The Lone Wolf's Den

Yesterday i got a tweet from DtotheUG a former guild member of mine talking about the retaking Gnomeregan pre-cata world quest. I wondered if there was a horde side version and indeed there is. You are tasked to help take down the evil Hexmaster Zalazane and take back the Darkspear Trolls’ land the Echo Isles.

After some frog capture, frog bombing run, and a epic revelation of the Troll Druids you are asked to take up arms with 400 or so of your fellow horde members and rush the islands to kill Zalazane in a giant raid.

You get loots too! A cloak with lame stats that looks neat and a item that transforms you into a darkspear warrior. You also get an achievement.

The reason for all this wackiness is that the Echo Isles will be the new troll starting area come cataclysm. To me the best part was the showcase of the lost Troll Druids. I am kind of a lore nerd so this was really neat.

Overall fun stuff and if you have a toon 75-80 give it a shot on horde or alliance side.

Spoiler alert! I am using lore seen in Cata videos so be forewarned there could be spoilers.

They say that nothing ends conflict like tragedy. Having watched quite a bit of the opening scenes for the horde and alliance i have to wonder if Cata will not only be the changing of the world but also the end of the war between the Horde and Alliance.

Thrall has gotten older and given up his war chief status to a mad man in Hellscream while at the same time the alliance now has a xenophobic king that everyone thinks is a revenge seeking dick. The 2 men trying to lead their sides into war are not well liked even by their own people.

I’ll break things down on the horde side as to why i think this theory is true.

Tauren – Hellscream killed their beloved leader in a dual.

Trolls – While loyal to Thrall the troll leader doesn’t like Hellscream one bit.

Undead – Sylvanas and Hellscream are very far apart in their ideas even to the point Hellscream seems racist toward the undead.

Blood Elves – The sunwell was cleansed by a Naru and Sunstrider is dead. All that is left of these guys is to break their magic addiction and they would return to high elf status. The Night Elves are very understanding even helping out the cursed Worgen. One has to wonder if they would help their addicted kin folk.

Goblins – The Goblins are basically out for themselves but loyal to Thrall for helping them during the events of Cata.

Now here is the catch…Thrall is currently busy helping take down Deathwing. The what if is Thrall and Proudmore finally fall in love and get married. Thrall returns with a human female on his side and a halfling baby. Proof that orcs and humans can live together. Hellscream and Varian Wrynn both die in battle leaving both sides with out leadership. Thrall returns as the king of the horde and Proudmore becomes the queen of the Alliance their halfling baby a sign of hope for the future and the end of the orcs vs humans war.

The trick then is to have a 3rd outside party cause a lot of problems to cement the new bond between the 2 in a war to save their world. Horde and Alliance vs someone new could be the theme of the next expansion after Cata and the end to the World of Warcraft. Then Blizzard releases it’s secret new MMO property. To me blizzard is the send you home happy kind of company that would actually end a MMO with a good story before moving on to the next thing.

An idea i had for the end is when you log out the last time blizzard caches the models of what you were wearing and sends you a “family photo” of all your character models and names on a glossy poster, a T-shirt, and a beta key for the new game maybe for $14.99. A thanks and a personalized memento for playing the game all those years.

So it’s been a while now since i started playing horde and i have leveled 3 toons past 10 now. Here are some things i have noticed different from playing on the Alliance side.

- NO MONEY. Horde is very stingy with gear and money early levels so getting new gear and weapons is very hard. My lvl 22 shadow priest is now at 0 copper and all the gear he has is from tailoring and vendors.

- Barrens get boring really fast. Cata will fix a lot of this but my god the Barrens suck.

- Questing is harder. I can say this with full confidence that questing on the horde side is much harder. More mobs in an area to aggro, mobs are higher level when you get the quests, quests are much more spread out.

All that said i still love playing the horde. The undead are by far my favorite race in the game with the Trolls being the second. So much great lore and not as much of that snob ass hole feeling you get playing the Alliance especially the humans.

I have to say from this point forward i am FOR THE HORDE!

Man it sucks being on horde side with out a gold farmer but i finally scraped the cash together to get mounted…that sounds wrong huh?

Say hello to Darknessheal my new horde main a Undead Shadow Priest. I am a big fan of the Forsaken and Sylvanas Windrunner on the horde side. I love the metal dance of the male forsaken. I love the cannibalize racial. I just love everything about this rotting misunderstood race. Mix this in with the fact that i have never played a priest past level 18 and you have a good reason to make it my horde side main. When i started playing horde i said i am going to see a lot of new stuff and what better way to see that stuff than with a new race/class mix. I ended up moving almost 40g from my death knight onto Darknessheal and deleting him so i guess that makes it official. My horde side main will be a undead priest.

Robbythecow will still be around. I might end up moving him to being a bank toon or something.

Something tells me a lot of my toons going forward on the horde side will be Undead. I have just fallen head over heals for them.

This is my “main” as they call it in WoW. Not the first character i ever played but by far my favorite. From a lore standpoint she is the daughter of nobility but cast off that lifestyle to live with the night elf rangers training to be a master marksman using either a bow or gun and considers herself more elf than draenei hence the longer ears and purple hued skin. The former leader of a rouge faction called the Knights of Radshire she walked away from it all on a soul searching mission. Now returning to Stormwind Castle she has vowed to step onto the field of battle not as a leader but as a Ranger to stand for the alliance in the war against the horde.

Ok enough with the crazy backstory lol. Tonight i picked up Relentless Gladiator’s Wristguards of Triumph using all the honor i got from trading in all my old battlegrounds marks. I also put into place a plan to get a spider pet and respec into a PvP Marks build. Next will be turning in some more stuff for honor and getting more gear upgrades. I’ll post updates as i go.

If an opportunity rises i may go back to raiding someday since i never set foot in anything past Naxx but for now i am unguilded and focused on PvP….at least on this character.

Robbythecow is my official Horde side main character. Details can be found on the characters page. Picked up skinning and leatherworking on him…ironic don’t ya think .