After several interviews in which key members of the WoW team talked about the game reaching a place where your choice of race doesn’t affect your choice of classes, I have waited patiently for combinations like night elf/gnome paladins to become a reality.
So I’m a bit frustrated to have seen recent comments in which one of the key Blizz people more or less shot down the possibility of that happening anytime soon. It actually baffles me that the game has torn down so much of the faction wall (arguably THE key tenet of this game), but continues to hold onto this archaic mindset that only certain races are worthy of certain classes.
To be clear I’m not talking about Evoker/Demon Hunter, those make sense as being restricted as they are. But it is insane that nearly twenty years into this game, the original classes are still locked away from most races.
And talking about these barriers going away, on multiple occasions over the last few years, only to walk it back is deeply unfair to people who have been waiting literally years for this to happen.
The excuse that it will take a ‘ton of work’ to create those animations for the other races isn’t true because the vast majority of them already have those animations in-game. I can run over an engineering toy as a human paladin, get changed into a gnome, and that gnome has all the proper casting animations for paladin spells. The only thing she’s missing is a gnome-esque paladin mount.
Druids need their unique forms, that I understand, but if you never start making them on account of ‘how much work’ it takes, it’ll never get done. It just feels like a copout and a constant game of giving us just enough to keep our hopes up until someone asks about it in an interview and suddenly it’s all ‘oh, it’s so much work, not happening any time soon’.
I’ve said this before and I say it again: your team is so fixated on new, shiny, new, shiny, that it doesn’t even occur to you that some of us simply want new ways to enjoy the old things we already love. And it sucks, plain and simple, to be strung along on whether or not we’ll ever see things like new classes for literally years at a time.
The vast majority of WoW’s classes are based on fantasy archetypes that existed long before this game (or Blizzard itself) did, so the gatekeeping and have/have-not stuff makes no sense at all.
For this and other reasons I’ve decided to unsub from the game, as I’m at the point where being a fan of WoW is more frustration than fun. But yeah, maybe stop getting people’s hopes up if there’s not any actual intention of following through on things like this.
Because some of us are sick and tired of it.
