All the wow classes pull from the warcraft games and as I already mentioned from the very post you quoted me from, they already took the Necromancer theme and abilities from WC3 and incorporated them into Death Knight.
Obviously the Hero Classes in WC3 are the deafult points of origin they can pull from to create a fully fledged out class that can stand on its own right without becoming a meme or gimmick.
Wrath = Death Knight = WC3 Hero
MoP = Panderian Brewmaster = WC3 Hero
Legion = Demon Hunter = WC3 Hero
Dragonflight = The dragon aspects powers playable as a humanoid form which has some connection with Warcraft games but mainly built around the fleshed out lore in WoW.
Necromancers were just consumed by more broader design space classes. To actually build out a class with at least 2 specs around a Necromancer theme meaning it needs a core set of abilities and a class talent tree and spec trees and Hero Path trees but still stays within its own design space without crossover into Warlock and Death Knight territory is just increasingly difficult if not impossible as again… To avoid becoming a meme or gimmick.
The phrase the juice isn’t worth the squeeze comes to mind. With the amount of effort put into it, you will sorely get very little out of it to the point where it most likely can’t go beyond bare bones concept if even that is achievable.
Affliction is still a warlock and it’s theme is still centered around demons.
Shadow is still a priest and it’s theme is still around manipulation of health via leech. Then they also deal with spirits or ghosts as they have ties to the angelic afterlife / spirit healer.
The gameplay is similar sure when you base it on the damage over time concept but that isn’t a theme, that’s a gameplay aspect that can and has changed over the years (Dotless spec in WoD for example).
The only similarity that really is noticable is that they both heavily deal with Shadow Magic. But that’s more of a magic school and less tired to the source of magic as it’s still destruction magic for warlock and Shadow or some say Void magic for Shadow. So from a lore perspective, they are from different cosmic aspects of magic.
So you have enough difference between them that simply does not exist between Death Knight and Necromancer.
The more apt example would be Paladin and Priest as they are essentially the melee and caster version of Holy. But if you’ve played priest with any amount of relevant time, you can clearly see that Paladin sucks up all the light from the room (pun intended) when it comes to design space leaving priest lost for multiple expansions and then Priest struggle in 2 additional ways with Holy and Shadow being diametrically opposing forces so it makes shared abilities a problem as well as a good class tree that all specs can make good use of as currently you have very little options as Holy/Discipline vs Shadow.
Then the issue also becomes apparent when you look at Holy and Discipline as they are both Ranged Holy Healer specs and so to make them both unique enough while still being useful and competitive with each other has been an ongoing challenge for multiple years.
In fact, Discipline was supposed to be like a crusader type spec way back in like Vanilla Alpha and had some lingering design choices left in at the begining of Vanilla that allows you to take less damage and deal more physical damage and Mind Blast for the longest time dealt extra threat for the purposes of aggro control for when you tank. They obviously scrapped that early but the point remains, lots of directionless aspects surrounding the Priest class and I attribute a lot of that with the existence of the Paladin class as that seems to receive a clear concentrated focus on the direction they want that to go in and how each spec is unique from the others in what they do and how they do it.
You basically undercut your own point by including Evokers here. Ultimately, Evokers DO NOT pull from WC3 and have been built entirely around WoW Lore & Mechanics.
Necromancers, notably, have seen a MASSIVE expansion in terms of themes, abilities and Mechanics since WoW launched. They’ve recieved the benefits of TWO expansions focused PURELY on Death, the theme of Death featuring VERY PROMINENTLY in TWO MORE expansions & Death magic in general appearing in some form in nearly every other expansion.
But thank you for outing yourself as a Tinker Guy here, because that’s who uses the Warcraft III Hero argument. Glad we cleared that up. You’re plugging your ears to every point I’m raising, every argument of yours I’m deconstructing and every example of something unique a Necromancer could do because you’d rather play Tinker.
Your right, it started back in WC2 with the orcs taking control of the red dragons and using them for flight combat.
They didn’t have a Hero in WC3 around dragons, but the dragons still exist and were NOT represented as anything remotely available within wow classes.
So yea, the Dragon theme is a slight offshoot from the pattern, but it also didn’t have a similar theme already incorporated as an existing class which is not the case with Necromancers with the connections mainly attributed to Death Knights.
They actually are both using the same source of magic. It’s been established since at least MoP when the Council of the Black Harvest talks about learning new spells and how they learned things from the Twilight’s Hammer cultists. They’ve summoned Voidwalkers since Vanilla which are not actually demons, but void creatures.
Legion class preview specifically mentions the void:
Also, I don’t think the Dragon Unit in WCII has any bearing on Evokers. This is a laughably stupid argument.
Two words: “Demon Hunter”
Again, this reasoning falls apart when you consider Demon Hunters. You’re not actually engaging in good faith discussion here. You’re just trying to cobble together a set of irrelevant “rules” based off from precedent (rules that have already been broken), which will presumably allow you to declare “Necromancers will NEVER EVER HAPPEN!”
Right… I mentioned this, Void / Shadow it’s basically interchangeable.
