Post-Blizzcon, Blizzard have been providing a large amount of details about all the different classes and specs in World of Warcraft and how they’ll be changing come the release of Legion. Three or so have come out per day for the past week and all of them are now finished, giving players their first in-depth glimpse of how their characters will play next year.
World of Warcraft remains one of the best MMOs ever.
All of them are now up on the WoW site, but here’s a brief rundown of what each is getting:
- Death Knight: The resource system of Runes is being changed to be less complicated and allow for more ability uses. Unholy spec is getting the biggest updates of the three.
- Druid: A new set of talents are enhancing their hybrid-role nature. Guardian tanks and Balance DPS are getting larger changes than the healing and melee DPS specs.
- Hunter: Big push to seperate the specs more definitively, including making Hunters that do not use ranged weapons a thing again, for the first time since vanilla WoW.
- Mage: Overall Blizzard are happy with the class, but are making quality of life changes and smaller tweaks to make it more enjoyable.
- Monk: WoW’s youngest class is still having teething problems, so a lot of work is going into making its play match its ‘fantasy’ – a term Blizzard have been pushing hard for Legion as a whole. The super-specialised Fistweaving has been removed.
- Paladin: Another one Blizzard are mostly happy with, outside of the healing Holy spec. They’re being modified so they’re incentivised to stand closer to targets they’re healing, especially melee ones, putting them closer to the battle to make use of all that plate armour.
- Priest: A lot of big changes here, with Holy priests remaining in a for-the-light healing role, while Discipline will be about doing damage to enemies to heal allies and Shadow becomes a path of serving Old Gods of madness. Pretty cool, to be honest.
- Rogue: Similar to Hunters, as a DPS-only class there were problems defining how specs differed from one another. To that end, the Combat spec has been completely redesigned to Outlaw.
- Shaman: Big changes are being made to the long-maligned Totems, and resource systems are being changed across the board. Enhancement is getting the biggest switches.
- Warlock: While Destruction and Affliction Warlocks are in a good spot, Blizzard want to move Demonology away from Metamorphosis and back to summoning evil hordes to do your bidding.
- Warriors: Like Mage, Blizzard seem to be mostly happy here. Fury is receiving the largest changes, in an attempt to “convey better” the “thematically grandiose take on the archetype.”
I’m personally a little disappointed there haven’t been bigger announcements made for my personal wheelhouse, the Protection Warrior. A man can dream of class-wide Titan’s Grip so we’re a bit less Paladins-without-the-magic, perhaps in the next expansion. On the flipside, Shadow Priests, Demonology Warlocks and the new Vengeance Demon Hunters could all finally drag me away from the class I’ve been playing for ten years. WoW players: what are they doing to you, and is it great?