They can just be non-dracthyr Evokers, everything re-skinned and re-themed.
All the charge-up abilities and the breathing abilities and stuff can just be portrayed as sound, music notes, etc.
The specs could be Siren (Devastation), Conductor (Augmentation), and Harmony (Preservation).
I have low hopes for a cool new class design anymore from Blizzard. It took forever to get Evoker to where it is, Demon Hunters still only have two specs, it took like 2 years for Death Knights to have solid spec identity, and if they were going to make an attempt at Tinker they would’ve by now. It’s not that I don’t think they could come up with a good class that fits into the world if they wanted to, but I don’t think they want to.
Instead, just re-skin a class that exists already so evoker can thematically exist in the world without being the ugliest race in the game while also filling the void of one of the most popular fantasy RPG classes somehow still missing from this fantasy MMO.
Meanwhile, in FFXIV, which does have bards…they are basically just marksmanship hunters. Their “songs” are just buffs that work the same way the old hunter aspects did. You do have buffs you press in a rotation, but you’re mostly just a marksmanship hunter. Not saying it’s a bad job or anything, but is’s just DPS.
100% agree. Bards are storytellers. They hang around at the inn singing about the exploits of the heroes. Not out on the battlefield with them.
FFXIV can get away with silly, oddball jobs, because there really isn’t a lot of investment into them. You can learn every job on one character. There is zero consequence to playing around with a job and not liking it, you can swap right back. And they have every single other FF game to draw from to create new jobs, basically every single NPC.
I definitely think bards are planned for the future. I wasn’t sure for many years, but the moment they implemented Augmentation Evokers, I was convinced otherwise. I believe they didn’t necessarily want their first “support” spec to be bards, as they weren’t sure if it’d work within the holy trinity. So, they experimented with Augmentation Evokers as a testbed which they could convincingly scrap or rework if it didn’t succeed. Bards however are such a staple within the fantasy community that when they introduce them to WoW, you can’t just quietly delete it from the game.
Now it can be argued that Augmentation Evokers don’t work out, but I’d say they are solid enough to not feel dramatically game breaking. Now I’m thinking they’re confident enough one day introduce bards as a new class someday (like monk) maybe tied to some new region / culture we’ll meet that ties magic to music or something akin to it. It’s easy enough to introduce in a high fantasy world like WoW. I can already see a bard spec similar to Augmentation Evokers, that empowers heroes with the power of melody. Then of course there’d be an easy case to make for a healing spec, as you can say you soothe or heal wounds through the power of magical melody or whatever. I guess it all depends on the lore they come up with behind them, but I imagine it’ll be something tied to magic like mages.
