Twenty-six races, and not one of them shares a phone book
Every other generator on the internet has decided that a name is a name. Type in a word, get a word, off you go. The bloody dice has looked at twenty-six sets of naming conventions and learned ALL of them, which nobody asked for and nobody has thanked me for, and I am going to tell you about it anyway.
Human names are medieval-European with sturdy real-word surnames. Dwarf names sound like a rockslide learning Scots. Night elf names flow, with surnames assembled out of dusk and leaf. Gnome names arrive pre-built from what is very obviously a parts catalogue. Across the fence it changes completely: orc names are one growl long with a surname earned in violence, troll names roll and carry a lore-proper apostrophe, tauren names move like weather over the plains, and Forsaken names read like a Victorian obituary that got back up and had OPINIONS about it.
Allied races inherit their parent's phonetics and then bend them. That is a real rule in the lore and it is a real rule in here, which means a Void Elf sounds like a night elf who has been somewhere upsetting. I find that detail quietly perfect and I will not be discussing why.
What the axes actually do to you
Faction and race set the sound. Add a class and the surname leans in. Pick a specialisation, a reputation or a profession and the titles turn PERSONAL — a Beast Mastery hunter risks Owner of Too Many Pets, a Bloodsail grinder courts Dread Pirate of the South Seas, and an engineer must simply live with Survivor of Own Inventions.
The important part is the hierarchy. The deeper the option, the harder it bends the result: picking a profession seasons your name, it does not take it hostage. Getting that gradient right took an EMBARRASSING amount of work, most of it mine, and the reward has been total silence.
Then there is the die. Six tones round a hexagon, and you drag the handle rather than picking from a list, because tone was never a list — serious and silly and crude are three different directions and the old five buttons could not say so. Sit halfway between two and you get halfway between two: blended phonetics, blended titles, the lot. Slide toward the bottom and things get grubby. Slide all the way and I stop being witty; there is a painted red line on the die and a door with a warning on it, and you will have to open that door yourself.
Claiming the name in-game, where I am obliged to stop being fun
This is the part where I put my hands up and simply read out the rules, because getting it wrong costs you the name at the worst possible moment — the character creation screen, with everyone else ALREADY LOGGED IN and saying so.
WoW's name field takes a single name: letters only, twelve characters maximum, no apostrophes, no spaces. Names are unique per realm. So the first name is the only part you actually claim in the character creator.
Right. Back to me. Anything over the cap is still shown to you, with its length attached, rather than quietly binned — a generator that hides names it has privately decided are too long is making your decision on your behalf, and I have STRONG FEELINGS about generators that do that. Troll names appear twice, in the lore-proper form with the apostrophe and again in the claimable one without, because the apostrophe is beautiful and Blizzard does not care. Surnames and titles are for roleplay profiles, guild rosters and forum signatures — which is where the good material lives anyway, so this is less a limitation than a redirection. I am being extremely gracious about it and nobody has noticed.
The material is genuinely better than I am
Four hundred and forty-five titles, and I did not write the best ones. The machine did. Taunts Things That Weren't Coming. Beacon Placed on the Wrong Person. Has Never Read a Tooltip. Professional Standing Still. Emotionally Room-Temperature. Owner of Nine Hundred Grey Items — that one is about you, and you know it is about you.
I would like to claim them. I cannot. They came out of the pools I built, which is the closest thing to credit I am going to get, and honestly it is enough. Roll it a few times. The right one is usually two batches away.