I was playing my warlock and thinking, boy casting sure is boring (to me), wish I could have a way to actually be in the fight instead of being in the background relying on my minions.
I wish mages and warlocks had a spec that allowed them to enchant themselves or their weapons so they could be fit for some close quarter fights.
This idea is mostly based on the battle mage class from d&d and that one scene from the warcraft movie where guldan uses fel magic to buff himself up when fighting durotan.
And Death Knights are battle mages. That’s how it’d look.
This thread reminds me of the push for Locks to get a Tank spec when they got their Demon Form. Would’ve been awesome, but it was given to DH instead.
It’s going to come down to how it’s implemented, in D&D the separation of armored melee character and spellcaster is for balance reasons, I mean when you really get down to the numbers, those eldrich knight kind of character are not very good.
What exactly do you have in mind for specs? Would it have any unique mechanic?
I kind of had the idea of like them enchanting their weapons with some sort of magic. so it’d be similar to how shamans can enhance their weapons with elemental dmg stuff I guess.
In 3.5 theres the spellsword, a martial/spellcaster class where you channel your spell in to your weapon.
So I am thinking, for Wow, this class only have spells with cast time, but you can charge a spell in to your weapon that makes it instant cast on hit? or maybe have additional effect?
I haven’t had a look at prestige classes for 5e, the problem with hybrid classes comes down to stat distribution, you need STR to hit, and you need INT for spell slots and saves, and you have to decide if you want to cast 9th level spells.
What you end up with is a class that has lower chances to hit, lower spell slots, and get good spells much later than everyone else.
fwiw Gishes are good in the way that matters in tabletop: they provide flexibility in a world that does not always purely revolve around combat. You’re not the best combatant but you can devote your magical talents to literally anything else.
Also the 2e mage list and the 3e bard list came with a ton of illusion self-defense spells that made them underrated arcane tanks.
They don’t exist anymore. Eldritch Knight is an archetype for fighter.
Spell slots aren’t affected by int in 5e and generally melee casters take spells that use their melee stat and support spells that don’t require spell rolls.
They might as well turn Demonology into a tank spec. It’d honestly be kinda cool. They have tank pets. They could do like puppet type actions to control them and then any damage the lock does automatically transfers threat to the pet. Health pools are shared and whatnot.
There’s really no reason at this point not to have every class have at least two roles bound to it. Survival Hunter (Or Beast Master) could become a tank. It’s weird and whatnot but we really need to make the game more accessible to all classes.
Gonna be honest here, there is allot of things and themes arcane as a magic school can do to warrant battle mages being able to be it’s own class. Also they could be mail users which the game needs more of
Adding new tank specs doesn’t really change the number of tanks. For example when demon hunter released the percentage of people playing tanks didn’t really change.
People who want to tank are tanking and any new tank specs will be played by people who already want to tank.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind a tank that focused on time and space typist magic to avoid or soak damage, they could also take some stuff from wc3 spellbreakers too.
That’s not the point. The point is to swap to an accessibility role on your character.
DPS queues are long, Mythic+ is not always easy to get into. You can swap to an accessibility role to work on boosting your ilvl, then continue on doing whatever you were doing before.
There’s really no reason for us to have pure DPS classes anymore. At least in my personal opinion.
