For nine months now I have spent my time on Elune forging the matra: "For the Alliance". I have spent many hours in Warsong Gultch, Wintergrasp and the Barrens killing my most hated enemy, the Horde. But lately I've been wondering, "What would it be like to join in on one of Thrall's dance parties?"
So I decided that now is the time to try out my hand at the horde. It is also an excellent chance to try a new class. My first major decision was to find a suitable home for my horde character as Elune is way to one sided. A friend of mine suggested Anvilmar as a great place to start my new character. With that decision out of the way, I chose a priest, because, let's face it, no one has a harder job than a healer, and I needed to know what that was like. Linking in my depth of knowledge of the Star Wars universe, I chose my character's name to be Plagueiss, after Darth Plagueis, who trained Dart Sidious. I figured as a master of manipulating metachlorians he'd make an excellent dark priest :-)
The most interesting thing about the horde as I've found is that right off the bat you seem to get two kinds of players: First, are tried and true World of Warcraft players who have decided to take the side of the underdog, or Second REALLY annoying 13 year old boys. While on the Alliance side I tend to find players from all ages, genders and experience levels, the Horde seems to be a higher breed of gamer (on average). Most of them seem to have multiple alts, and many level 80+.
When you're running around in a major city with no guild affiliation, you get a lot of whispers on the Horde side. Lots of "You wanna join my guild?" stuff/ In order to keep folks from incessantly offering, I joined one of the guilds I thought had the mightiest name. Now that I was in a guild, I was all set to begin questing.
Interestingly enough, the follows on the Horde side seemed to be obsessed with two things: One, killing the Alliance and two, getting up to end game content. Very few times if ever, is anyone ever interested in helping me complete quests without doing something to make sure they get more out of it than I. Recently, while trying to complete a few quests in the Ghostlands was offered a group by a Blood Elf Paladin, who turned looting to free for all and promptly took everything he could (sans of course the money which is automatically split). I also noticed this with the occasional raid, people aren't very good at sharing loot, but instead they primarily want to level themselves first.
I will not begin to pretend that this does not also happen on the alliance side. But after playing my first 20 levels with the Horde it does seem more prevalent. Not that this is a bad thing, considering those who are playing Horde seem to be of a higher caliber, but it is just a little frustrating as someone coming from the Alliance side. The level of play may be higher, but the level of help is certainly not. But regardless, I have enjoyed my time so far as a member of the Horde. Hopefully soon I'll get myself invited to one of Thrall's dance parties :-)
