There are a lot of rumblings that Tinkers are going to be the next class. For years, I’d been banking on Sea Witches being added to the game, because they could wear mail armor, be healers, and use ranged weapons—all things that would fill in gaps that the current class roster has.
Of course, Tinkers also fill those gaps in, and don’t require some weird lore to get servants of Azshara to defect to the Horde and Alliance, and more people are asking for Tinkers than are for Sea Witches, so Tinkers make more sense. About the only thing Sea Witches have on Tinkers is that Sea Witches could be casters as well as ranged damage-dealers, and we haven’t had a caster added to the game since 2004!
Anyhow, one of the rumors is that Tinkers will have a tanking spec, and for that spec, I have a suggestion for a distance-closing ability that’ll work wonders in PvE:
Tractor Beam:
Instant
45 second cooldown
For the next 7 seconds, enemies in a cone in front of you within 30 yards are drawn toward you at walking speed.
This is intended to be something like the wind-effects that some bosses have: it’s not a knockback effect and won’t interrupt casting, and while enemies are being drawn in, their feet won’t animate as if they’re walking. To the best of my knowledge, no player has a wind-like ability in their toolkits, nor have they ever in the game’s history. So this Tractor Beam ability would help add flavor to tinkers and differentiate them from other classes.
I chose a cone for the shape for a few reasons: first of all, this would let Tinker tanks draw in multiple casters. Secondly, the tractor beam graphical effects in the Star Trek the Next Generation era were all animated as cone-shaped blue beams that glowed a bit randomly and reminded me of how it looks when sunlight goes through water. Since those beams were cone-shaped, I figure it’d be appropriate to have a cone-shaped Tractor Beam for Tinkers.
…I’d be kidding no one if I pretended that my main reason for proposing this wasn’t to prevent a repeat of the times when Blizzard stole ideas people were posting for Paladins, only to give them to the new class du jour: I’m 95% sure that Death Grip was a proposal from the paladin community for a distance-closer for retribution while WotLK was in development, and I know that I and at least one other player proposed an ability while MoP was in development that had the target and the caster meeting in the middle as a distance-closer for Paladins. Blizzard liked that idea so much that they gave it to Brewmaster monks as their Clash ability. I have an idea for a distance-closer for paladins that I’ll share in some other thread, and I don’t want it stolen for use by Tinkers, this time!
Anyhow…enough about history, though—back to Tinkers:
Another thing that would help differentiate Tinkers from other classes would be the graphics of their abilities. Few effects in the game have straight-line beams in them—almost all channeled abilities in the game have some waving, zigging, or zagging going in their graphics, and the only exceptions I can think of are Holy Prism and maybe a channel the player does in a cutscene in Uldum. With that context in mind, I think a ray gun ability (or maybe even a few different ray gun abilities) would be fitting for Tinkers. And since Arcane is a somewhat-underutilized school, here’s one example I’d like to propose:
Arcane Ray:
Instant
15 second cooldown
Deals Arcane damage to an enemy equal to 120% of your attack power.
It’s intended to be an ability that’s high on your priority queue, but its cooldown limits how often you can cast it.
Another possible ray-gun ability is meant to be the opposite of the Tractor Beam—not just in that it’s single-target, either:
Repulsor Ray:
Channeled for 3 seconds
15 second cooldown
Pushes the target away at 150% of run speed for 3 seconds.
My first thought was that Tinkers should also have a freeze ray—that’s kind of obvious. But then I realized that a ray that pushes enemies away also serves to control their movement and gets them out of melee. I.e.: it performs most of the same functions that a root or slow could perform, so maybe-maybe Tinkers could have this instead of a freeze-ray ability. Maybe…
…I should probably stop typing here. This post is long enough as it is!