New Classes

This post at Tobold’s blog got me into brainstorming mode. What would be some good new races/classes to add to WoW in future expansions?

As far as races go, I’m not really knowledgable enough about Warcraft lore to suggest what races would be good to play as. I’d love to be a Goblin, Gnoll or a Furbolg myself, but I would predict that if Blizzard DID introduce new playable races, then they would be different to the races that are currently in-game.

So, let’s talk about classes. I have 3 ideas that I think are pretty cool. The chances of any of them ever being put in the game are almost nil, but It’s fun to imagine what they would be like anyway…

1. The Subjugator

My first idea (and the one I would enjoy playing most) is a pet class that would enslave humanoids. I guess you call it an Enchanter, but “Slaver” or “Subjugator” would be even better.

The primary mechanic of this class would be as a short term pet class. The player would enslave humanoid mobs similar to Priest’s Mind Control or a Warlock’s Enslave Demon Spell.

Subjugators would be casters, but have very few damaging or healing spells of their own, instead relying on buffing and healing their minion and letting it do the fighting for them.

Enslaving a particular mob would last say 30 minutes, and it would retain a basic set of abilities relevant to what type of humanoid it was (just like the Priest’s mind control spell). The rest of the Subjugator’s spells would be designed to increase that creature’s effectiveness in combat.

In groups, the Subjugator would primarily be assigned tasks of Crowd Control or Buffs. In addition to the ability to enslave humanoids, it would have crowd control spells suited for other type of mobs too. In addition, it would bring powerful buffs for the rest of the party.

The buffs that a Subjugator gives would be unique, not merely increasing stats, but granting otherwise unavailable abilities to other players. For example, they would be able to cast a buff that gives a melee character a stun attack on a cooldown, or a caster player a spammable bolt that they didn’t otherwise have.

In terms of balance, a Subjugated mob would be more powerful than a Warlock’s felguard, but the Subjugator itself wouldn’t have anywhere near the amount of offensive capabilities that a Warlock does. On the DPS meters, the Subjugator would expected to do less damage than the tank, but greatly improve the ability of the rest of his group to do damage.

2. The Scout

This one is obviously self-explanatory. WoW has no pure Archer Class. Hunters are a hybrid pet class, without their pet or any other kind of tank, they can’t kill anything without kiting it for hours. The Scout would be a pure Archer, the physical combat equivalent of a Mage, and restricted to leather armour. They would use an energy bar similar to a rogue, although I’m not sure if giving them the ability to stealth would be a good idea.

The scout would primarily use very long-ranged attacks, roots (like the nets that “bandit” and “mercenary” mobs in WoW use) and snares to keep a target at range rather than a pet. For this reason, I can forsee the class being difficult to balance in a PvP situation, but that is an issue for developers, not creative geniuses like myself.

Apart from that, the blueprints for this class can be found in every Role Playing game, novel and history book from the last 2000 years. This would be an extremely popular class, and hopefully go some way to reducing the number of Hunters in the game.

As an afterthough, the addition of this class could coincide with a re-working of the Hunter talent trees, moving them to a more pet-oriented role (more like a beastmaster) and letting those who want to play pure Archers reroll as scouts.

3. The Engineer

This one is probably the most radical of my 3 ideas. The Engineer class would mimic the abilities of the Engineering profession, by giving the ability of some engineering devices to their class as trainable skills. The class would be heavily dependent on reagents, similar to a rogue, but instead of using them for poisons, vanishing, blinding, etc, the engineer would use those reagents to create devices that could be used in combat.

The primary device that engineers would use is the shredder. This would effictively make Engineers a tanking class – in the purest sense of the word. They would literally build their own mechanical exo-skeleton that would allow them to take a frontal assault from tough mobs. The shredder would be their primary mode of fighting and locomotion, and instead of merely training new skills, the engineer would be required to complete quests to find metal components and improve the shredder as they levelled, to keep their abilities up to par.

In addition, engineers would be able to build complex traps, throw bombs and grenades, and control other mechanical devices.

Tank characters are probably the rarest of any in WoW at the moment. Only 3 classes can tank, and those 1 of those 3 is quite rare in any case (druid). The major problem seems to be that tanking is quite boring until you begin raiding, and tanking classes are difficult to level. Hopefully the addition of a fun new tanking class would alleviate that a little bit.

Anyway, those are just 3 ideas that I thought of in the last 20 minutes (except for the scout obviously, that class has been around long before WoW), anyone else, feel free to leave your own ideas in the comments.