Lore
-Worgen is not a race, it’s a curse that has affected both night elfs and humans and can presumably affect other races as well. Why would a Human with a Curse be a distinct playable race? It isn’t, they’re just humans with different origin stories. So, effectively, Worgen isn’t even really the race, the player character is a Human with a special feature called “furry mode”. Unfortunately, furry mode is race locked to these humans so if you wanted to explore that with a different race too bad.
-Being a Worgen has literally no bearing on how your character plays because you’re still going to pick a class. So forget about actually doing any cool werewolf things like clawing or biting stuff. I mean seriously, why would a Worgen ever need a class? A Worgen is a massive beast with teeth, claws, etc comparable to that of a Druid in bear or cat form, but they say forget that and pick up a gun? Is that really the character fantasy any players want to pursue? Basically the player thinks “wow it’d be so cool to play as a werewolf! I’ll spec rabies and…” and Blizzard says no stop fun detected laser beams activate… here you’re going to be a stupid furry with a top hat and a gun.
Gameplay
-Worgen was a perfect opportunity to introduce a second shapeshifting class to the game. Instead of a healing, tanking hybrid like the Druid, the Worgen could have been maybe a pure dps assassin or perhaps tank/dps. It would have been a great alternative to the Druid for people who wanted a shapeshifter, but were looking more for the “upright werewolf” as opposed to the Druid basic animal transformations. This also could have been available to multiple races.
-Worgen as a class practically designs itself. You could either make it a pure assassin with stealth and three distinct DPS specs like the Rogue. Or a two dps, one tank spec sort of situation. The game REALLY needs, not only a different take on shapeshifting like I mentioned before, but also another take on how an assassin could work. Worgen was an opportunity to maybe try making an assassin that isn’t based around combo points like the Rogue or Feral Druid. Maybe the Worgen as an assassin uses simple focus like a Hunter instead. Let’s face it, combo points aren’t for everyone and some people want to play an assassin without them, and have been asking for that for ages.
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Idk if you played heroes of the storm, but Greymane kinda plays out as what you are describing. Every other wow character in the game kind of represent a specific specialisation, but Greymane is basically just Worgen (pretty unique).
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Or since it was a Druid thing it could have been a final talent for feral druids that makes them badass killing machines.
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Surprisingly yeah, hardly ever takes longer than 2 minutes to find a game on quick match or aram. Ranked games heavily depend on your rank (and timing).
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I like that idea, but I think the concept of the Worgen is substantial enough to justify way more. I mean from the dev standpoint it’s just too good. Talent abilities come and go, like the Tree of Life. Worgen has way more potential than that.
Worgen would have been absolutely fine as a race if they didn’t have Two Forms and they were willing to commit to ‘wolf-people’ instead of trying to halfass it by saying ‘oh but if you don’t like the wolf form you can stay human, see?’
Worgen are an example of what happens when you second-guess and compromise designs.
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If you want to get technical, Worgen should be a Spec for Druids if we’re really gonna argue about whether or not it should be a race or a class, since it’s a Druid based curse (which is why Worgens can be Druids).
Thanks, I’m glad you brought this up. This is another great example in the lore of how much better Worgen could have been. Even in WoW, Worgen characters are depicted as being fearsome beasts when they fight, just watch any Greymane cinematic.
Because those cursed humans can be various classes.
You may as well say the same stuff about Forsaken lol
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My only two issues with making the Worgen just be a talent point for Druids is, as I mentioned before, they have way too much potential to just be made into another “tree of life”, but also there are some lore reasons to keep Worgen away from Druid. I mean, a huge part of Worgen lore is how the Druids considered it a huge taboo and would never use pack form after the original curse backfired against them so hard.
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in that case, undead is not a race either.
Neither is Kul-Tiran. Might as well remove mechagnomes and lightforged too. Hell, all allied races minus Vulpera and maybe void elf?
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Or one step further. Complete a really hard quest line on any character and unlock a worgen spec.
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True, all of those allied races are not separate races. They should just be condensed, absolutely. Dark Irons are Dwarves, Kul’tiran are Humans, etc.
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I’ll never disagree they should’ve been unlocked customizations but it’s too late now.
Forsaken is an interesting point. I can and would say the same things about Forsaken. Like Worgen, they are not an actual race. All playable Forsaken in WoW were originally Humans who died and were then reanimated. So… Human is the race.
Blizzard has been inconsistent with how it’s handled undeath. When they decided that Forsaken would be it’s own separate race, they said to the player there, you can’t be a Dwarven Forsaken or Tauren Forsaken, that’s not a thing in the game. This is already a huge problem because, in universe, these races absolutely can be undead. Then later, of course, that option opens up in the form of the Death Knight. So now you can be an Undead Dwarf, but only as a Death Knight. What a mess. Now we have Dark Ranger elf customizations where undeath is literally just a cosmetic option for one race. The water only gets more muddy as the game develops.
Asking whether Forsaken should have ever been a race is also a totally valid question. The reason I don’t bring up Forsaken is because, unlike the Worgen, it works out decently well as a “race” option, and would absolutely never be a “class”.
Why does Forsaken work as a “race”?
They are cool enough, plain and simple, and them having a class doesn’t completely break immersion like it does with the Worgen. Although, I do think a better execution of the Forsaken as a race in Vanilla WoW would have been to give them the option to appear as the undead version of any other race in the game (think DK appearances), rather than just a basic human zombie.
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no one plays worgen because they look like cabbage, imo
put armor set on a worgen and don’t say cabbage, i dare u
I dont know if anyone elese mentioned it, but ESO handled it this way by making werewolves a specific sort of class effect on a character (also vampire). Both came through bites by characters “afflicted” and had benefits and disadvantages (vampires, for example, were extra vulnerable to fire). It was quite a thing for players to seek the bite to get the abilities, which were I believe activated when the player wished to, just don’t know the parameters.
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