Demon Hunters are WoW's second hero class and the third class to be added to the game after vanilla. The "hero" aspect of hero classes caused some controversy back in the early days of Wrath of the Lich King, when pretty much all three specs were overpowered (I loved leveling up as Blood DPS back then - though the self-healing and ability to sustain combat without stopping to heal or eat is something that most classes have these days anyway,) But in reality, the Hero Class label really just distinguishes the class in terms of lore and starting area.
Demon Hunters will start at a very high level - probably in the mid to late 90s so that by the time they finish the starting experience, they can jump right into the high-level Legion content. This is a departure from Death Knights, who did get to skip the vanilla zones, but had to go through Outland before joining veteran characters in Northrend.
What this means is that, during the Legion expansion's time as current content, Demon Hunters will essentially only do that current content. There's a risk here that they could thus feel somewhat disconnected from the rest of the world, but I think Blizzard is more concerned about scaring off people who don't want to have to go through old zones that they've been through eleven times before.
Timewalker dungeons - something that they're extremely likely to expand - should help with this. While I'm obviously going to focus a lot on Legion's stuff, it'll be cool to take my Demon Hunter into BC-era dungeons - though it'll be somewhat paradoxical for him to go back and run Black Temple (I would be overjoyed if they added a new line of dialogue just for those DHs who do that where Illidan calls you out for turning on him in the old level 70 raid.)
Playable DHs will obviously have a deep connection to Illidan. Unlike Death Knights, who very definitely turned against Arthas, it looks like Demon Hunters aren't really going to feel all that guilty about what they've done, and might remain loyal to Illidan.
As we understand it (and this is obviously subject to change,) the Demon Hunter starting experience will begin at the Black Temple, literally right as the raid full of, well, us from 2007 or 2008, is making their way up through the building. We'll then be sent to the planet Mar'duun, which is where Sargeras had originally imprisoned all the demons he had defeated back when he was a good guy, and which he destroyed to free them when he went evil.
I expect that Mar'duun will be where most of this experience takes place. By the end of it, however, it looks like we'll be captured by the Night Elf Wardens (Maiev Shadowsong being their leader) and imprisoned just like Illidan was, only to be freed eight-ish years later to fight against the Legion's invasion.
Presumably we'll be sent to our respective factions to offer our services (it'd be cool if we went to Darnassus and Silvermoon rather than Stormwind/Orgrimmar,) and then get funneled into the main expansion experience.
We really don't have a great idea of where Demon Hunters' class hall will be. Warlocks will be on a fel-blasted Portal World, so I think it might make more sense for Demon Hunters to have a place on the Broken Isles themselves - possibly some ancient site used by Illidan way back in the day.
As it stands, only the two elf races will be able to play Demon Hunters. This is a bit frustrating, but I expect it has more to do with how tricky it will be to do the Metamorphosis forms. Unlike the current Demonology ability, which uses an identical demon-form model regardless of the player's race or gender, the ones in the Legion trailer are clearly based on the player model - possibly even incorporating things like hair style and facial features. Doing this will be a big challenge, and I can see why they want to stick to just two races instead of thirteen.
They have said that after Legion, they might consider opening the class up to other races, but I'm not holding my breath (for one thing, the expansion after Legion could be as long as three years away.) I suspect that we might, possibly, some time in the future have one additional race per faction, sort of like the way that Cataclysm finally gave us options for non Night-Elf/Tauren druids. But if you thought animal forms were tricky, these Demon Forms are going to be much more complicated.
However, they are setting up a pretty big hurdle to adding any new races to the mix. One could imagine (indeed, I had done just that) that you could make Demon Hunters part of a new order, rather than using the actual Illidari from Burning Crusade. Rather than having the beginning of the class experience start in the past, you could have people like Feronas Sindweller (the Demon Hunter currently in Felwood) spreading the word about how Illidan was actually a hero, and that they could teach people those techniques.
As it stands, however, you're pretty limited. The only Demon Hunters we've seen in-game have been Night Elves and Blood Elves. The Illidari forces did contain some other races, though. It might not be too hard to justify Orc demon hunters - Illidan had the Fel Horde under his thumb, after all. Perhaps more of a stretch, but still possible, would be Draenei demon hunters. Illidan had the Ashtongue Broken working for him (until they were emphatically not working for him,) and you could maybe come up with some bit of lore where Illidan has managed to purge the Sethe-based toxins that mutated them in the first place, giving us healthy Draenei who would understandably be very loyal to Illidan for curing them and also probably still bitter and cut off from the Light thanks to all the Fel energy coursing through them.
But I really don't expect that we'll see other playable Demon Hunter races, at least for a very long time. We went three expansions (well, one core game and two expansions) before there were alternatives for Druids, and the lore of Demon Hunters is quite restrictive.
So get comfortable with your elves.
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