Since there are 8 races and 9 classes, I want you to pair each class with a race, except warrior (since its op for pvp), warrior can pair with 2 races (one from ally, one from horde)
Half of the matchups for druid’s they want to be nowhere near the opponent on “opener” and ideally as far away from them as possible for most of the fight. Personally I think the Tauren edges it in PvP but that’s mainly because of the matchups. The night elf racials really aren’t very good.
The main arguments for Tauren is of course war stomp and the fact that you don’t have to face shamans, there is generally less warlocks on the alliance side due to WOTF. Being a horde Druid does make potential mage matchups harder however and this is simply due to escape artist nullifying roots.
EDIT: I’m not just talking about world PvP/Ganking. A Paladin causes a druid 0 issues everywhere. That’s open world, battlegrounds or dueling. A shaman however, counters hard.
Kinda limiting to force different races for each class. Also lol @people derailing this threat the OP said 1 race so he picked tauren for a shaman ergo he “has” to pick nelf for druid unless i misunderstand the rules.
This isnt best class/race combo. Its best race/class combo if you have to use different races each time unless its warrior.
As for the topic - i tried to make a list but came up with pretty much the same… maybe tauren over orc war but yeah.
Gnome warrior > orc warrior. No point mentioning horde since u didnt do the same for the others.
Priest best racial is dwarf and undead by far ( i’d wager dwarf is slightly better even) , troll is only good for 3v3 in tbc as shadow but even then dwarf racials are absolute insane and imo better than troll in vanilla. Desperate prayer for ohcrap moments, fear ward and most important your personal poison cleanse > any healing reduction trolls have, not to mention berserking only works on casted spells not channeled, and that’s only talking about shadow, for healing troll is probably 3rd behind ud/dwarf.
Warlock - both ud and orc are equally poweful , as someone who played both in classic, the orc racial is too rng to rely on when u need it, ud provides a better favorable matchup against mirrors , priests and even warriors.
Druid - tauren and its not even close tbh. Shadowmeld cant be used in combat until wotlk.
Shaman - all 3 are good at different things. Tauren for surviving if always trained but generally the weakest option if u arent. Orcs are better for enh and the stun resist has good uses in most cases but imo troll is extremely underrated, especially for ele/resto. Most of ur stuff is casted and having faster casts helps against ur biggest counter, curse of tongues.
Mage - its undead, mage’s biggest blunder is warlock and priest ( and hunter/shaman to some degree), being horde helps u avoid shamans and having wotf helps u deal with ur biggest weakness.
troll shadow priest racials in vanilla are stupid good. Shadowguard in particular but also hex of weakness. In my opinion it does edge out undead but both are quite good. Whether it’s better than Dwarf I can’t really say, probably better in 1v1s with Shadowguard but Dwarf racials are positively broken overall.
but the original poster wanted to tie one race to one class (except warriors) and avoid repeats, which makes very little sense to begin with. That’s how he ended up with Night Elf druids and dwarf hunters, which are very lackluster when compared against horde racials. Their only redeeming feature is being on the faction with Paladins, at least until TBC rolls out and they become objectively worse(and it’s not just racials but also the insane demand of newly-levelled Draenei Shamans since every raid wants 5 of them, whereas you’re just fine with 2/3 Blood Elf pallies per raid)
(the druids flip by wotlk, somehow wotlk decides night elfs should get combat shadowmeld while tauren druids get their 5% hp turned into base only…)
Troll priest is better against a lot more classes than Undead priest. Shadowguard can proc the stun from shadow dmg. And the healing reduction can be nasty. Undead priest only does better against other priests and warlock. Troll priest does better against every other class.
Humans Perception migt be nice for catching those pesky rogues, but Dwarves racial let’s you come out of their Blind. Engineering is pretty much a must have for PvP anyway.