But Warlocks don’t use that Magic, they are Fel / Disorder or the word I used “Destruction” as that is opposite as “Creation” which is what Arcane or Order would be considered which is the opposite of Fel / Disorder.
Demon Hunters use Fel Magic and Shadow Magic. But that Shadow Magic is not Void magic, they are still that chaotic magic that resides from the Fel / Disorder cosmic spectrum.
Unholy Death Knights use Shadow magic but that’s from the Death / Decay cosmic spectrum.
So just because a spell is classified as Shadow in its “School” doesn’t mean they reside from the same source.
Except now it’s yet another spec that has to fit in the already super crowded space we already live in and is yet another impossible to balance variable in the grand scheme mucking things up…and for what? To play a demo warlock with undead minions instead of demons? It has to be it’s own damn class after all because it isn’t like they’re just going to tack it onto DKs or else…whoops…how we gonna make it a cloth class like it “properly would be cause duh necromancers”…to this day, no class uses 2 different armor types.
The truth which nobody has yet to competently refute is unholy DK IS the necromancer. It literally has all the various necromancer spells and uses the same magic…and good gods holy hell it can do “most” of the actual unholy stuff from farther than melee range…in fact I think the only actual unholy ability it uses that still takes true melee range is the strike to put the pustules on the enemy. It can run clawing shadow to pop them which is 30 yard range and everything from pestilence, death and decay, powering up timmy, and death coils ALL have “caster” range.
And it already STILL has to fight with ret, fury, arms, and even frost for plate melee DPS specs.
Like I said, give warlocks a super master glyph turning all demons into comparable undead and rename the spells and it’s literally a “necromancer” as demo…or the actual necromancer DK in unholy.
Warlocks peer into the Void without hesitation, leveraging the chaos they glimpse within to devastating ends in battle—their greatest abilities are fueled by the souls they’ve harvested from their victims. They exploit powerful Shadow magic to manipulate and degrade the minds and bodies of their enemies. They employ Fire magic, dropping hellish rain from the sky, to immolate the opposition. They summon and command indomitable demons from the Twisting Nether to do their bidding, or even to be sacrificed as the Warlock sees fit, empowering and protecting the dark caster from harm.
The look into the Void and use chaos magic to control it.
They don’t use Void magic.
Just like how that Narru Xera thing tried to use Holy Magic to forcibly control Illidan.
how do you make a necromancer into a hero? into something heroic? death knights and demon hunters are the antiheros of wow (and to a lesser degree maybe rogue and warlock)
This has been refuted 10x over, you’re just being deliberately obtuse.
My point is that the WoW Demon Hunter class completely debunks the nonsense quoted here
Which is why I quoted this part specifically?
You can’t just performatively type “Erm, WOT U ON ABOUT?!” to pretend you’re talking to some unreasonable person who is prone to irrelevant rambling. People can go back and read the conversation!
At the end of the day, you are trying to construct an arbitrary set of rules to determine what “can” and “cannot” be a New Class. The Warcraft III Hero Argument was LITERALLY used by posters in this thread to “disqualify” Demon Hunters.
You were talking about WCIII Hero Abilities earlier, look at which ones the Demon Hunter had!
Mana Burn-Priest
Immolation Aura-Warlock
Evasion-Rogue
Metamorphosis-Warlock.
The ENTIRE Demon Hunter toolkit was split between existing classes prior to their addition to the game. People like you (including some of those in this very thread) said this guaranteed we would not get Demon Hunters. We did ANYWAY.
Creating these rule sets are ridiculous. Clearly Blizzard felt like the Demon Hunter fantasy wasn’t being delivered by Warlocks (or Rogues, or Monks), so they decided to add them. The Necromancer Fantasy, and its broad range of themes IS NOT and CAN NOT be covered by Unholy Death Knights.
They’ve already done this with Warlocks, what do you mean? “Dark Casters who utilize black magic to defend Azeroth while struggling to resist the corruption inherent to what they practice.”
Warlocks have Immolate. NOT Immolation Aura. They casted Immolate on a target. Immolation Aura was only used on and by the Demon Hunter.
Metamorphosis was added to Warlock yes… But it was originally the Demon Hunter concept and toolkit as seen in WC3.
As I said, look at the Dread Lord and Pit Lord Heros in WC3 if you want the majority of Warlock reference material.
Blizzard simply wanted to make something cool for 1 spec of Warlocks in giving them Metamorphosis but then they clawed it back going into legion because wait for it… It would be weird having a shared design space for 2 classes. So since Demon Hunter has it first, it made sense to take it away from Warlocks in order to preserve the uniqueness that the classes bring.
As I always play as a frost knight I don’t care if we get a “necromancer” but I believe it will be an affliction spec of warlocks while summoning a corpse instead of demons.
Perhaps what we are lacking in the game is spell custumization, for example my anti-magic spell is blue usually it is green.
most cultures and societies do not look well upon defiling the dead (which is why dks are generally reviled and sure you’ll say but dks do the same thing!) but the main difference is that death knights did not sign up for being, well, a death knight. a necromancer would have had to go out of their way to learn and perform these things