For the… Horde?
I’ve spent the last few days running around on Lilleigh, my horde toon. She’s level 45 now, and I love her dearly, especially since mage has always held a special place in my heart. I must report, though, the one thing that’s standing out to me more than anything else is how inconvenient it is being horde. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying being a part of the other side, seeing the horde cities (they’re all so unique and beautiful!!), and grouping with the likes of Orc, Tauren, Troll, and Undead (Forsaken?) for some random dungeons. I’m trying to see the horde side before Cataclysm hits and am making sure to tour around to every zone where there is one to see the horde towns and do the horde quests.
Therein lies the trouble. I’ve always been alliance. From zone one, alliance characters flow from zone to zone almost carelessly as they quest their way to greatness. Elwynn, to Westfall, to Redridge, to Duskwood, to Stranglethorn Vale and so on. It’s the same no matter your race. I’m not finding this to be the case with horde and it could be that I started out as Blood Elf, or maybe it’s a horde-wide problem. The first few zones are seamless as a belf. All the way to the Ghostlands, the leveling is amazing, but then what?
The only way I’ve found out of the Blood Elf haven is the orb in Silvermoon City. Yet, when one takes the orb, and arrives at Undercity, they’re left in a zone where the quests are too low-level. If they stayed in the Ghostlands until they were done, the next zone over from Undercity, Silverpine Forest, is also too low-level, yet the quests in Hillsbrad, at Tarren Mill, are almost all too high for the likes of a clothie at this point. One could take the Zeppelin to Orgrimar and head across the Barrens to Thousand Needles, but it’s remarkably out-of-the-way. So, a horde lowbie is left scrounging around for quests, or dying repeatedly doing quests they’re still a bit too low-level for and frustration blossoms… at least mine did.
When I was able to go to Desolace, Stranglethorn Vale, and Dustwallow Marsh, things picked up. I didn’t have so much trouble getting around, especially after I hit 40 and got an epic ground mount (the Swift Pink Hawkstrider). Being a mage makes things especially easy as I can teleport and portal around the globe. Yet, I find that getting to the horde towns from zone to zone is a pain in the rump. While the alliance towns in zones like the Hinterlands are right on the road, the horde town is all the way at the back of the zone and a pain to reach! To get to the Swamp of Sorrows, which I’ve come to realize is very much more a horde zone than it is alliance, one must run up from Grom’gal in Stranglethorn, across Duskwood and around the alliance town Darkshire, and across the Deadwind Pass. Thank the light mages can teleport/portal into Stonard. Yet there isn’t a connecting zone to the Swamp of Sorrows for the horde to go to when they’re done.
I will say, and this is something which just now occurred to me, that horde have a much easier time in the mid-40′s and early 50′s than do alliance. I’m level 45, I’d normally be running around looking for something to do if I were alliance, yet as a Horde, I have a ton of quests! So many, in fact, that I’m constantly dropping some to pick up the quests as a I move from zone to zone. That, my friends, is distinctly not frustrating!
My friends, who have attempted (and failed) to play horde to any real level have constantly complained that it’s easier to level a horde than it is alliance. That the horde have it easy, that their quests/zones are easier. Now that I’ve had some time to run around and be horde, I have to say that I disagree. I love Lilleigh and will definitely meet my new years resolution to play her to 80 and gear her up, but if anything, I’m finding horde more difficult and inconvenient than I did alliance. Perhaps it’s that I’ve played alliance for years, but the horde is fresh and new and I have no idea where to go to get and do quests. Or, perhaps it’s that it really is more difficult in general.
I would be most interested to hear what others think!
If you cannot tell by reading my blog, I love the Horde. I don’t however, love blood elves. I get to a point (usually around level 25), and they disappear. The only one that did make it past that level is my warlock, and then only because of the recruit a friend program!
Having leveled both sides of the fence, I will say I agree with getting hung up around the mid fourties with an alliance character. I have a human paladin that was stuck there forever. When I finally dug in and found another low fourties zone, things picked right back up.
Glad you are sight seeing on the Horde side!
Leveling my druid as Horde (before LFG) was a blast. Everything I experienced was kind of new and fun. I even took the time to read some of the quest text and enjoy the story and lore again. The only issue was that I felt rather lonely without my stable of toons with all of the their professions, money, etc. Which is another reason for me switching all of my toons to Horde.
Gronnd, my warrior that I’m leveling now and is about to hit 62 this evening, was a different story. I too hit that wall where I was done with Tirisfal Glades and Silverpine and was kind of at a loss as to where to go for a while. My solution: LFG! Levels really blow by if you are willing to put up with the frustration of often terrible groups.
I too am glad I leveled through the Horde zones before Cataclysm, since things will be drastically different. I’ll probably do the same (albeit a bit slowly) on the Alliance side after Cataclysm just to see the Worgen side of things.
I agree with you that the early zones for the Horde are not as seemless, or linear as the Alliance zones. I think part of the reason for this is lore related. The Horde, for the most part, are together out of mutual hatred of the Alliance, but most of them have their own agendas as well. If the Horde somehow “won” against the Alliance, they’d probably go back into separate isolation and do their own thing. Trolls would hang with trolls, orcs with orcs and Tauren would go pick flowers together. The Alliance on the other hand, would still kick it together in peace.
Because of this, the race-based quests aren’t tied as tightly together and it’s more difficult for them to get you from zone to zone without going way off the reservation storywise. Cataclysm may solve this, similar to how Outland and Northrend did, because again they will both have a mutual enemy. However they have said they want to create more instense strife between the two factions and make players feel like they should dislike the other a lot more. This I like.
As a Horde, nothing has been as satisfying lately as sending the Alliance gunship crashing to the ground in a smoldering pile. More of this please Blizzard!
Last thing, two addons since you are going through old world stuff and questing:
- Atlast (not Atlasloot): Has dungeon maps and boss locations for all instances, both new and TBC and vanilla.
- Everyquest: Questracker to all of the quests you’ve done and not done in a zone. Great for chasing Loremaster, which I know you’ve done and may pursue on Hesston one day.
Take care, happy Horde’ing.
Hubby and I just got done leveling a pair of horde druids for our latest recruit-a-friend jaunt. We were tauren, so there wasn’t too much difficulty at early levels. We went from the Barrens up to Astranaar (Splintertree Post/Zoram’gar Outpost) and from there to Stonetalon. Of course, this could just have been easier because of the RAF thing, we were leveling so fast that most of the time we didn’t finish all of the quests for a particular hub before we were ready to move on.
I agree with you about Blood Elves though. I have one at 64, and he’s only there because I leveled him with another toon of hubby’s, a Forsaken, and we just started right out in Brill and that area together. I think Hesston has a good point about the Horde not being quite so tight-knit as the Alliance, but it really doesn’t make it any easier when you’re trying to find your next quest hub and you don’t get any clear pointers from the one you’re currently working on!