my idea for a tinker class would be
dps- guns, turrets, lazers, bombs, flamethrowers, mines, etc.
tank- pilots a mech suit with a chainsword + gatling gun (a ranged tank)
heals- alchemist archetype, uses potions/healing goop, and has a healing beam device like the medic from tf2
Possible, yes.
Probable, no. Hell no.
A bard class would be fun and something completely different and when was the last time did either of those separately, let alone, together.
Tinkerer is pure DPS, just going by the characters in-game that have “tinkerer tendencies” for lack of a better term. That would be easy to put in game. It’s basically hunter (ranged physical DPS) with bombs rather than bullets/arrows. We could all come up with that class here in 30 minutes over pizza.
Bard is a little more difficult. I would love to see it – if we’re talking true support here – but the primary thing holding it back right now is the dungeon finder. We all know when you hit the button, there’s one tank, one healer and 3 DPS. Unless the Bard was able to stand alone as a DPS or healer, he can’t come to the party. And if he’s good enough to play the DPS or healer role, odds are that he’s going to be judged as such when it’s time to put together raid comps.
The other “fix” is to make dungeon groups six people, with a support class required. Now EVERYbody has to have a Bard. Think of what that does to queue times – especially if they play more difficult than DPS.
I’m afraid that if/when we get a Bard (and if the game keeps adding classes every other expansion, eventually, we’ll get 'em), then it’s just going to be another name for a hybrid class, say a healer and two DPS a la the Shaman class.
I don’t think so. In theory, there would be a dps and a healer spec. It would for all intensive purposes be “support.” However, if properly balanced, it would do… say 50% the dps of baseline pure dps and 50% of baseline dps as buffs. Dps meters should be able to parse this so that it’s proven a Bard dps pulls his weight. Seems fairly easy.
Healing can be done in the same way. The bard or tinker provides 50% direct “pure” healing as a normal pure healer, and 50% in buffs to the other party members. It would be a challenging class to make, but a fun and unique one.
Let me sing you the song of my people.
Not arguing. I wish we had utility classes but the next poster after you said it best. This game is about pew pew pew now
I would make a Female Undead Bard, to hear her sing in her pack-a-day smoker’s voice.
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Support doesn’t have to be its own role. In FFXIV, there is no support role. Bard is a DPS, but it does its damage mainly by increasing party damage output rather than its own: replenishing resource so party can continue to deal damage and healers can heal, increasing party critical rate, making enemies take more damage, increasing party defense, etc.
In this game though, a “supportive” class like a Bard would have to bring, like, a 100% damage buff to a fellow DPS to justify bringing them along to something like a raid or a M+ dungeon.
Support can be done in this game. Blizz would have to be creative. It can be done. That’s what they are paid the big bucks for.
Well, that’s just a matter of balance.
Say a DPS can bring another 100 points of damage, a Bard can bring 80 points of damage on its own and increase the other 4 people’s damage by 5 points each.
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I suppose. But then we’d get complaints about bards being underpowered in solo content.
Classes like bard and enchanter worked well in games like EverQuest but I question their traditional viability in a game like WoW.
Now instead if bards were heavy metal warriors who beat people up with an axe guitar while blasting them with sonic riffs then that’d be a different story. xD
That brings on the issue of group sizes and numbers though.
Yes it would technically be equal in your example of 5 people, although you have to take into account since the healer isn’t primarily doing damage their 5 damage is lost and thus the Bard is only really contributing to 95 damage.
Either the buffs would have to be dynamically split, they wouldn’t have a limit, or they would have a limit of affected players. Do the buffs also affect the Bard? Or other Bards?
If they didn’t have a limit, you would only ever take one and his value would increase exponentially based on the number of players in your group/raid.
If they had a limit you would take them based on the limit. Each affects 4 players? take a 16 man group, add 4 Bards. But what if the group wasn’t divisible? Say you had 15 players? Do you add 3 Bards and have 3 players miss the buffs? Or do you take 4 Bards and accept that one is not going to be 100% effective?
What happens if you drop the original group to 14? or 13? It begins to determine the number of “available” Bard spots.
Or is it dynamically split? Based on the number of people affected? If so do damage buffs get absorbed/shared by healers and tanks? Or are they intelligent to determine role?
Otherwise you have 9 people + 1 Bard for example which lets for the sake of it say splits a 100% damage increase buff. Does each player get 10%? Or do the tanks and healers get nothing whilst the Bard + 4-5 dps get 20-25% each?
With I assume the other buffs getting split in similar manner.
Or are they targeted with more limited durations allowing you to determine how you split them?
Edit: While I would love to see Bards (and would hands down reroll one), I think it would be quite a difficult process to create/balance them.
Totally agree with you on this. But it can be done. It needs creativity in game dev which… I’ll just leave it at that.
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Obviously, those were just imaginary numbers I used. I do not know exactly how balancing would work, but suffice it to say, they can make Bard pull its own weight in 5-man content and scale its buff down for larger party size. After all, with larger parties, it would make sense for each individual contribution to decrease compared to 5-man content.
As for solo content, it can be like a Healer where it’s possible to do but may take longer or there is a spec/talent for doing solo content where it will not have to buff others and just increase its own damage output.
Probably unlikely - they don’t really have many more avenues for classes, everything has been covered. Engineer class (Tinker - gnome/goblin) is probably the next logical step if they really want to stretch it out just because it would be unique and would be suitable for tanking/healing/dps. A class focused around Turrets that do damage, heal, or generate threat; Bombs; and creating devices/items - with either a ranged or melee weapon for filler.
At the end of the day another class could be fun and break up the monotony but they can’t even balance the classes and specs the game already has.
Now if they want to stop trying and undo some pruning so classes can have a greater level of choice and possible fun I say add whatever they want.
Sure I am on a Zandalari Paladin but at the end of the day it is my 4th or 5th Paladin with very similar gameplay. Nothing about my race really changes anything. Not even visually. Had they gone the path of character depth maybe we could have seen more diversity between players but instead we got to go E-SPORTS and worry about fairness and balance.
Not sure why I got to this but at the end of the day I can’t wait for a new class but I worry that it will just play like every other one. I mean if your a build and spend DPS I am sure you all feel similar just like most of the tanks do. They tried to make every class easy to approach and at the same time made a lot of the spec’s boring.
Hope their philosophy changes going forward. I mean numbers don’t lie. The game was more popular when they did things differently. This path is wrong.
Problem is a lot of the Bard class is already in game as Hunter, Shaman or Rogue stuff. The only thing left is the musical aspect. Not a lot there to expand into its own class.
I don’t care what it is as long as it can wear mail and use a ranged weapon. We don’t need another class on the Plate, or Leather wagon and we all know it will not be another cloth wearer.
On a side note I could go without a new class even if 9.0 is the correct time for one. I would rather they fix so much of what they ruined in our current classes and maybe take what is here to a more enjoyable play state. Wishful thinking I guess.
There is a bard NPC in Boralus, but obviously the NPC has no depth or substance. Blizzard could creatively come up with anything they want, but I do not believe a Bard will enter WoW any time in the near future as a playable class. My money is on a Tinker class.