Friday, November 1, 2019

Surprising Absences in the Shadowlands Reveal

Before we begin, there are some major caveats: the expansion has only just been announced, and we have a "deep dive" panel tomorrow (that'll be happening while I'm off D&D'ing, so I'll probably make a late post either tomorrow or the next day.)

There were two things in particular I was surprised not to hear anything about in the announcements.

First, the simpler one: there's no new class. In all the previous even-numbered expansions, i.e. Wrath, Mists, and Legion, we've gotten a new class. Despite this being the perfect time to introduce, for example, the Necromancer, we're not getting that. Nor are we, apparently, getting any class skins or fourth specs. For a third expansion in a row, we're going to be at 12 classes.

I can understand the logic here - Necromancers, for example, were always going to be stepping on the toes of Death Knights and Warlocks. I'm frankly grateful that we managed to get Demon Hunters in there given how they close to Warlocks (poor Warlocks: the only time they haven't lost at least one ability to a new class was with Monks.)

Still, it's a little sad - I keep waiting for a new class I can make as a Worgen, because I love them as a race but already have characters in my favorite classes.

The other, more surprising thing, was that there was no news on any change to the faction system. Given the end of the Fourth War, and particularly developments like Calia apparently going over to at least offer to lead the Forsaken, you would think there would be a massive rapprochement between the two factions.

I was hoping that we'd be able to start doing cross-faction grouping, at least for instanced content. While I'm not ruling it out entirely, I also feel like that's a big enough feature that you'd think it'd be in the gameplay trailer.

Expansion announcements tend to come about a year before the actual expansion comes out, and I'm sure that we'll see lots of new developments as the beta launches and such.

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