Posts with tag races

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Every race has its own unique storyline, many of which have been played out in books, comics, and endless fanfics. Who have you enjoyed reading and acting out the most?

I'm torn. I love the orc lore -- it's so richly detailed, especially in so many of the books, that when I play an orc or head into orc territory, I really feel like I get them. I know most of the NPCs by name, and I know their backstories and their motivations. Landing on Nagrand for the first time in The Burning Crusade with an orc character was a game-changing experience.

The night elves probably have the most complete lore -- quite a feat when you consider how long their race goes back. Night elf lore imbues the game with an aura of mystery and grace that I have yet to find anywhere else. It's hard to play a night elf and not feel inclined to roleplay, at least a little bit. Playing through the quests involving Malfurion Stormrage always provides a sense of urgency, like the world actually depends on what you are doing.

Now it's your turn. Whose lore gets you really involved? Have you acted out stories involving the lore? Do you read up to get the background on your characters?

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

Each time you create a new character, you are faced with a few crucial decisions. Which class? Which race? And perhaps most importantly, which hairstyle? When I started my most recent alt, I debated with myself over the best choice of race for quite some time. Here are some of the factors that crossed my mind:

• Class considerations Before Cataclysm, if you wanted to play a druid on the Alliance, rolling a Night Elf was the only option; likewise, Blood Elves were the only ones who could be paladins on the Horde side. Selecting a class first often makes the race decision easier -- unless, of course, you select the warrior class, in which case you won't get any help.
• Pure aesthetics Who wants to look at cow butt for hours on end? 'Nuff said.
• Affinity Perhaps the backstory of a particular race captivates you, reminding you of your own journey or struggles. Perhaps it's easier to put yourself in the shoes of a character who howls at the full moon or eats the corpses of the dead for a quick pick-me-up.
• Racials If you plan to min-max with your character, you may want to select a race with a bonus to stats that actually matter for the character's class. Likewise, it could be helpful to go with a race that has bonus skill points in the profession you hope to learn. Some advantages are just a matter of convenience (e.g., instant flight form). And let's not forget cool effects like Rocket Jump!
• Resemblance When you still can't decide, I suggest rolling a character of a race that looks more like you do. Got lots of back hair? So do Worgen and Tauren. Long ears? You must be an Elf or Troll.

Which factors did you consider when choosing race? Which of them is most important and why?

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

The majority of the people who play chose their main character's race because it appealed to them for one reason or another. Some people play a certain race because of the racial traits and the benefits they provide in a raid. The extra crit or intellect can be the defining choice when a raider is picking his or her race. A serious PvP player may choose his race based on the offensive or defensive racial traits for that race. For the average player, though, we choose our race because something appealed to us: the look of that race, the lore, or maybe it was the thought of how playing a certain race and class combination would play out.

My very first toon in WoW was a gnome rogue. The thought of something so small jumping out from the shadows and stabbing you in the kneecaps before vanishing made me laugh. I moved onto a dwarf hunter a few weeks later and never looked back. The dwarven race has always been my favorite because of their lore, the way they carry themselves, their attitude. When I think of dwarves, I think of Scotland and bagpipe music. In Wrath of the Lich King, I spent more time in the Howling Fjord than any other zone. If I could have taken the music from the Fjord and put it in Ironforge, my dwarf would have been drunk on ale and in heaven. Every character I have, save for my first rogue and my priest, is a dwarf.

What is your favorite race? Why does that race appeal to you? Are there any races that you can't stand to play or dislike in general?

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening Music: Sting with some of my favorite folk, "The Snow, It Melts the Soonest." Although this version isn't my favorite, it's one of the only videos with decent quality I could find -- and it's by Sting, gotta love Sting.

Last Week: We talked about season eight compositions and trends, particularly in 3v3. Not much has changed since then. Check it out if you have the time, it's still very relevant.

This Week: We'll be discussing the wonderful imbalances we call "racials" for arena. The alliance have historically had worse PvP racials than their horde counterparts, but this might have changed in WotLK.

Remember back to a time when race changes didn't exist. In vanilla WoW and The Burning Crusade, players had to reroll or deal with the racials that they originally chose, even if those racials got nerfed or buffed. These racials were also far more imbalanced than they are today, which added insult to injury for certain race / class combinations.

Dwarf

Stoneform: Activate to remove poison, disease, and bleed effects; +10% Armor; Lasts 8 seconds. 2 minute cooldown.

