Blizzard appears to be considering adding one or more of several new classes to World of Warcraft: Forever, including many that have been in-demand for years but never added to any version of the game, if player claims about a recent survey are to be believed.
Multiple individuals playing WoW: Forever have reported receiving a survey prompt in the Battle.net launcher in the last week. Sharing screenshots of the survey was forbidden, so we don’t have any actual visual proof, and the survey didn’t appear for me when I launched Battle.net at any point this week. However, multiple other players have confirmed the same list of classes mentioned as part of the survey, and another person has posted what they claim are extracted text descriptions of each new class from the survey, which I’ve tried to sum up below:
- Demon Hunter
- San’layn – Plate armor, these guys are basically vampires?
- Warden – Tank, melee DPS, plate armor, abilities unclear as the poster lists San’layn abilities instead
- Death Knight
- Necromancer – Cloth armor, a mage with shadow- and death-themed abilities (sounds rather similar to Warlocks)
- Witch – Ranged DPS (caster) and support class, cloth armor, has abilities like conjuring a cauldron that can buff allies and summoning a blood golem at the cost of one’s own health
- Tinker – Tank, ranged DPS, and support, mail armor, constructs a mech, shoots rockets, drops supplies to heal allies
- Metalborn/Runesmith – (different people reported this class as being shown to them under different names) Mail armor, uses runic power and transmutes body into metal to attack
- Bard – Support and healer, leather armor, uses songs to buff party members and debuff enemies
- Illusionist – Ranged DPS, leather armor, spells include creating illusory murlocs or other monsters to fight for you or conjuring mirror images
- Monk
Forgive me, but if it’s real, this list goes hard. Demon Hunter, Death Knight, and Monk are all already classes in retail World of Warcraft, added in various expansions, but there’s no telling how similar they would be in Forever. And all the rest of these would be new to the MMORPG, even if many are suggested by other Warcraft games and properties (Wardens and Tinkers, for instance). It’s hard not to look at this and not just wish they’d add all of it and fully scramble things up, but that would probably be far too much change and unbalancing for WoW to handle all at once.
What’s also jumping out about this is that several of these classes seem to be listed as “support,” which is not really a role in WoW Classic or WoW: Forever. Blizzard has tried to add a support class in retail WoW with one of the Evoker’s specializations, but it’s become rather unoptimal given that the game isn’t really balanced around a party that includes that sort of thing. Starting over with Classic and adding multiple support specs would be a much better way to trial that sort of thing and let people play around with group composition.
Again, we have no clue how real or accurate the survey was, even though quite a few folks seem to be confirming they’ve seen it. And assuming it’s real, we don’t know how serious Blizzard is about adding new classes at all—for all we know, they could read the results of this survey and decide it’s all a terrible idea.
Personally, I hope they add at least a few of these brand new ones, preferably the really out-there classes like Tinker and San’layn. I’m less interested in seeing reconfigured versions of stuff I can already play in retail, or slightly different flavors of what we already have, like Necromancer. Give me Bard, Blizzard! Let me sing my allies to victory! I’ve been waiting for years to do this!
