// PC GAMER — GAMING
World of Warcraft's D&D crossover is neat, but inconsistent—novel on one page, then shrugging and pointing to the PHB you already own on the next
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World of Warcraft's big crossover with Dungeons & Dragons is finally here—and despite being a huge flagship collaboration, one of the biggest MMOs meeting with one of the biggest TTRPGs, I'm sad to say I'm feeling just a touch whelmed. This sourcebook is inconsistent—filled with very cool character options in some places, and just pointing at the already-existing player's handbook in others.
That inconsistency doesn't let the whole project down, mind. There are still some rules tucked away in here that I think are great additions to any campaign, not just a World of Warcraft-themed one.
Let's start with the big one: Classes. WoW and D&D do have a lot of overlap in terms of class fantasy—there's not much in the way of appreciable differences between a Fighter and a Warrior, other than a few iconic abilities being missing from the pack. As a result, this rulebook essentially uses the pre-existing classes as a template to throw some WoW flavour on.
Some of these changes are meaningful—take, for example, the Death Knight. This uses the Paladin's chassis, but throws in a ton of impactful changes, replacing Lay on Hands with Death Coil, for example. It also throws a whole new raft of Death Knight-adjacent spells, adjusts your Find Steed with a cool undead ghost that can phase through objects, and more.
A lot of the classes are solved by custom spells like this—the Paladin, for instance, has just the one new subclass to cover for Holy and a bunch of iconic Paladin spells. But the balance of these is a touch skewiff in places. Take Divine Shield, for instance. This thing is straight busted.
It's a 4th level spell, which does admittedly mean you'll only get it at levels 13 plus, but it makes you immune to not only the damage of a triggering attack, but also all damage until the start of your next turn. AND you can't be moved or have your speed reduced. While absolutely correct for the flavour of WoW's iconic bubble, this is crazy overpowered.
And while some of these classes do have a lot new on offer, others are so thin on content it's a wonder why they're there at all. The rogue gets a particularly short end of the stick, for instance. Outlaw rogues are just given a reskinned version of 5e's Swashbuckler subclass (which does, in fairness, have some new Cunning Strike options to bring it up to parity). Otherwise, the book just points you in the direction of pre-existing subclasses.
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Others are a complete miss, too. Shamans are all awkwardly stuffed into the chassis of the Barbarian, which only really works for Enhancement shamans—Elemental and Restoration shamans are pretty much just your standard D&D barbarian with some flavour-adjacent rage options, rather than the full spellcasters they are in the videogame.