What Would Class Skins Look Like?

New classes tend to be very exciting for WoW. Your preferences will certainly vary, but of the three classes added after vanilla WoW, two of them are among my favorite to play (it's the two hero classes, Death Knights and Demon Hunters.)

However, while I was very happy we got Demon Hunters, I also recognize that there's a problem with just adding class after class, beyond the obvious need to come up with new gameplay mechanics.

And that's one of theme.

Demon Hunters had precedent in the lore, but in the earlier iterations of the existing classes, some elements of the Warcraft III hero were redistributed to other classes. Most notably, Metamorphosis became the absolute core to the Demonology Warlock spec. In Mists and Warlords, Demo Locks were all about building up Demonic Fury and then transforming, getting a burst of power that they then spent before going back into the building phase. Indeed, Mists saw Warlocks get a radical redesign to the old Soul Shard system, giving each spec its own cool secondary resource, which was then walked back to making Soul Shards a more relevant resource regardless of spec (they were originally a special inventory item you'd make special bags to hold.)

So when Demon Hunters came along, and given how Metamorphosis was one of Illidan's most iconic abilities, it made perfect sense for them to take that from Warlocks, forcing Demonology to be totally redesigned and even reconceptualized. While I really enjoyed the Mists/Warlords version of the spec, I thought the Legion incarnation to be a good idea executed not so well (Demonic Empowerment was a dumb spell,) and at this point I'm mostly happy with how the spec plays (give or take a baseline Implosion.)

But the whole reason this was an issue is that Demon Hunters, like Warlocks, use demonic, Fel magic. And in order to make a clear distinction, Blizzard had to take away the idea that Warlocks were truly embodying the Fel in their own bodies via Metamorphosis, and instead make them purely magical practitioners while Demon Hunters were the ones who had effectively become demons.

To be fair, there's precedent for having two takes on the same basic concept. Priests and Paladins both have a holy, divine style of magic, but Paladins use it in conjunction with martial prowess while Priests are purely magic practitioners. In recent expansions, they've even shifted Priests to be less specifically about Holy magic, and more about the spectrum of lightness and dark - primarily by giving Discipline access to both.

In a vacuum, I think a Necromancer class would be a really cool one for WoW. You could imagine it as a ranged caster, even potentially with a healing spec (theming your healing around Necromancy's ability to revive the dead.)

But it does run into the following problem:

When you think of Necromancers, you generally think of them as summoning undead minions - sure, there's harmful spells that sap the life from your enemies, but the really iconic look for "necromancy" is a spellcaster with a bunch of skeletons or zombies fighting for them.

Creating such a playstyle for a ranged caster - the magic ranged DPS with a swarm of undead minions - sure sounds a lot like the way Demonology works, doesn't it?

And naturally, Death Knights also use necromancy as their primary magical power - from Blood's ability to sap life from enemies and Unholy's undead minions (done differently than Demonology, of course.) Frost, to be fair, is the least obviously necromantic, but given Warcraft's long association between necromancy and cold places (Northrend,) it makes sense.

So are we just not ever going to get Necromancers as a class?

The answer could very well be yes. The fact of the matter is that the two most obvious aspects of the class - a caster that summons lots of minions and a class themed around necromancy - are both already represented.

But what if the class wasn't actually a new class? What if it was just a change in flavor?

In Blizzard's pure multiplayer games, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch, the "heroes" that players embody come with a large number of cosmetic skins. Sometimes these change the look and feel of a character. For example, Torbjorn in Overwatch is a diminutive Swedish engineer who drops a powerful turret as his primary feature. However, there's a skin that dresses him up like Magni Bronzebeard, changing his look from sci-fi blacksmith to dwarven king. This changes nothing about how he works as an Overwatch character, but you get a different feel from him.

Could a similar thing be done with World of Warcraft classes?

Allied races went farther than simply changing the cosmetic look of existing races - they have unique racial abilities and sometimes different class options. But racials are only rarely the defining characteristic of a character's power, so one could see Allied races as essentially new "skins" for existing races.

Perhaps we could see Necromancers introduced, not as a new class, but as a variant on Warlocks. Imagine, for instance, that a Demonology Warlock is instead a Corpseraiser Necromancer, replacing imps with skeletons, felhounds with geists, and maybe the felguard with an abomination minon. Mechanically, it'd be identical to Demonology (except perhaps the creature type of the minions you summon, making it easier for priests to CC them but harder for warlocks) but you'd get this new flavor.

And then, yes, you'd get some thematic overlap with Death Knights, but their mechanics would be totally distinct.

Then, the question becomes how easily you can find similar class skins for other classes.

I could see Paladins getting something akin to D&D's Eldritch Knight - all the defensive and offensive abilities but themed as arcane magic rather than holy devotion.

But when you come to, say, Hunters, I can't say I have a ton of ideas. Ranger is basically just another term for what a Hunter is.

So it's an idea with some merits, but it's not obvious it could be applied universally.

So far, we've gotten a new class with every other expansion. But these patterns don't always hold - take Mists and Warlords, for example, where we got Pandaren right after we got Worgen and Goblins, but then got no new race in Warlords. And of course, BFA hasn't given us any brand-new races (though Kul Tirans and to a lesser extent Zandalari Trolls aren't the sort of palette swap the other allied races are, model-wise) but we have gotten a full eight allied races - the same number of races WoW started with.

So I really do wonder to what extent we can simply assume that this Blizzcon we'll be hearing about a new class. I often hear skeptics say we shouldn't expect them, but I heard similar ideas in 2015 before Legion was announced, so while I do think that there's less room now for new classes, it's also such a popular and buzz-generating feature that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.