If so, what do you think it will be?
IMO, these are the two main contenders:
Tinker:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2373583-Tinker-Class-Concept- 2018-(long)
Dragonborne:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2615474-Dragonborne-Class-Concept-2022
I hope not. Blizzard can’t even handle the classes they already have.
How about instead of a new class, they work on everyone’s talent trees, instead. Half the talents in the game are garbage that nobody ever takes; let’s get that cleaned up.
The reason they won’t do that is because new classes are entirely driven by marketing considerations. Same reason that all the new classes to date have been melee: It’s easier to create ads and marketing materials with somebody swinging a weapon around in melee with their enemies.
Guess there’s no stopping the absolute train wreck that is class & spec balancing.
It’s not even about balancing in my book, they can’t even get class development done. There’s no reason to add another class considering the appalling state of many specs in the game right now just from a gameplay perspective. (Not to mention half the talents being useless.)
All too true. Specs are a mess overall. Many talents are useless or pointless. They need to revamp Talents and marry it with the old talent system while still retaining the new feel.
Allow us to have other spec talents with our current spec if they suit our needs. I believe they can make it work in a far more interesting way then our current iteration on talents.
Sure they can. They just… can’t balance between M+ and Raids. It’s not something they had to do before the last few expansions. Classes are still balanced for raid, more or less. Then M+ comes in and there’s huge discrepancies because this was never a game made for 30 minutes of nonstop AoE.
Not talking about balance.
Talking about class design.
The can add new classes and clean up the talents.
It isn’t like this is an “either or” situation.
No they can’t.
Uh yes they can. They did a complete talent rework in MoP AND they added a new class. In Legion they did a talent and spec overhaul AND added a new class.
Again, this isn’t an “either or” situation. We definitely shouldn’t wave away content because we believe that Blizzard is incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Which is when they shifted to a system where half the talents are worthless.
They promised, when they abandoned the talent trees for the MoP talent system, that every row would offer interesting choices.
They lied.
That was 10 years ago and we’re STILL waiting for them to actually finish development on the MoP talent system. Something that was added to the game in an incomplete and half-baked state and has never been fixed.
Let’s get that done before we add another class to the game for everyone to level up and then have sit on the shelf collecting dust.
We don’t need any more classes.
That’s just a dream at this point. They are happy with it since after a decade nothing has really improved.
Adding a new Class will at least give the game some freshness.
No, they attempted a new system and it underperformed. That isn’t a lie, that’s a work in progress. The new system that came out of MoP was better than the old school talent system.
However that misses the point; The point is that Blizzard can bring us new classes and improve current classes. This is demonstrated by the fact that expansions that bring in new classes are regarded as the best expansions.
That assumes the new class was particularly relevant to the expansion being better. It f you took DKs out of Wrath and Monks out of MoP, but left everything else the same, they’d still be considered good by most people who think they’re good now.
Absolutely agree.
IMO they should:
It might be “boring”, but if a new class/spec is necessary to distract the masses and keep them happy, the expansion has big problems elsewhere that need solving, and I think the value of every spec eventually reaching the point of being at least decent and viable in competitive context outweighs the value brought by a new class, especially in the long term.
We don’t know that though, because it is highly possible that the new class forced the devs to overhaul systems to accommodate it.
What we do know is that expansions that have lacked a new class are never more balanced or of higher quality than the expansions that bring in a new class.
I think you know pretty well that they will never put the level of work in that some classes deserve just because they didn’t add one in an expansion.
Class design in legion was actually pretty decent and it’s just been degrading ever since.
I would argue that we definitely need a tech-based class, because we have multiple sci-fi based races who feel out of place without a corresponding class.
Almost without fail though, new classes have a period of 1-2 expansions where they’re objectively overpowered and kind of take the spotlight. If they can introduce a new class without that, the idea might be worth more consideration but I don’t have much faith that they’d do that.