Every odd-numbered X.0 patch has given us a new class in WoW. 1.0 obviously brought in the original nine. Then we got Death Knights in 3.0, Monks in 5.0, and Demon Hunters in 7.0 (the latter quite literally, as you could actually play your DH before the expansion proper came out.)
So color me somewhat surprised that we did not see any new class announcement with the Shadowlands features trailer. Indeed, while the premise and setting of the expansion seems profoundly cool, I'll confess that, until we have a better sense of how big a deal Covenants are going to be, the trailer felt a little thin (though you could also argue that a "going back to basics" approach to WoW in terms of how many new mechanics are in place could be a shot in the arm for the game.)
I think it was either Taliesin from Taliesin & Evitel or Matt Rossi from Blizzard Watch who made a good point: it's not clear that WoW itself needs a thirteenth class. But it might be that Shadowlands does.
Legion, as an example, was a great expansion. There was tons to do, and I'm sure some players just briefly touched a DH to check it out but then moved on. But there's something really exciting about adding a new class to the game. Even if you're not playing it (my Monk was never one of my top alts) it's sort of exciting to see them added to the mix. During Legion I got a certain rush when I was on a DPS character and we got a Demon Hunter tank (when they understood the way the class worked, like maybe use Demon Spikes instead of saving all your Pain for Soul Cleave...)
The last expansion we got in which there was no new class and no new races was Warlords of Draenor, which I think most players consider the nadir of WoW (I'm sure some will consider BFA to be that. I'll confess that while I feel less motivated to play this expansion than I did Warlords, I think that's in part due to outside things. While the Azerite system has been a train wreck, I really cannot toss out all of BFA, which introduced some really cool ideas and an interesting story - even if it's a story whose plot I wish were resolved already.)
Now, I don't think we can assume that just because it lacks races and a class that Shadowlands will be another Warlords. Warlords had three major problems going for it:
The first is that Garrisons did basically the opposite of what players wanted them to do. We wanted a highly-customizable player housing that was mostly a reward in itself - where we might be able to earn new ways to decorate it and show off what our characters would want in a home. Instead, we got something deeply mechanical and with practically zero cosmetic customization, which also seemed to solve a bunch of problems that the designers then needed to create (like the one-a-day profession reagents.)
The second is that there just wasn't as much content. For a normal expansion, Hellfire Citadel should have been the "midway raid," like Tomb of Sargeras or the Eternal Palace were in the subsequent expansions. Blizzard had apparently wanted to turn out the next expansion in a year, which, given how big Legion was, was a pretty naive goal to have. So instead, we just got less of Warlords and were left sitting with that for a very long time.
The third is that the whole reason for the very, very convoluted story was, in theory, to have us deal with these figures of Warcraft's past, but we chewed through the eponymous Warlords so quickly that we never really got a chance to get any personality from any of them, other than "this Orc is an aggressive jerk." There could have been a lot of interesting nuance and maybe even shifting loyalities to this story, but instead it was basically the heroes of Azeroth versus the testosterone brigade. And then, a jarring shift in which Grom just recognizes that we're the good guys and fights alongside us and we just go "ok, sure, all that genocide and destruction is fine now that you're a good guy."
For Shadowlands, we just don't really know what to expect, storywise. Because at this point we only have the barest idea of a premise. The major players we know are Sylvanas, the Jailor, Bolvar, and the Arbiter. Presumably there will be important characters amongst the various Covenants, but how they interact and how familiar faces like Jaina, Thrall, Khadgar, and Lor'themar will play into this story remains totally unknown.
It also remains to be seen how the mechanics develop over time. Personally, I hope they kind of nail the Covenants on the first go, and instead of further complicating them, they can do "horizontal" expansion by adding new Soulbinds or, potentially, even new Covenants if they bring in new zones. However, what's more likely is that they'll just find new wrinkles in the system for us to keep track of as the patches come out, similar to Artifacts and Azerite.
In terms of classes, I'm very curious to see what the "unpruning" looks like. If they bring back two-handed Frost for DKs I'll be very happy indeed (though I will say that I've been enjoying Unholy a lot more since the Legion-era changes. I just prefer my Frostwyrm blue!)
Still, I do feel a certain remorse. I realize that a Necromancer would be stepping on a bunch of other classes' toes (Warlock and Death Knight mainly) but it would have been cool to A: add a dark-themed healing class and B: add a new ranged spec for the first time in 15 years.
It does also make me wonder about future classes. Should we take this to mean that Blizzard just doesn't want to do more classes? Or does this instead just mean that the old, predictable schedule of their every-four-years release is no longer valid? By the end of Shadowlands, we'll have gone six years without a new class.
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