BlizzCon ’08 hosts many World of Warcraft related panels (like the Dungeon and Raids Panel) along with panels related to Diablo III and StarCraft II. One of the panels was the “World of Warcraft Classes Panel” with Tom Chilton (Game Designer) and Greg Street (Developer). The panels focus on the classes within the game along with a few other hints at changes coming.

The major thing we learned from the panel is that it is confirmed that dual specs are coming and that they’re going to be used to allow classes to switch from PvP to PvE specs and vice-versa. So players won’t have to be in only a tanking or healing spec or will have to pay massive amounts of money to do different things. There won’t be any exploitable changes like allowing specs to change in the middle of an area but they’ll let you change in the middle of a raid in a simple way.

With that out of the way the panel was split up by classes starting with the Death Knight and leading through the current classes. Then it was closed with a discussion about group flexibility. We’ll let’s get started!

Death Knight

Death Knights will share itemization with other classes in order to prevent any “Death Knight Specific” loot from dropping causing players to have to shard it. Runes are their resource similar to rage, energy, and mana but they will not be customizable. There will be an ability in each talent tree to temporarily change runes but it won’t be permanent like they announced at last year’s BlizzCon. That way players are sort of encouraged into using all of their abilities instead of just sticking to one line (which can cause balance issues).

Runic Power is designed to let a Death Knight build up energy by using abilities and then unleash something cool. In the same light the various diseases that a Death Knight can use will act as a sort of pseudo combo point system. These mechanics allow the Death Knight to be a little bit unique and have somewhat of a different play style. It was mentioned that there will be a learning curve that makes the class easy to play but hard to master.

The talent trees are going to be designed to not specify what the Death Knight can do (all three will allow the Death Knight to tank) but instead change its style. Presences will also allow the Death Knight to switch between a tanking role and a DPS role. They’re very similar to Warrior stances.

Hunter

A pet overhaul allows the Hunter to have easier to work with pets with a loyalty rework and allowing pets to learn skills as they level up not to mention there will now be over 100 tameable pets. Freezing Shot allows Hunters to sort of “throw the trap” so that they don’t have to perfectly line up a pull with a trap. Disengage revamp will help Hunters from getting chewed up by melee. Shot rotating are being fixed to allow autoshot to always fire no matter what skills the Hunter is using.

Priest

Shadow Priests will focus on DPS instead of being mana batteries.  Mind Sear is a new ability that will give Priests another DPS ability and allow them to do some DPS. It’ll do damage to and near a target. Racials will get revamped so that Priests won’t have to roll as only a certain class to be any good. Discipline Priests will become viable raid healers.

Mage

Mages will be getting a FrostFire Bolt that’ll help move them towards an elementalist build. They’ll have a new ability called Mirror Image as well. They should have three to four DPS specs.

Druid

When Druids were mentioned there was a good deal of booing from the crowd. That goes to show how adamant the fans are about the game and how rooted their thoughts are. Anyway, Balance will be about crowd control and DPS and “oomkins” (out of mana boomkins) should no longer be an issue. Resto will be getting Nourish which is like a flash heal and Wild Growth which is an AoE heal.

They will be getting the ability to do an indoor Entangling Roots to grant more 5-man crowd control abilities and they will also be getting an out of combat resurrection as well. As far as tanking goes, bear tanks should be able to tank everything and cat form should allow a Druid to perform similar to a Rogue.

Shaman

Shaman totems are now physical and heartier. Totems have been consolidated so that there are fewer of them. Hex (a form of Crowd Control), Riptide (a form of healing), and Lava Burst (DPS) abilities are coming.

Rogue

Rogues will be getting “Fan of Knives” (ability from Warcraft III Wardens) for some AoE damage to help in the big pulls in instances. They’ll be able to sap more things. Blizzard is trying to push them back into the poison and dagger niche that they should belong in. Mutilate should become useful again.

Warriors

They want Protection Warriors to have more toys so they’ve made mitigation talents cost less to let them pick up some new abilities. Arms and Fury will not be PvP or PvE limited anymore. Overpower is to be fun again. Arms will be getting Bladestorm and Fury will be getting Titan’s Group (two-handed dual wield).

Warlock

Pet diversity is very important and Blizzard wants Warlocks to use more pets. Pets should be easier to use and switch around. Chaos Bolt was added to make Warlock rotations more interesting. Affliction is currently too complicated but that’s being worked on. Demonic Circle and Metamorphosis are coming as new abilities.

Paladin

They want Protection Paladins to be main tanks instead of just being limited to being off-tanks. They want Holy (healadins) Paladin to be more flexible on moving about while healing so that they’re not limited to healing in encounters where they can stand still. They’ll be getting a HoT but it won’t be their specialty.

Protection Paladins will need to have actual gear. Retribution Paladins will rely less on crits and have a little better mana consumption.

Group Flexability

“There are currently 30 specs and 25 raid slots”, is a very good quote from the panel. The class choices for going to a raid should be very flexible and not reliant on any one player or one class. You should be able to bring the player and not the spec. Skill should account for more than having a certain class with a certain spec to get say a Bloodlust rotation going. There should be multiple ways to get the same buff (but they obviously won’t be stacking) to help with this.

Speaking of skill, the same should apply to instances. They want skill to trump over consumables (potions) and buffs. They feel that potions and buffs are way out of control and will be looking to tone this down a bit. In summary, they want you to bring who you want without limitations of class, spec, buffs, and consumables in the way.

There will also be more shared gear and less focus on threat. Healing and coordination should trump threat. It should be about moving about and healing rather than trying to manage threat so much. (This is why WotLK will have a built in threat meter).

The Q&A provided us mostly with the fact that you can switch dual specs in the middle of a raid. The rest of the questions didn’t provide much other than a repeat of what was offered.

That’s it for the WoW Classes Panel. I suggest taking a look at the Dungeons and Raids panel next or heading to our Wrath of the Lich King Portal or BlizzCon ’08 Portal to get more info on what’s next for WoW.