It’s not a tinker patch, it’s a patch focused on goblin society, which has more than just tinkers in the same way that night elves aren’t all druids and priests. It wasn’t going to come bundled with a new class solely because of its themes.
I took psychic damage on initially reading about the idea of a class being released halfway into an expansion, especially with no hints towards it on the roadmap. A new class is a selling point for a whole expac and not a single patch, a mid-expac release would mean people wouldn’t have the prepatch to get their bearings with the class, and PvPers playing it for the first time would only have half a season to get its class-specific elite rewards, but when I pointed this all out, it fell on deaf ears.
I’ve seen at least one comparison between an 11.1.5 tinker release and Aug being added in 10.1.5, when learning a new spec is absolutely not the same as learning a new class and getting a new character to endgame, gear and all. Then it was all shot down less than two weeks after 11.1’s release, which gave me some smug self-satisfaction.
Oh yeah, they also have a bizarre belief in the possibility of tinkers in Midnight if they’re not in TLT. Imagine an expac about elven cultures and the Void, and the class that comes with it doesn’t share themes with either.
Yep. Every race can be engineers, Lightforged and earthen have built tinker-style mechs, but the class would absolutely need to be limited to four specific races, one of which is only included due to a need for faction parity and would need to have its culture shift in a specific direction that would make it no different from the other three.