Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Classes in an Alternate Burning Crusade

Continuing on from my previous post on races, another major mistake The Burning Crusade expansion made was with classes. Specifically allowing Alliance Shamans and Horde Paladins.

I've discussed this before, but I think that the Alliance in particular lost a lot of its identity when the Horde got paladins. Especially as the Silver Hand opened up to both factions, but the Horde had separate orders for the Blood Knights and Sunwalkers.

In an alternate TBC, paladins could stay Alliance, and shamans could stay Horde. As long as Blessing of Salvation (and the equivalent totem) is removed, there would be no real imbalance.

Then, assuming an alternate Wrath comes along, perhaps the Horde could get Death Knights, and the Alliance gets Demon Hunters (since both Night Elves and Blood Elves are Alliance in my alternate timeline).

I think reinforcing the faction division mechanically, with different classes that play significantly different, would be a much better path. WoW chose to homogenise the factions. In the long run, I think that was not a good decision.

2 comments:

  1. Was not Blessing of Salvation the counterpart to Bloodlust? I.e. damage output was limited foremost by threat (that's why "interesting" rotations like Frosbolt-Frostbolt-Frostbolt-... did exist), and Alliance's solution was to lower damage dealers' threat by Salvation while Horde's solution was to boost tank threat through haste from Bloodlust.

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    1. No, Bloodlust boosts both damage and threat, so it's kind of a wash. It does boost damage while it's up. However, If the DPS is threat-capped, Salvation will allow them to do 42% more damage all the time.

      A simple example, let's say a great tank puts out 100 threat/second. The dps is basically limited to 100 damage/second. However, with Salvation, the dps can do 142 damage/second * .7 threat/damage = 99 threat/second.

      So long as tank threat is the limit for dps, Salvation is extraordinarily powerful.

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