Tinkerer to me is like asking for Necromancer. Yeah, ya could make it different, but that’s a lot of effort for something “skins” could provide. That’s a different topic but they should absolutely do skins.
My thought about this sort of thing is: If 50% of the spells/attacks/concepts are going to borrow from another class, just give a tree to that class.
New classes generally have three problems:
They apparently have to be thematically related to an expansion
The one time we’ve tried a non-hero class it went over poorly.
It’s feast or famine. They’re either way OP or underwhelming
Adding a new tree to an old class provides a built-in audience. It makes it a “Hero” class without starting at a high-level, because many people have a hunter leveled to max or close. And it can borrow elements without stealing the way Demon Hunter stole.
A Survival Hunter has bombs, traps, “radar,” and a utility-belt-like set of stuff. Just give that a ranged-option and call it “Tinkerer.” This seems like the best medium for everyone who wants that option and the usual problems associated with new classes.
It could also be an interesting play style to mess around with.
On pull you rip off a couple ranged attacks as you close distance then melee the mob once you get in range, when you have to run out of bad you can fire off a couple more ranged attacks, then jump back in.
This is so far away from what the Tinker Hero Unit actually does in WC3.
Firing Missiles, Tanking in a Mech Suit, Building Turrets and Pocket factories.
Just let Hunter be hunter.
Hunter is about Archery, Poison, Beasts, Nature, and Animal Aspects.
That’s awesome. Leave all that to Hunter, it’s their “Thing”
Make a seperate class that’s about Rockets, Missiles, Turrets, and Mechs. Thats Tinkers “Thing”
Tinkers are Thematically different from Every Class that’s currently in game.
Tinker would have made sense for a class at launch. It’s a “world-building” element. They opted for Engineering instead. Now, they’d need to theme an entire expansion around Goblins vs. Gnomes-esque shenanigans to justify the inclusion of the class, and I don’t think Blizzard is willing to do that. That stuff belongs on the sidelines as comic relief. Not the main course.
Yes, largely because 5 mech suits in the world isn’t game-breaking. Armies of Mechs is.
A rule of fantasy writing is, there still needs to be internal logic. If one spell can wipe out armies - then no one would make armies. If we had mechs everywhere why would warriors exist? They’d all just get into a mech.
We got an Army of Demon Hunters in Legion. The game is not ruined.
You Know Garrosh was a Warrior. He was a really big bad guy. But he didn’t use a Mech suit. Probably because he didn’t know how to Make or Pilot one dude.
He was a BETTER warrior than he was a Mech Suit Pilot.
HOWEVER In Garrosh’s company was a guy named Seigecrafter Blackfuse.
He wasn’t a warrior. He fought us in a Mech suit.
Different people can be good at different things.
In Fact:
Lets assume you want to play as a Shaman. Why wouldn’t you just use a mech suit?
PROBABLY BECAUSE YOU CAN SHOOT LIGHTNING OUT OF YOUR HANDS.
It’s a FANTASY UNIVERSE Not everyone needs to be in a Mech when you have Dwarves Shooting Lightning
How are “armies of mechs” any more gamebreaking than “armies of Warlocks, Demon Hunters or Death Knights”, which canonically are all extremely rare, extremely powerful classes.
In BC there were like a dozen full demon hunters because the training was so intense that maybe like 1 in 100 actually survived it, let alone passed it to Illidans satisfaction.
Tet overnight in Legion, we had thousands of them pop up like mushrooms.
In the DK intro, it’s shown that since you have to kill a bunch of other supplicants who are already a cut above the vast majority of undead, being a full Death Knight is basically the cream of the crop of the Scourge, and yet there are more DK’s than guys who learned how to stab people with daggers.
How would a Warrior win against someone who can melt your mind with void magic?
What hunter skin could make it look like you’re piloting a mech suit in combat?
So, the goblin tinker in WC3 jumped the shark all the way back in the early 2000s?
There would never be “armies of mechs” because they are incredibly costly to make and being able to operate one is not a widely-known skill.
It would be like if you said “magic is definitely more powerful than hitting things with a sharp sword, so why doesn’t everyone just learn how to be a mage???”
Mechs don’t break the lore as much as you think they do.
How quickly we forget that Varian Wrynn canonically 1v1d a fel reaver and won.
Have you… played this game? We’ve lived in a world with infinite ammo rapid fire cannons for expansions now.
Fire arms are reliable and plentiful - there’s no reason why any sort of “melee” class exists at this point. Hell, the Draenei have interdimensional flying space castles - why are we using bronze age weapons in a post-space age world?
Face it - internal Logic is so dead it’s at least seven afterlives past the Shadowlands at this point.