That dragons exist and are willing/able to empower mortals is more than enough justification for introducing a class.
Now, as far as the dragonflights presenting as dull or boring in WCII, this doesn’t really matter considering that they’ve become much more fleshed out in the time between WCII and Shadowlands.
It isn’t dismissive to discuss something you’d like.
There are a plethora of conceptual classes which would make sense. Some of these already exist as recognizable classes (Necromancers, Tinkers, “Ranger”); some of them are merely conceivable based upon a smattering of similarly functioning skillsets found on various NPC’s (“Dragonsworn”, “Ranger”, “Spellblade”).
It is when your topic title is “or: Why Bards, Necromancers and Tinkers Don’t Work” and then come up with BS reasons and then present more BS reasons for why this non-existent class is more likely.
A class doesn’t have to be expansion-based, just needs a footnote to worm its way in.
Even Shadowlands would have worked with the sheer amount of musical instruments thrown around as rewards from treasure chests and rares and the focus on the bells in Bastion.
Obviously too late for that, and I’m not particularly fond of the idea of a bard in WoW anyway. Bard = Support, and WoW moved on from the idea of Support classes ages ago. I’d prefer them to just make playable instruments in place of an actual ‘Bard’ combat class.
Just as a Warlock is just a Mage, but Demonic, a Dragonsworn could just as easily be a Druid (/whatever else), but Draconic.
I fully admit that, outside of the dragons themselves, there aren’t readily available movesets. That’s pretty much the selling point for me - it’s a completely clean slate that the developers could do whatever they want to with, making a class for the modern WoW without the hangups of two decades of baggage other classes have.
You don’t see the movesets of Vengeance Demon Hunters, Blood Death Knights, Windwalker Monks, Frost Death Knights, or Mistweaver Monks anywhere. Each of those classes started with a kernel of inspiration that grew into a fully-fledged class. Everything else was “made up.”
Monk, particularly, is a funny one. We started with an artist that liked to hide panda doodles in his artwork. Then we got a reskinned furbolg neutral mob in WCIII. Then a full-fledged hero in WCIII:TFT. And that hero was the precedent for an entire race, class, and continent in an expansion dedicated to them.
I think the draconic lore has a bit more to it than Pandaren and Monks (which, again, were entirely invented for the expansion as Brewmasters were not titled Monks) did pre-implementation. Monks didn’t even have a single NPC to their name until the expansion hit. More than enough to work with for Dragonsworn.
And as has been mentioned, you don’t even need to go exclusively with the RPG’s Dragonsworn concept. We could just get playable dragons outright, with you choosing your “race” being choosing your humanoid form. (Now who gets to move the goalposts? )
And I don’t have a problem with the Dragonsworn as a concept (as I’ve said before). I just find it silly that you would claim that these other classes, which clearly exist in the game and can easily be done by pulling existing moves from NPCs and Blizzard basing new classes off of existing move sets from WC3 (either because they’re iconic or Blizzard is lazy) are less likely to happen than a class that pretty much has zero groundwork in any Warcraft game.
Uh make a freaking dragonsworn class with Aspects determining your spec and I will throw money at this game, however, I see a class balance issue cause nobody is going to want to be anything else…
It just be like everything that comes new, classes and races at first you see them everywhere then eventually things balance off…
Remember when Vulpera released, they where everywhere but that hype died out quickly, same with classes, they become the FOTM and are everywhere then things just balance out.
It was made quite clear that “Dragonsworn” is little more than a retronym adopted by the playerbase, a terminological catch-all whose purpose is to reference a hypothetical collection of similarly empowered beings – ergo, it’s going to be impossible to point to any NPC’s that are decidedly “Dragonsworn”.
(Just as it would’ve been impossible to point to any NPC’s that were decidedly “Monk”, prior to their introduction. A lack of existence, at the current moment, doesn’t at all affect plausibility – Void Elves come to mind.)
Even then, you’re not giving the concept enough credit.
The term was first applied to the WarCraft universe in 2008 through the tabletop RPG. Given how much Metzen contributed to these source books, the RPG was considered canon for a time - in fact, to a higher degree than WoW itself since it isn’t feasible to accurately portray everything in the universe in the MMO space.
It wasn’t until a few years later when a CM came along and said, essentially, “Consider it non-canon until canonized by the MMO. We like borrowing concepts from the RPG book, but we’re tired of people getting mad at us when we do anything that contradicts it.”
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