What playable races from alliance and horde are the most evil by lore? Explain.
Now? Pretty much no one. It’s all relative, and we’re all friends and such.
Not so long ago I’d have said the Forsaken topped the list, with minds twisted by dark magic that make them focus all on negative emotions, and wallowing in hatred for everything, including themselves. Death to the living and all that, and spreading undeath, while also describing it as an existence of suffering. Add chemical warfare and human experiments to the mix, and they are about as dark as you could get. But that was before it was retconned so that most of that was Sylvanas’ oppressive regime and that many, if not most Forsaken were actually fine people, or something.
Trolls were pretty vile as well, with all of the friendliest cliches about Aztec culture, from blood rites, cannibalism and vodoo slaves to human sacrifices to summon dark gods of vile disease… But I guess the playable Darkspear were never part of that and were introduced specifically as rebels, and the Zandalari were distanced from all of that stuff as well…
Then there are of course the Orcs, which let themselves be manipulated into straight-out genocide, followed by interdimensional genocide. That kind of stupidity has a large part of evil, I’d guess. Same for the Void Elves, really, who deliberately sought out the vilest of magics, in the unfounded expectation that they could control them without turning evil. They couldn’t, until deus ex Alleria came. If we take allied races, Dark Irons are in the same category. Buttholes with delusions of grandeur that did the stupidest stuff that killed a lot of people.
Goblins and dwarves might be next on my list, for being egoistical buttholes, that just take whatever they like. They would pretty much barge in where they wanted something, take it, and make war on any natives that dared to protest. Pretty wicked, but more banale than some of the fantasy stuff on the list here. And of course, it was tuned down a lot since classic…
The rest of the playable races doesn’t really compare. Humans do some bad stuff, but frankly, less than real humans would have done under the circumstances. Night Elves were militant isolationists, but that’s not rising much above the level of casual buttholery. Gnomes are dangerous in the same way that rampant AI is dangerous. Unintentionally. Blood Elves were usually more victims than oppressors, but did their fair share of nonsense as well through Kael. Pandaren, Vulpera, Dracthyr… no one cares. Draenei? Holier than thou, so there is room for a fanatic arc, but that hasn’t happened yet. Really, nothing worth mentioning here.
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No race is purely evil. all the races have done bad stuff, yes for sure. But i dont think any of them are evil.
i can give a few examples of who have done the most evil in the past though.
On horde side i think its the Forsaken/ Undead. they have done some pretty horrible things under Sylvanas and not just towards the alliance, but also towards the enviorment/nature.
Orcs if lead by a bad leader are often genocidal. often see this when leveling in Night elf zones around Kalimdor. plus Theramore of course…
Goblins are greedy, and often have a chaotic and funny lore. They also blow stuff up all the time.
Zandalari were chaotic back in the days. helping the mogu slave and invade pandaria, helping the Amani invade Quel’thalas, sending innocents to Vol’duns desert, among other things. Now they are ok.
Blood elves might come third, but they have changed since burning crusade. back then they were brainwashing citizens to keep the peace in Silvermoon. sucking magic from dead naruu, animals, etc. But like i said they changed.
On Alliance side it is most likely the Lightforged/ Lightbound. They genocided the Mag’har orcs and tried to spread the light by force and often in brutal ways, similar to the scarlet crusade.
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I would say clear on first place are the Forsaken. With all the betrayel and resentment together with the fact that undead support negative feelings they are most closely to classical evil race.
On place two depend on if we say with trolls only the trolls of the horde tribes or trolls itself. If we say trolls itself then I would say trolls because most trolls have no honor code, they would do anything to gain an advantage and have no problem dooming someone for eternity just for a small advantage.
On place three in general and on two if we would only take about playable I would say Goblins. Goblins with their nature and their culture would do things for money other would not dare. Especially the bilgewatercartell is most ruthless in this only beaten by the Venture.
Forsaken there’s no competition there orcs are just stupid af but forsaken are calculating and enjoy bringing misery and pain to the living
Gnomes.
In order to find a way to find a cure to the undead plague, two gnomes experimented on samples, testing their cure on a Vrykul, but it turned out that it empowered it, making the plague even worse, spreading it horribly. But instead of facing judgement for their mistake, they said forsaken had created yet another new version of the plague, fueling hatred while Horde and Alliance were trying to join forces in order to end Arthas.
Whats worse that a sadistic killer? A coward that doesn’t assume his mistakes and manipulates you to think he did good.
Oh… And they come back every time after we sacrificed them to the loot god. If it’s not a proof they sold they soul to demons, i don’t see what it takes to convince you.
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Humans and elves no doubt. They are colonizers who took everything from the trolls and were reesponsible for multiple genocides.
In Kul Tiras you get executed for piracy. So being exiled is a mercy to some degeree.
The Mogu promised them land and the Zandalari took their word. Pandaren are to blame for resisting.
Quel’thalas belongs to the Amani. Elves need to be kicked out.
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Yes, they should have just let themselves be enslaved and abused by the Mogu and Zandalari, damn those people! Always resisting, put the blame on them!
I wonder what your beloved Ranger-General would say about that.
Orcs and Undead
Orcs are bloothirsty conquerors, and they are still the same even after Thrall’s Horde, they genocided the Draenei and the Night Elves and sacrificed thousands of Humans in the name of the Legion.
Undead just want to see the living in agony and despair, enough said.
