Horde or Alliance: Choosing Your World of Warcraft Faction

I guess the first decision you have to make is not which race and class to play as, but which side to play. The final differences are cosmetic, but your experience is still from two different points of view. All races are exclusive to each faction, but all classes are available to both sides. In the beginning, paladins were only in alliance and shamans were only hordes. This caused a problem as it was felt there might be an advantage to one side over the other, so Blizzard made a good decision by making all classes available to both sides.

What will be different?

Each faction has their own towns throughout the game which, if you only play one side, you’ll never see much of the others, other than a few quests that take you there on a raid; even then his stay is brief.

Each side has 5 races (soon to be six in Cataclysm) and they are unique to each faction. So you’ll miss out on the backstories and atmosphere that come with each of these races and their cities. Maybe this RP stuff is of no interest and you want to go with what you think is cool, so more power to you! One side has no more than the other when it comes to skills; races are a small part of the game.

Your leveling experience, at least in the early levels, will definitely be different as each faction has dedicated zones 1-20. However, at this stage of the game which is a small part of your experience, you will only play 1-20 during a few days to a week, depending on how long you spend in the game.

So the key difference will be the races available and the hometowns you’ll be visiting often, even at 80, looking for auction houses, trainers, other PvP gear, etc. Alliance races and city environments are more colorful, beautiful and full of life. On the Horde side, things are dark, bleak, and hardened. Alliance are the Heroes and Horde are the Badasses outcasts.

One thing to note is that in somewhat recent changes you can now have characters from both factions on the same server. You still have all the restrictions of splitting factions, like you can’t send mail to one of your tanks on the other faction or even talk to tanks on another faction.