1.6 Leaked Patch Notes

[Elegantly]

Can we can the rhetoric please? Blizzard's CMs, developers and staff all play classes and races on both sides on the public servers. This has been repeated many times on the official forums.

Blizzard also said there is no faction imbalance on the WoW servers.
Blizzard also said they will open the US servers for non-US players after release.

I trust in what I have seen myself. :)

Lets look now at how this has really changed PvE for the horde. Lemekim pointed out that WotF allowed an undead tank 20 seconds or so to build up aggro on Onxyia and other fear producing mobs. To get the same effect the Alliance has to have two dwarf priests casting fear ward on a tank. [...]

OTOH, there have been raid strategies floating around (bare with me, I'm not a raid expert...not by far) which make use of Paladin heals because they generate only a marginal amount of aggro. Of course, this is a bit like comparing apples (a racial trait) with oranges (a class), but since WotF is Horde only and Paladins are Alliance only, there is at least *some* similarity.

But the real area to look at is in PvP. In capture the flag battlegrounds fear rules supreme. Those who are quickest on the fear and have more of it available will have an easeir time than those who don't. A typical encounter on the PvE battlegrounds is a horde warrior charges into an alliance group and fears. All alliance scatter. The fear passes and the alliance starts regrouping their tactics. Horde warlock or priest fears and the alliance re-scatters. Rinse and repeat at least one more time for fun. [...]

Don't forget that for some classes, the Honor System introduced PvP trinkets which also remove fear effects, so this situation is not Alliance-only anymore.

And I can assure you, for every single voice that says "nerf WotF" and "nerf Shamans" there will be another voice saying "nerf Paladins". Alliance has a plate-wearing backup healer (with the option to use non-plate gear to buff up his healing capabilities) who can also remove Polymorph and other debuffs on his friends. The Horde needs fragile Priests to counter Entangling Roots, Polymorph & Co.; don't expect that Priests will last as long on the battlefield than Druids, Shamans or Paladins.

But I really don't want to get into this discussion; rather, I want to point out that I can find a lot of arguments for both factions about a) why they are at a disadvantage and B) why they are at an advantage.

For example, the Horde has been whining about being outnumbered when playing in the field over the last months, now the Alliance is whining that they have longer BG queues than the Horde because of server imbalance. It's quite funny after all ;)