With Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard is pursuing new and old goals in WoW class design. Abilities will likely be rigorously trimmed – but old skills might also return.
The closed alpha of Battle for Azeroth, the next addon for World of Warcraft, has begun. To prepare players for the upcoming expansion – no matter how far in the future it may be – the developers are largely revealing their plans for the classes.
In a long blog post, Blizzard talked about how class design should look after Legion. After all, the artifact weapons will be gone, and usually, each new expansion brings a major overhaul of the classes.
At its core, the developers are pursuing three goals they want to achieve with Battle for Azeroth:
- Strengthen the uniqueness of the classes
- Refine the talent selection
- Adjust classes to the absence of artifact weapons
Strengthen the uniqueness of the classes
Although Legion focused on the uniqueness of each class with its order halls and corresponding campaigns, many classes still bring the same set of abilities. For these “utility” abilities, such as stuns, sprints, teleports, or other useful skills, Blizzard wants to create stronger differences.
A good example is mass stuns. Nowadays, almost every group has 2-3 mass stuns, making these abilities no longer special, and the only challenge is to prevent overlaps in stuns.
The developers plan to remove some abilities from certain classes – mass stuns seem to be at the top of the problematic list. In return, there will be new abilities elsewhere or even the return of abilities that were removed from the game in previous expansions.
The fundamental idea is: Each class should be able to do something that no other class can do.
Refine the talent selection
Basically, the developers are quite satisfied with the talents, but there are areas that need adjustment. For instance, they want to try to eliminate choices between “single target” and “AoE” talents, as this creates a constant urge to change talents for each situation.
At the same time, they also want to avoid selection between three similar talents (like three AoE spells), where one must perform lengthy mathematical calculations to choose the best talent.
How exactly this balancing act will be achieved remains to be seen.
Adjust classes to the absence of artifact weapons
The last problem is likely to be the biggest one, as in Battle for Azeroth, classes must stand without their artifact weapons. In order for the classes not to feel suddenly incomplete, the developers are considering implementing one or two bonuses from each weapon into the core set of a class. However, the benchmark for this is high, and only a very few bonuses are to be transferred.
At the same time, attention is being paid to the rotations of the respective specializations. If classes have too large gaps in their rotations without their artifact abilities, the intention is to reduce cooldowns or meaningfully fill the gaps.
So far, most of this is still just gray theory. How well Blizzard actually manages to implement these goals will probably be evident in a few weeks. After all, the alpha of Battle for Azeroth has already begun.
What other innovations are there in Battle for Azeroth? We have listed them for you in this article.
