Blizzard appears to be considering adding one or more new classes to World of Warcraft: Forevermany of which have been in high demand for years but have never been added to any version of the game, if player claims regarding a recent survey are to be believed.
Several individuals playing WoW: forever have reported receiving a survey prompt in the Battle.net launcher over the past week. Sharing screenshots of the survey was prohibited, so we have no real visual evidence, and the survey did not appear to me at any point when I launched Battle.net this week. However, several other players have confirmed the same list of classes mentioned in the survey, and another person has posted what they claim are excerpted text descriptions of each new class in the survey, which I’ve tried to summarize below:
- Demon Hunter
- San’layn – Plate armor, these guys are basically vampires?
- Guardian – Tank, melee DPS, plate armor, abilities unclear as poster lists San’layn’s abilities instead
- Death Knight
- Necromancer – Cloth armor, a mage with shadow and death themed abilities (looks quite similar to Warlocks)
- Sorceress – Ranged DPS (caster) and support class, cloth armor, has abilities such as conjuring a cauldron that can buff allies and summoning a blood golem at the cost of her own health
- Tinker – Tank, ranged and support DPS, mail armor, builds a mech, fires rockets, drops supplies to heal allies
- Metalborn/Runesmith – (different people have reported this class being shown to them under different names) Mail armor, uses runic power and transmutes metal body to attack
- Bard – Support and healer, leather armor, uses songs to buff party members and weaken enemies
- Illusionist – Ranged DPS, leather armor, spells include creating illusory murlocs or other monsters to fight for you or summoning mirror images
- Monk
Forgive me, but if it’s real, this list is difficult. Demon Hunter, Death Knight, and Monk are all already classes in retail World of Warcraftadded in various expansions, but it is unclear how similar they would be in Forever. And everything else would be new to the MMORPG, although many are suggested by others. Warcraft games and properties (guardians and handymen, for example). It’s hard not to look at this and just wish they would add it all up and completely mix things up, but that would probably be way too much change and imbalance for Wow to manage all at once.
What’s also striking is that several of these classes seem to be listed as “support”, which isn’t really a role in WoW Classic Or WoW: forever. Blizzard tried to add a support class in retail Wow with one of the Evoker specializations, but this becomes rather suboptimal given that the game isn’t really balanced around a group that includes this sort of thing. Start again with Classic and adding more support specs would be a much better way to test this sort of thing and let people play around with group composition.
Again, we have no idea if the survey is real or accurate, although a number of people appear to confirm seeing it. And assuming it’s real, we have no idea how serious Blizzard is about adding new classes. For all we know, they might read the results of this investigation and decide that this is a really bad idea.
Personally, I hope they add at least a few of these brand new classes, preferably the more original classes like Tinker and San’layn. I’m less interested in seeing reconfigured versions of things I can already play at retail, or slightly different flavors of what we already have, like Necromancer. Give me Bard, Blizzard! Let me sing my allies to victory! I’ve been waiting for this for years!
Gn tech
