| You can get a Mini Me Teldrassil Sproutling directly from the Argent Tournament and won’t have to pay thousands of gold for one. | You have a much better chance of avoiding 14 year old boys in your pugs. |
| You won’t cringe when looking at your party members. | Gnomes make better footballs than raidmates. |
| Blizzard clearly favors the Alliance. | Blizzard clearly favors the Horde. |
| Blizzard clearly hates the Horde. | Blizzard clearly hates the Alliance. |
If you do decide you want to take the plunge and switch factions, it might help to ease your transition by trying to live as the other faction for a while before making the switch. Be prepared for ganking, though. Lots and lots of ganking. Good luck out there!
There are 6 Comments to "Going Under the Knife: Faction Changes Druid Style"
LMAO gnomes do make better footballs than raidmates (with a few notable exceptions). I used to far and away prefer alliance, but all my friends are horde, I missed out on a lot of druidic goodness because A) Tauren catform looked dumb (thank you 3.2 for fixing that), B) NE cat form looked AWESOME (yay blue emo kitty), and I much prefer leveling in spooky forests than wastelands. . .
Fish´s last blog ..UFC 100 preview and predictions
So what does it look like to a horde when an Alliance says ‘lol,’ is it kek too?
Sylly,
Your photoshop and humor leave me rolling on the floor! I love it! Honestly, you could just photoshop your title pictures and then quote 5 pages of Keats in your posts, and I’d STILL be completely hooked =D
Beruthiel´s last blog ..Oh My…
If said in Common, then the Hordie will see, “bur.”
I don’t think I’ve ever raided with a gnome. However, I *have* raided with multiple scrapbots in the raid.
That was hilarious and love your mad photoshop skilz.
Chris @ Santoku Knife´s last blog ..Global Santoku Knife