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Bad news for shaman tank hopefuls—World of Warcraft: Forever won't have Season of Discovery's zany class design just yet: 'But never say never, y'know'
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World of Warcraft: Forever's an interesting pitch—instead of no changes, it's an all-changes version of vanilla WoW. Updated talent trees, new quests, essentially an envisioning of the OG game where, save for the new sky elves, all of the fresh additions are horizontal. New dungeons and raids all packaged within that original level 60 cap in good ol' Azeroth.
But given Blizzard just did Season of Discovery, at least one question was brewing in my mind—would the developer add some of the wilder class designs, like healing mages and shaman tanks, as optional skill trees or playstyles?
Sadly not, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in a recent GameSpot interview: "[Season of Discovery] was always meant to be ephemeral, and it allowed us to take some risks that we probably wouldn't really take in a 'forever' game. A lot of the changes, I think, in spirit—a lot of the lessons we learned—are carried over. But some of the more out there things that weren't originally in original WoW, we toned them back a little bit."
I already had a feeling, given a lot of the preemptively put together talent calculators—but these were assembled from a beta version of the game, gathered together in snippets at Blizzcon. By no means were its prophesied talents final. However, what I did see had me leaning in the way of playing it safe.
Aside from a few very cool additions and redesigned specs, a lot of the changes were simply bringing class design elements from modern WoW back into its vanilla age. Take combat rogues, for instance, which enjoy an equivalent of the outlaw rogue's central trick, lowering all of their cooldowns by a few seconds when they use a finishing more.
That's not to say that there's no experimentation in Forever's future, mind. Greenfield continues: "It's one of those things—it's in the name, it's forever, we can do a lot of things over years, but we wanted to start from a place where the soul of the class is very coded and original WoW-centric.
"But there's still meaningful changes and really exciting ways to play your class … But some of the Warlock tank, Shaman tank, not quite yet? But never say never, y'know." It's a bit of a shame, given Forever is sort of meant to be Blizzard's replacement for a WoW 2, but I can at least understand why the studio's starting off a little less experimental than it could've. And that's not to say the boat isn't being rocked at all.
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