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Mumbling incoherently about some stuff about Warcraft 3

Yet another review of a game that can soon buy its own liquor? Nope, just what the title says. Including the redundant, clunky phrasing it contains.

Humans

Why isn’t this faction in the game called “Alliance”? It is not just humans making up the ranks, but Dwarves and High/Blood Elves too. It is one of the earlier incarnations of the Alliance. Same goes for “Orc” fitting more with the name “Horde”, as Tauren, Orcs and Trolls all have their representation.

What I like about the Alliance in this game is its synergy. No one unit dominates (maybe except the Muradin-styled Mountain King that kicks a metric shit-ton of ass), but they work very well together. Between the buffs, debuffs, utility and general flexibility, they are a lot of fun to use. For me anyway. No clue, or care, for competitive play. If that even goes on anymore with this game.

Something else I like about the Alliance is that the melee soldiers have lower health, but more armor. And they have a generous attack speed. Made sense to me that the humans would compensate for their lower stature and physical strength when opposing the Orcs this way. So why on earth does the melee heroes of the Alliance focus on strength over agility?

I should probably quickly summarize these attributes and the heroes in general. Each hero has three attributes: Strength, agility and intelligence. Each attribute has specific effects on the hero. Strength increases health and health regen. Agility increases attack speed and armor. Intelligence increases mana and mana regeneration. In addition to this, each hero will have one of these three as a primary attribute, which means it will determine the damage the hero does. Strength heroes are usually called “Warrior Hero”, agility heroes are called “Cunning Hero” and intelligence heroes are usually called “Mystical Hero”.

Warrior Heroes typically have a high strength, moderate intelligence and low agility. Cunning Heroes typically have a value between moderate and high in all three. Mystical heroes typically have high intelligence and moderate to low strength and agility, but with a slight increase in movement speed and ranged attacks to compensate for their lack of survivability.

So, looking at the common Alliance units, which are focused on armor and speed over health, why are the Paladin and Mountain King heroes made to be Warrior Heroes?

Now, I will acknowledge that the Mountain King would probably be even more powerful as a Cunning Hero. It’s 20/30/40% (!!!) chance of doing a critical strike that stuns would benefit immensely from increased attack speed. So, from a gameplay perspective, I can see that getting out of hand on a hero that is already a “hero killer”. Though I would prefer to reduce the proc chance a bit instead and make it an agility based hero. But I see the point.

The hero I don’t see why they made a Warrior Hero is the Paladin and, by extension, the Death Knight who is the undead mirror of the Paladin. Sure, they run around with big weapons and look imposing and strong, but so does the Blademaster, which is a Cunning Hero. The Blademaster is easily more muscular than the Paladin and Death Knight, and way more dangerous in melee range because of its Critical Strike ability (15% chance of doing x2/3/4 damage).

The Paladin and Death Knights are melee support heroes and are not going to ever be considered a real threat directly, beyond what any hero is. They simply do not have the abilities the Mountain King has that would give their increased attack speed much more to present in a melee fight. Their increase in armor would also be compensated for through their decrease in health. The only direct benefit would be a slight increase in intelligence, but even that won’t be more than 3/4 points at level 10. However, it would fit thematically on how the human units (the Death Knights are humans in this game. Non-human Death Knights are not seen in W3) work as opposed to Orcs.

Of course, yes, the increase in attack speed and mana would make them a bit better. And I would have liked that, because I really enjoy playing with that sort of melee unit, but I don’t think those improvements (which does come at the cost of quite a bit of health which isn’t fully accounted for by the armor increase) would upset the hero balance. Just fit the themes better.

Blademaster

What I said about could be taken as me thinking the Orcish Blademaster should be a Warrior Hero, which would be half-true. Yes, it would fit thematically with the general Orcish melee units, but, at the same time, it wouldn’t fit that well with Grommash Hellscream.

For those who never played W3, Grommash Hellscream is a Blademaster with a unique model. And, on the topic of that model, I really like how they carried over him being an empowered Grunt unit in Warcraft 2 visually in Warcraft 3. He uses an axe and has shoulder armor, just like the Grunt model used in Warcraft 3, basically making him a stronger and unique Grunt. That can turn invisible. And create Mirror Images. Grommash’s magical aptitude seems to have gone missing in later representations.

While Grommash is portrayed as a hulking mount of muscle in most representations, the lore behind him at the time of W3 says that he used speed and agility a lot more than most Orcish warriors. And therefor it makes sense that the class Grommash has is a Cunning Hero. And since the generic heroes kinda just work off their story-mode counterparts, this needed no change.