Shadowlands Class Changes: My Big Takeaway is the Return of 2H Frost

With the Shadowlands Alpha starting soon, Blizzard has announced a sort of broad overview of class changes coming with the expansion.

Philosophically, the main takeaway is that they're trying to broaden class abilities so that the various specs have some ability overlap. In Legion, with its focus on giving each spec a very strong identity, a lot of classes were really divided between their specs. Today, outside of utility spells, most specializations don't have any shared rotational spells or abilities with the other specs of their class.

I'll confess I'm not entirely excited by this prospect. While I miss having Frostfire Bolt on my Frost Mage, that's not what they're bringing back. Still, what this will mean is a return of a lot of funky utility spells, with stuff like Warlock utility curses, Paladin Auras, and Raise Dead coming back to all specs for their respective classes.

As someone whose sort of secondary main is a Frost Death Knight, I'm extremely excited by the prospect of Frost being able to wield two-handed weapons once again. No word on if we get to transmog Frostmourne (though it wouldn't be inappropriate given the subject matter of the expansion.) It just remains to be seen whether it'll be easy to balance given that 2H frost doesn't have access to two weapon runes.

A few other things of note:

Both Elemental and Enhancement Shamans are losing Maelstrom as a resource, and going back to more of a cooldown-based rotation. While I think this is probably good for Elemental, I've actually liked the way Enhancement plays since 7.0, so we'll see how the new rotation feels.

All Paladins will once again use Holy Power. I'm trying to remember if it was Legion or Warlords that removed it from Holy and Protection. If you're one of those folks who wants Ret to go back to the way it was in Wrath, I think you're out of luck. Still, while I did eventually get used to the idea of simply managing cooldowns for my Shield of the Righteous, Holy Power did give the class a certain structure that I do think we lost. I'm going to mostly consider this a good thing.

Vengeance Demon Hunters will now use Fury instead of Pain as their resource, which is pretty much just a flavor thing. While I sort of liked the fact that you could tell a DH's spec by the color of their resource bar, this seems fine, and I think they picked the correct one to stick with.

Balance Druids are going to go back to having Solar Wrath and Lunar Strike causing Eclipses, but I don't know if that means anything for Astral Power.

Finally, did I mention Frost DKs can use two-handed weapons again?