Nothing to promise yet, but they want to work towards a place where race isn’t a limiting factor. But the timeline is something they’ll have to be flexible on. A lot of the classes have a lot of content and lore requirements like for Paladin and Warlock.
In 10.0 Rogues, Mages and Priests available for all races.
Sharing Talent Builds
They’ve talked a lot of about it, but don’t think it will be something that can be in for launch. They think it would be cool and want to see players work with it before making functionality that people don’t need or make things that people don’t care about. They don’t want people to constantly have to download the latest build.
Talent Gates
There will be 2 Talent Gates in the Talent Tree which will encourage players to go wide with talents and prevent players from rushing directly to the Capstone Trait. A lot of stuff will be in the tree so that players can choose to opt into them or not.
Covenant Abilties
Blizzard is still debating how covenant abilities will be handled in the 10.0 talent trees–some fit the class fantasy well and will be added, but they are evaluating on a case by case basis. Abomination Limb was directly mentioned.
Gladiator Mounts
Gladiator Mounts in Dragonflight will take the form of a prestigious customization that you can apply to your Dragon Isles drake.
Dracthyr
First Dracthyr has no restrictions other than purchasing Dracthyr. Future Dracthyr has to be on a realm where there is already a level 50 character and only one Dracthyr per realm.
I am wondering about Goblins and Worgen regarding the possibility of new class options. The next wave of new race/class combos currently avoids adding new classes to these two races.
I’m under the assumption that the Worgen and Goblin starting zones are still considered to be a huge problem in giving them new class options. I don’t think Blizzard wants to do race/class combos that require Exile’s Reach, so they’d probably either work on doing some minor updates to the Worgen and Goblin starting zones to allow for new class options or do special starting experiences for new class options for these two races.
It does sound like that they are working on a way to have some unique starting experiences for certain new race/class combos similar to the Allied Race Death Knights.
For instance, I can see new Paladin options being a thing that they do alongside a major story development and these new Paladin options getting their own unique starting experience to reflect that.
Listening to the interview, Holinka said that other classes (druids for forms, shamans for totems and paladin for racial mounts) are a goal, but they want to setup in game events to bring them in (also it takes time to make the other things unique to the classes) so they want to bring the other classes to the other races in a quality way.
I do think that challenges in implementation of certain race/class combos in certain starting zones still apply.
For instance, adding new classes for Worgen and Goblins in particular would mean either adding in new class trainer NPCs and even some new quests (which is probably a nightmare to do, which is one of the most likely reasons why they aren’t adding Worgen and Goblin Monks for now) or somehow not letting the new race/class combos for Worgen and Goblins to start in the Cataclysm era starting zones.
I do suspect that they might be planning to do special starting experiences for certain race/class combos because while they could theoretically just have Worgen and Goblin Monks start only in Exile’s Reach, Exile’s Reach is intended for new players and I don’t think the devs want to limit certain race/class combos to just the tutorial-driven starting zone.
There’s also stuff too like how it wouldn’t make sense for something like a Draenei Warlock to have the same starting experience as other Draenei for obvious reasons.
We’ll probably get some of these future waves of new race/class combos along with story developments and starting experiences for the new race/class combos that make sense from a story and game design perspective.
I think Worgen, Goblins, and possibly also Pandaren are some of the elephants in the room when it comes to adding new classes since adding new classes for them isn’t as simple as “Just plunk a new NPC in their starting zone” like it is for most other playable races.
