There’s no place like Stormwind: The new Human racial in The War Within

The Warbands announcement for World of Warcraft: The War Within was met with a ton of excitement from the community. The new system solves a lot of frustrations around resource and rep sharing that have been mitigated through various workarounds in the past. However, it seems that Warbands have also conflict with a long-standing in-game passive — the Human racial Diplomacy — to the point where the developers are pulling it out of the game in favor of a brand-new option, No Place Like Home. Let’s discuss this proposed change, which is, unfortunately, a bit anticlimactic.

Now, for those players on Team Red — the current Diplomacy Human racial passive grants a 10% increase in reputation gains. This has long been considered one of the best racial passive abilities in the game, second only to the Void Elf transmog discount. The devs shared the bad news about Diplomacy’s removal in their Warbands preview post:

The human racial Diplomacy is currently designed to grant a bonus 10% to reputation for players who choose that race. Unfortunately, with Warband reputations, this racial causes problems due its character-specific nature.

We don’t want players to feel compelled to play a specific character or race to earn Warband-level rewards more efficiently, so we will convert this race-specific bonus into something new. We’ll share more information on it at a later date.

Diplomacy’s proposed replacement was introduced to the alpha client approximately a week before it rolled over to the beta client. Per the development notes, No Place Like Home reduces your hearthstone’s cooldown by five minutes and grants a second charge. Admittedly, No Place Like Home takes you from one 30-minute Hearthstone cast to two 10-minute Hearthstone casts when paired with the Hasty Hearth guild. This could be useful for quick auction house runs during raids for things like new gear enchantments. It’s just not shatteringly cool in a world that contains portal-casting Mages and additional Hearthstone toys to Legion’s Dalaran.

This versatile race should have a wide range of possibilities available to it. Brainstorm for a few minutes on the existing in-game passives, and you can come up with some easy parallels. For example, new Diplomacy could grant additional cost reductions to vendors in Alliance cities, similar to the Goblin’s Best Deals Anywhere. Or Humans could have the Jack of All Trades passive to match their Kul Tiran brethren.

Conversely, Humans as a Warcraft Alliance race are, well, a touch boring (please don’t come for me). Do they really need a big, flashy replacement for Diplomacy? And yet, there would probably be riots (or at least, demands for free race changes) if the devs proposed something as simple as inverting the Undead’s Shadow Resistance into a Holy Resistance (useful for tackling a race devoted to a light-providing crystal in the next expansion) to replace Diplomacy.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether changing from Diplomacy to No Place Like Home is a win. I don’t currently have a Human character in my lineup, and I’m not racing to add one to take advantage of No Place Like Home. Now, if they got free transmog? Then we can talk.