WoW Insider Community Blog Topic: New Class

First of all, apologies to any that read this that I haven’t updated it in a couple years. Perhaps I’ll do a real post…but for now, I’ll just start off by mentioning that my life now involves geek radio and making books. There’s a lot more to update, I’ll share that soon probably.

Anyhow…with the geek radio site being down possibly never to return, I thought I’d use my own personal blog to do this. The topic of this week’s CBT: create a new class in WoW.

My choice for the new class: Blue Mage. 8-Bit Theatre has a much better explanation for a Blue Mage than I have, but it’s essentially a type of Wizard that learns the spells of the monsters of the world after experiencing them, then uses them back. Given the nightmare balancing something like this could be, I’d be surprised to see it…but here’s how it would work. I’m not sold on any of the spec names, I just couldn’t think of better.

Class name: Blue Mage
Maximum armor class: Mail

Specifications:
Runemaster: Buff/Heal spec. Primary stat: Intellect
Summoner: Tank spec. Primary stat: Stamina
Wizard: DPS spec. Primary stat: Intellect

First, I’ll start this off by giving a little bit of information on how each spec would work. Runemaster would be your traditional in-the-back healer giving heals to the group, raid, etc…but it also casts runes on people. Instead of all of the heals being straight up heals, this class would cast certain buffs on members of the raid. Extra damage, extra tanking ability, 6 seconds of no damage, etc. This spec would require a decent amount of practice to get the buffs set up perfectly to best help the raid, and likely some coordination from group members.

A Summoner is sort of a ranged tank with pets. The style would not be incredibly different from a Demo Warlock, but would be done in slightly different ways. A summoner would summon a minion from a set of minions to tank in various orders, each with various specialties (better against magic, better armor, better health, etc). It would do it’s own sort of tank swap, switching one minion for another, all with a shared health/buff pool with the summoner itself. It would control each of these minions, and would have a limited spell set for itself involving some DPS and healing spells.

The Wizard would be your standard sort of Ranged Mage DPS, except it would have a selection of spells from all families as opposed to the various specialties that each caster class has.

Of course, the real specialty of the Blue Mage class is not in the spells it itself has, but in the spells it can learn. Each spec would come with slight sets of taunts, spell misdirects, and mind control spells, which would be used both as CC and as a way for the Mage to get new spells. These would obviously have to be somewhat limited and similar in strength for balancing, but I see how this could work. Each caster has a set of open spell slots, say 6 or so. As a Blue Mage was hit with a certain spell (likely while casting a specific spell they have), they would learn it and it would be stored in a list. You could then add it to the spellbook in a similar fashion to how Glyphs currently work. This allows for a great deal of customization, even at endgame, and a lot of different strategies you can employ.

Fighting against a Blue Mage would be a nightmare in PvP, because you wouldn’t necessarily know what spells were coming your way. You might be able to get some of the picture due to their spec, but each one would be slightly different. One tank might prefer to have their own set of healing spells, whereas another might prefer to have some extra CC, whereas another might have an extra set of melee abilities, while another still would enhance their AoE spell collection.

Personally, I feel this would add a great new element to WoW gameplay that isn’t currently there, plus it would potentially (if it worked well) open the door for other classes to have more in-game customization. Thoughts?