The fun thing about Orcs is how WoD kinda destroyed their “evil Legion influence”-excuse. The Devs thought it was actually a good idea to show us an alternate future, where the Orcs were warned before succumbing to demonic influence… and still became every much as murdeous as our original orcish Horde did, when Garrosh provided the tech. Not sure if the devs were even aware of the moral implications here, they certainly didn’t seem very aware…
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That’s totally Garrosh’s fault tho! (With that bad faith take out of the way)
WoD was conceived of as cross-promotion with the Warcraft movie so they probably didn’t even stop to consider the implications. The thing is that Orcs aren’t meant to be evil exactly they’re meant to fundamentally believe in rule of the strongest, as the single best way to determine leadership. A mindset the writers eem to struggle wrapping their head around rather significantly, which ends up in said characters either being watered down to rabid warmongering animals or just forsake their proposed belief system entirely to be the good guys.
What we call “the good old days”, now that we saw the Legion to Shadowlands arc that followed.
- Orc, pretty much drank demonblood, broke their own planet totaly, then tried to take over Azeroth killing everything in sight.
2.Night elfs/all other elves, and trolls, those trolls how became night elfs, they tried to
litrealy take over the hole continent, pretty much killed any troll on sight, then tried to summon the legion, and ended up blowing up the continent.
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undead/forsaken, tried to kill everything and everyone under Arthaz, then tried again under sylvanas reign.
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Dwarfs, as already said, pretty much takes what they want no matter from who, and they even fight eachother for good messures at times.
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humans, wel they have had their wars with eachother, but none been at the scale as anyone else.
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goblins, their greed makes them do things that are not so good at times, including letting their own die for thier own agendas.
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Dranei their own stupidity led to them loosing their own planet, then again making it so the burning legion found Draenor, but otherwise they have not done to much evil stuff.
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Gnomes, well they dont realy done anything pure evil that has affected others, exept messing up their own city.
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Tauren and Pandaren, pretty much the good cows of Azeroth, not realy done anything bad, exept manageing to anger the wrong people at times.
I wont put the death knights here, considering they are technicaly many races even if playable
there is offcourse all the newer races also, including mag´thar, lightforge dranei, Zandalari trolls, vulpera, kul tirans.
the only ones I left out was the trolls and zandalari trolls, becuse they have done bad things also, but at same time most of the time they done something is for their own survival, most times they been fighting is for their own existence, for example against the Azhara night elfs, many times against humans who took their lands, blood elfs at silvermoon did the same thing. and theese where all of the troll tribes, including amani and zandalari.
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Oh come on, give us some credit for King Mechagon that wanted to create nuclear armageddon, killing all non-mechanicals! Yeah, he failed, but he had the best of the worst of intentions! 
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I lean toward this. The notion of collective guilt, even in a fictional setting, is a logical fallacy.
Collective guilt, sure. But if we’re talking inborne traits, there is no reason why one race couldn’t, on average, be more evil than another. If their traits differ at all, it should actually be quite likely that they do. If Forsaken are a race that has problems feeling anything positive, and are suffused by magics that focus them on their hate and self-pity, for example, I think it’s quite logical that they , as a race, would be more evil than more balanced races. And judging the race does not preclude one from judging the individual independently as well.
But trying to make the races morally the same either requires making their character traits closer to the same, or dropping moral objecitvity, making the relative judgement pretty much irrelevant. I think Blizzard did a bit of both here, and I’m not exactly happy with either. I think having different racial characters is part of the charme of using fantasy races, and moral relativism seldom feels inspiring.
Nothing more evil than humans. If the game wasn’t so biased for the alliance they Stormwind would be burning by now.
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Eh I disagree with the Trolls. It is said about playable races and the Trolls we get to play are Zandalari and Islandtrolls.
I agree on first place with the forsaken. Their undead nature makes them mostly evil.
On place two I would point the void elves. They willingly infused them with a destroying power that makes them crazy and additionally they want to commit genocide on their people just because they choose the side that helped them.
On place three I agree with the goblins as we play the Goblins from the Bilgewatercartell that screw off others for profit and are only worse by the Venture goblins.
Forsaken are the defacto evil race, as a whole they’re quite happy to commit attrocities or act in ways that most sane people simply can’t justify. The average forsaken shrugs at war crimes, they have complete lack of morals, feel very little and have a seething hatred for the living.
Trolls while not as bad as the forsaken I think are evil because their culture condones and celebrates ritualistic sacrifice, cannibalism, racial supremacism, worship of questionable entites, questionable practices that revolve around inflicting pain on others and they were fine with slavery until it was later retconned because of modern politics. Honestly some of the original RPG lore for trolls makes them very hardcore I particularly remember the more political parts of the original community getting bent out of shape over their gender dynamics which I’m assuming is why they’ve been memory holed/scrubbed from wowpedia.
The Darkspear, the kindest of the tribes they only gave up practicing cannibalism because Thrall pressured them too, it was hinted they practice it privately but that’s likely been retconned. They’ve been softened since their original introduction in vanilla but as a whole trolls are one of the most vicious, cruel and utterly barbarous races WoW has to offer.
The dark Iron dwarves are the closest thing WoW has to chaos dwarves so that mostly means being evil for the sake of evil, slavery, war crimes, imperialism, racial supremacism, worshipping Ragnaros etc and while they’ve made reforms since their original introduction as totally evil faction they are still morally questionable. Just take a glance around Shadowforge City.
There are certainly other races with negative traits but I think that the rest of them sit in a grey area, whether thats goblins or the void elves.
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For some people it seems too hard to let a topic die one day before it is closing.
Orcs from horde, definitely. The amount of damage orcs did to azeroth with their invasion is immeasurable, and they never apologized or felt sorry about it.
From the alliance, I would say dark irons for working for nefarian.