Im not calling for the race restrictions to be lifted (in this thread, anyway) but i cant help but look at the extreme race limitations on the Demon Hunter and think “they should never do something like this again.”
It feels like an insane waste of a class. I’m unsure how i feel about Evoker, since that is a weird case that appears to be largely armor related. (For some reason mail armor really messes Blizzard up.)
With demon hunter, though, it was given two two races. And i understand that the decision is lore based and, alright, you cant just erase lore during the expansion they come out.
But the long term limitations seems really bad. And i feel like the life that gets breathed into a race when they get a new tace is undervalued.
So the question is: do you want DH levels of race restrictions on future classes? Or no? And for the love of god, please tell us why. Zero people care about a “No. /10 chars” post.
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Nope. The race restriction is intrinsic to the class and makes it what it is.
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Right but do you want to see it on future classes?
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Honestly, making every race able to play every class when it makes no sense steps on the toes of the whole RPG aspect of the game that it was built upon.
Having classes unique to certain races is fine as it allows for better world building and uniqueness to those class options.
For DH it makes sense that they’re elf locked since elves are generally more agile than say Humans, Orcs or Dwarves in fantasy settings.
Other classes like Warrior or DK (Warrior raised from the dead) make more sense as classes that can be played by any race as they don’t focus on one unique trait that only set races would have inherently.
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We just saw it with Evokers and I’m perfectly content to never play a gecko.
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I dont want them to do it again, but it did fit within the story itself.
I dont want the story going forward to be based around a class you can only give 1 or 2 races.
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It just shows illidan is a racist
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Go gnome or go home! Gnome Demon Hunter!
And Gnome Worgen! Err Druid!
And my personal fav… Gnome Paladin!
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There is literally nothing inherent to elves that would make them the only candidates to be demon hunters. There is no lore reason for a hard restriction. The lore reason for a soft restriction, the fact demon hunters had to originally be trained by Illidan himself (or presumably one of his lieutenants) was already shaky because he wasn’t shown in BC to have a large contingent of Night Elf followers. They were kind of retconned in so Alliance could have a DH race.
The DH starting area story might be a little awkward with mechagnome DH’s, but no more awkward than Death Knights, who at their original release had a particular origin that no longer makes sense, for example, for Pandaren DK’s.
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Hero classes like Demon Hunter are made from very specific circumstances. It’s not like Paladin where anyone who’s capable of swinging a sword and praying can be trained to do both at the same time. It’s a fighting style invented by Illidan and requires a lot more than just training.
I can see it being updated to be added to some more races.
Orcs and Draenei were both already part of Illidan’s forces and it’s not unthinkable that some of them could have made the cut. Not as many as the elves of course, but some.
And Void Elves are just Blood Elves after The Incident™ so all it takes is saying a few Blood Elf Demon Hunters were there.
But I don’t imagine we’ll ever see Demon Hunters on every race like we have for Warlocks and eventually will for Paladins.
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“Restrictions are important for RPGs”
Hard disagree. It’s the complete opposite for me. This right here is really what all the ‘Open up all races/class combos’ arguments come down to.
And people on the restriction side really want to memory hole Blizzard saying they were opening up every combo, but that IS what happened.
Fortunately for you, they seem to have mostly given up on the idea. So you win by default.
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I would build a Tauren Demon Hunter in a heartbeat.
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Hearthstone has a worgen Demon Hunter 
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Open up all/all
But with much stronger racials that naturally push people to certain classic/race combos.
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I think they might expand DHs the next time demons and Fel become relevant.
Or Blizzard didn’t want to spend the time adding and fixing up DH animations for other races.
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Maybe it’s sour grapes talking but I feel like if you’ve designed a class that’s that inflexible with racial options, it should probably go back to the drawing board because it’s probably not a great idea to implement.
Demon hunter probably “gets away with it” because the options are both elves (not that the game really needed more of that population) but you can see how evoker’s suffering from it, even though its visage lore is obviously based around a technical limitation and not something intrinsic to the concept. Monk’s not really up there among the normal classes either, and would definitely be much worse off if they were limited to pandaren.
At what point do class concepts just get abandoned altogether before being created because the company doesn’t see enough value in it? Nobody’s really champing at the bit to play goblins and gnomes; that’s plainly going to affect the value of creating a Tinker class.
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I like the idea of Hero Classes being different and very specific compared to normal classes. Death Knights being tied to the Scourge and Arthas, Demon Hunters being tied to Illidans and Kael’thas, who weren’t particular fans of diversity. Monks aren’t a hero class but a new base archetype that wasn’t in vanilla, so it made sense to propagate them to every race and start them at level 1.
Evoker is just weird. No one roleplayed a “dracthyr” prior to DF. If someone called themselves an “evoker” prior to DF, it meant they were a special snowflake Mage who remembered the D&D term for direct damage spells. They wanted to be DRAGONS, like our buddies Chromie and Alex the Life Mommy. But they’re given all the prestige of Demon Hunters, which people wanted to be forever before Legion. Okay so I have a frontal cone AoE that has to be charged? What’s this from? Wildstar, the game that flopped massively and made NCsoft a joke? Why can’t I just be a chronomancer like my bronze buddies?
I’d say the warglaive restriction is the most bizarre one in regards to DH’s. You can wield them on many classes, but only DH can transmog them? That decision is still baffling to me, but I’d bet there are also defenders of this as well.
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