If You Were a Casual Gamer...

[Treesh]

Yeah not like they have frost shock or an earthbind totem to throw down. Those Shaman really get the shaft when it comes to PvP. :)
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And when frost shock is resisted and you're away from the earthbind totem or it was killed, you're screwed. There's a cooldown on earthbind. Oh, wait, now there's a druid or someone who rooted/snared you! Grounding totem won't clear that until another pulse. Tal, listen to your own advice about playing a character to low levels and deciding how powerful or underpowered they are. I really do think you are wrong about this one. My shaman has had a lot of bad situation and you really can't run away well, PvE or PvP. Frost shock and earthbind are not reliable escape tools like oh, mages or rogues have. We do have more escapes than warriors or priests though. I'll give you that. Most of the time you have a better chance of staying and fighting and not dying than you do of running away and not dying. And about your "shaman are easier to solo with than a paladin or a warrior" comment. At lower levels, as your shaman is, we really do great things. Get up higher levels and it gets tougher. Much tougher. Yes, you get mail and a shield as a shaman, but you've already found out that tanking as a pally is harder than as a warrior. How do you think us shaman feel if we have to try to be a main tank? Ain't gonna happen! If you want to actually be able to use your totems, you need intellect on your gear. Trying to get intellect and stamina on mail is tough, especially if you don't go looking on thott or allakhazam to see where to get that fanciest bit of armor you can have (which casual gamers aren't going to do). If you want to melee, you need some strength too. Spirit would be nice to reduce the downtime as well when you get into those really nasty situations and actually have to throw down all 4 totems at once and have your mana for healing the rest of the party. I'm sorry tal, I love you, but you're completely wrong about shamans. Edit: At least about shamans higher up, you're wrong. Early game we do kick a lot of butt easily.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. ;)[right][snapback]75433[/snapback][/right]

I wouldn't call Alliance "easy mode", but overall, most things are slightly better setup for Alliance than for horde. I'll take the rogue as an example. Starting rogues for alliance either have to sneak past critters and pickpocket or sneak past critters and lockpick. Horde must kill things higher levels than they are for their quests. The poisons quest? Soloable at 20 for alliance thanks to pickpocketing and stealth and good positioning. Soloable at maybe around 25 for horde because you must kill level 25 undead pairs of critters as part of the quest. No sap for you! On PvE servers (before the honor system came in), very few starting towns were leveled frequently for the alliance. Horde had to put up with the crossroads (a major questing town) being raided very frequently. Bloodhoof on Terenas was also hit very frequently for some reason. The Eastern Kingdoms has many more quests (even for Horde) available, but until you get honored with the Forsaken (which start as NEUTRAL to the other horde races), you're going to be either spending more money on training and such if you quest over there or you're going to be flying home much more frequently than Alliance does. If you quest over on Kalimdor, the quest lines aren't setup as well once you get past the gankfest that is the Barrens. Much travel for fewer quests and fewer rewards. After playing both horde and alliance, alliance really does have an easier time with some exceptions here and there.