I’m going to be disappointed if Blizzard adds another class. I know why they’d do it: to excite people with something new to draw them back after failing as hard as they did with SL.
But the reasons they shouldn’t are both there aren’t very many niches left that make sense and don’t infringe on professions (engineering cough) or existing classes AND much more importantly they can’t balance the classes they have right now and haven’t been able to for years.
We often wildly swing back and forth in power and meta and it means certain player classes/specs are just flat out rejected from any current content groups of significant difficulty (mythic keystones or raids). It also means hamfisted changes to classes all too often that break the playstyle of those who enjoy playing them.
I’m sorry but Blizz has proven they can’t balance classes and they waste far too much development effort on tweaking them as it is that they could be spending on other things the game needs done. Piling more on that plate will only make the situation that much worse and will increase the number of unwanted class/spec combos that players are unable to enjoy meaningfully as anything but a casual (and often not even that with some of these nerfs, changes, etc).
There’s also tier class sets and the additional design work that would go into that each expac (and right off the situation of them cutting then bringing back tier sets and not I think because they just didn’t like class fantasy but probably as a way to cut down workload they struggled to handle) which would be an additional burden on devs who have enough on their plates and backlogs as it is.
Regarding the first point, without getting away from WoW’s medieval roots a bard class that uses musical attacks and has utility buffs based on some school of magic is about the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that even works without being too similar to others. And it would still be darn similar in theming to monks I feel, to the point I almost feel bard spec for monks would be the better solution. And even that would have drawbacks as they’d likely steal/replicate existing buffs from other classes which would mean less incentive to have people who play those around.
I honestly think short of a big infusion of people and money from Microsoft down the line they shouldn’t ever add another class. Focus on new races which are what people often want.
A class won’t infringe on a profession. Classes and professions perform completely different purposes and don’t compete with one another (because a player could be a Tinker class and roll into the engineering profession under the same toon).
Also the classes will never be balanced to the point where every player will be satisfied. People complain about balance in every expansion, and will continue to complain about balance until WoWs servers shut down. The idea that we shouldn’t get new content because of a subjective thing like “balance” is ridiculous.
In your opinion, but it is a class idea that comes from Blizzard.
Something along the lines of World of WarCraft: Dragon Tales would sound more general/encompassing (gives plenty of leg room for developers to take the story from many angles); which could tell the legends or lore of dragons as it pleases rather than through the particular eyes of Galakros. Plus it’s rather punny to hear Dragon Tales as the tail of a dragon…well I think you get it lol.
Plus, Dragon or Dragons are synonymous with high-fantasy which is what WoW is at its core.
Yeah, but that sounds really boring. Ashes of Galakaros sounds far more epic and interesting than Dragon Tales. I could imagine AoG having a huge image of Galakrond on the cover standing over a landscape with vegetation and volcanoes going off in the background.
“Dragon Tales” just doesn’t scream “WoW Expansion” to me.
It’s the last RTS hero from WC3 outside of the class lineup. It also just happens to fill in all the holes people want the next class to fill, so its inclusion is not surprising.
All the NPCs can speak to each other, and we can understand all of them; Blood Elf hearing Anduin and Jaina’s words, Night Elf hearing Sylvanas and Thrall.
So how are we, the players’ characters, so dense that we cannot yet understand each other?
I’d love to have to ‘learn’ the languages of the opposite Faction, and earn the Reps. I don’t want it to be easy; it shouldn’t be. (But not grindy, either!)
Actually Blizzard has done a pretty excellent job balancing the classes. The covenants on the other hand are terrible. The only thing I see regularly rejected are classes that could be ranged, but choose a melee spec instead. Adding another melee spec for any class is a bad idea, and it would be dumb of Blizzard to do this, in spite of some potential interesting ones with strong ties to Warcraft lore. Like battle mage/spellbreaker.
This is both a flaw with the inherent imbalance strength/weakness of being a melee and the sheer number of different melee options out there. Blizzard could do better here. Especially in M+.
Really this is already a thing. Gnomes and mechagnomes that are not engineers for example. When WoW hit originally I found it odd for gnomes to be mages actually. Why would a gnome want to learn how to build machines when they can learn to do whatever that machine does with magic?
This was how Blizzard used to do borrowed power. They should have stuck to it. It is something that if they botch it too badly, it only affects 1 teir, 2 if it is botched too badly. (Rogue firelands tier comes to mind, and even then it was a very slight advantage)
Not sure where they get more people from Microsoft. Blizzard was a bigger name than they were in the game industry before Xbox. Even now, everyone who is a gamer knows of World of Warcraft. Even if they don’t play it.
So are monks. I always found brewmaster to be the most absurd of the warcraft 3 heroes. Here we are though. The thing about Warcraft, is part of its charm is a silly meme here and there. That has always been a thing. “Me not that kind of orc.” Click a sheep one too many times. Everything about goblins.
I agree with Rakxil, I say give it until the 17th if anything relating to the leak does happen whether it’s through datamining “similar to BFA & Shadowlands”, or a Panel just appears, otherwise the only thing that’s happening on the 18th are the two tournaments.
Are you talking about the Empire of Dragons one? I’m hearing about it now and it kind of does sound realistic. If it is true, I hope they change some of the things for better including adding cross faction guilds.
There’s no saying who’s stronger. Galakrond was basically Galactus of our world. And if you look how they were killed, it kinda makes Galakrond look stronger. It took all the powers of the dragons working together to killDeathwing. That wouldn’t work on Galakrond, it took a boulder lodged into his mouth to kill him followed by freezing the boulder in his mouth and forcing him to choke to death…no epic big beam ending but a very inconvenient way to kill him nonetheless. He was too strong for anything else.
I always found brewmaster to be the most absurd of the warcraft 3 heroes. Here we are though. The thing about Warcraft, is part of its charm is a silly meme here and there. That has always been a thing. “Me not that kind of orc.” Click a sheep one too many times. Everything about goblins.