This racial is a shadow of what it once was. Pre-WotLK, this racial would give a 8 second immunity to poison, disease, and bleed effects. The difference is enormous -- removing a 50% healing debuff in Wound Poison for an 8 second window allowed the dwarf to receive some massive heals. The racial was also on a three minute cooldown, but most PvPers will tell you that the shortened cooldown does not make up for the 8 second immunity. Dwarf priests and hunters had a much easier time surviving against rogues in The Burning Crusade, which is probably the reason the racial was nerfed for WotLK.

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

All the World's a Stage has been a voice for roleplaying in WoW for over two years now. I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the article entitled "So you want to be a bad guy" was just about at the 2 year mark for this column! To celebrate belatedly, today we'll review some of the other websites about roleplaying in WoW out there. If you like All the World's a Stage, you'll probably enjoy these as well.

In addition, you will find that some of these websites have similar, but unique pages with information about roleplaying the various races and classes of Azeroth. So for those of you who would like to have a reference to all these articles in a single place, I've collected them all together in one list at the end of the article. This list includes my own articles, as well as those of all the other websites I'm about to mention which follow on the same theme.

Now this is neat: brand-new totem artwork has been spotted on the patch 3.3 PTR for troll shamans by extremely excited tipster Zjin. Previously, all Horde shamans shared a totem design, and draenei got their own space-themed totems when they were added. The new troll ones look appropriately voodoo, I think.

There are now at least three designs for the four different horde races; I wouldn't be surprised if orcs turned out to have their own as well. The current Horde totems fit tauren best of all the races. Once we here at WoW.com start making our way onto the PTRs, we'll bring you any more information we can find on possible new totems for the various races. In the mean time, I'll be in my bunk, doing designs for dwarf totems in my head.

Update: yep, there are new Dwarf and Orc totems too.

I've been thinking about this ever since the faction changes went live: obviously, Blizzard will never actually release the numbers on how many server transfers or faction changes they do, just because they are notoriously guarded about the information they release, not least because riots are pretty easy to incite on the forums (imagine the reaction if Blizzard officially said that Alliance was the more popular faction). But I wonder nevertheless: how many players have transferred their characters over from one faction to another already? And lots of people seem to think that the vast majority of transfers are Alliance to Horde (not to mention I've heard many anecdotal stories of people flooding back to the Horde), but is that true?

Obviously, we don't have access to all of Blizzard's audience, and our polls are definitely much less scientific than the data Blizzard gets to look at (you better believe they're tracking transfers and faction and race choices with a close eye, just as they're tracking server populations 24/7), but just for the heck of it, we'll ask. After the break, we've got a few polls designed to give us a very general look at how transfers are playing out so far. There's a lot of anecdotal experiences flying around since transfers went live, but I'd like to know, a little more objectively, just how things are panning out.

Kisirani is tearing it up on the forums recently -- ever since she dropped that Tauren Paladins would be called Sunwalkers, she has kicked off a round of speculation and excitement about all of the new race/class combinations soon to be available to us in Cataclysm. But the number one question on everyone's lips seems to be: "If (race) can be a (class), why can't my (race) be a (class)?"

For that, Kisirani has an answer: because Blizzard doesn't want it to be. I have to say, I'm impressed so far with how Blizzard has tied these new class and race combinations into the lore of the world. We've only seen a little bit of how they'll do it, but while these new class/race combos could have easily just fallen into fan service (and that's definitely what I thought they were when Blizzard introduced them -- they'd abandoned all semblance of lore just to give players more options to play), it definitely doesn't seem that's the case. According to Kisirani, Blizzard is still thinking seriously about what races and classes fit together, and presumably all of the new combinations (yes, even Human Hunters, can't wait to see that one) will be explained in the end.

Good to hear. Of course, the reason they're including these combinations is partly fan service, and it's likely also meant to help folks rerolling to see all the new Cataclysm content. But knowing that there'll be lore behind all of the new combos is pretty darn exciting.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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One of the big things announced at BlizzCon were the new class and race combinations. These were originally datamined from patch 3.2.2 and include everything from Gnome Priests and Goblin Rogues to Worgen Druids. I'm especially excited about the last one.

For years, the race you played has been indelibly linked with the class and defined how you play the game. Say, for example, you like playing Night Elves, you're limited class-wise to rolling Druid, Priests, Hunters, Rogues and Warriors. On the other hand, if it's a specific class then you are sometimes limited to a particular race. So Draenei are the only Alliance race which can current become Shamans while the same is true, Horde-side, for Blood Elves becoming Paladins.

From a lore perspective, there is little preventing any of these combos. This is especially true as Azeroth expands and the game evolves. But readers, this is new territory for us, as WoW becomes more open. What do you think of the possibility of lore-centric or even playable class and race combinations?

And here lies the final chapter in the Taming of the Worgen saga: Mania reports that, just a little while after the troublesome Worgen Garwal was hotfixed to be untameable, Blizzard has magically changed all of the already-tamed Worgen to level 68 (or Hunter's level minus five) wolves. Why level 68? Because, Mania says, they've all been turned into Winterskorn Worgs, a level 63-69 NPC that wanders around the Howling Fah-jord.

So that's the end of that. Obviously, no one really expected to keep those pets as their own, and especially with all of the Worgen-as-playable-race speculation flying around, it wouldn't do for Hunters to have one of those humanoids at their beck and call. Some Hunters who went to the trouble of taming probably won't be too happy. But the good news is that the new white wolf in your stable is completely fixed -- it has all of the normal talent trees and abilities that wolves are supposed to have. Guess you and your pet Garwal were just never meant to be.

Aeuis brings up an interesting point over on the forums: even though some of the items we get are called "Bind on Account" (or, more properly, Bind to Account, even though most people use BoA as shorthand) they're really not that, because you can't actually send them across factions or realms. Of course, that's pretty obvious to people who've been playing the game for a while -- Blizzard has never really encouraged cross-faction interaction at all (you can "send" items through the neutral AH, though even that is a bit of a hack, not really the intended purpose). So BoA items are actually bound to account, server, and faction.

But Wyrxian is surprisingly open about "future possibility:" he does say that while Blizzard could allow us to send items between factions if they wanted us to, they also wanted to leave things open just in case the functionality came into view in the future. That doesn't mean we can expect a change in the next patch, but it does seem to mean that Blizzard is still open to the "possibility." You'd think it be tough technically (character inventories are all over the place, especially cross-server), but considering that we can now have cross-server battlegrounds, all it would probably take is a tweak to the in-game mail system. One character sends an item, another character receives it.

And really, the only possibility that might come open is just ease-of-use -- that's why BoA and Heirloom items are in the game already, and if Blizzard determines that it would be easier to have you share items between your characters' factions and servers (perhaps if they upgrade the character re-customization feature to include a faction change?), then it will likely happen sooner or later.

Blogatelle, a multi-author blog on WoW roleplay and commentary, has just finished an exhaustive series of play guides on the 10 playable races of Azeroth and how each perceives and interacts with the world, their allies, and their enemies. Regular readers of WoW Insider and particularly All the World's a Stage may also recognize the primary author, Sean, as one of our commenters here on the site.

Even if you're not a roleplayer, the guides are fascinating. They're well-written, thoroughly researched, and a supremely entertaining (and sometimes funny) guide to the mindset of each race. The guides also give some background into how each race arrived at the perspective that it did, and points out that there are several race combinations (notably Tauren/Gnome and Troll/Draenei) who really know very little about each other, and must rely on the often-biased opinions of their faction colleagues. And even beyond that, it keeps digging into the shifting nature of politics within each faction: why are the Forsaken and the Blood Elves on shakier ideological territory with each other now? Why are the Night Elves so standoffish with the Alliance as a whole, and why do the Humans in particular react badly?

I honestly can't say enough good things about these guides. No, they're not official lore, and there's necessarily some conjecture based on game mechanics and vague ingame hints concerning what's going on, but they seem pretty damn accurate to me. If you're in any way interested in Warcraft's lore, or in understanding why certain things in the game work the way they do, the full list of guides is here.

If you're interested in roleplaying your race and class in-game, check out our own series of guides, All The World's A Stage.

As a few of our readers have noticed, Blizzard has fixed the old problems with the Harvest Festival this year -- the new races of Blood Elves and Draenei can now do the quests that start outside of Orgrimmar and Ironforge. Last year was the first time the races had a chance to run them, and Blizzard hadn't implemented the quests for them yet. But this year, things are A-OK.

Unfortunately, there's no acknowledgement that they're new to the game -- while the quests do mention the character's class, they just see BEs and Draenei as just other members of their faction. It was a little weird running to honor Grom Hellscream with my Blood Elf, but if you want to be a good member of the Horde or Alliance (and pick up that nice food dispenser in the mail), have at it.