Demon Hunters - necessary class or just a coo onel?

[Golden Yak]

edit - well, fucked up that title, hopefully the rest of the thread goes better. Should be 'just a cool one'

I like Demon Hunters. I haven't played one beyond the starting experience, but they were definitely fun and cool there and I'm sure they are in content beyond. I like seeing them, jumping around and turning into demons and such.

But I'm wondering, did Demon Hunters fulfill some role that was needed before they were introduced? Or was the addition of the class just for the sake of greater variety and because it was thematically appropriate for Legion, rather than out of gameplay necessity? Are mobile jumping demon tank-fighters necessary or are they just rad, something new to experience?

Either way I think it's a good thing to have them in the game, I'm just curious as to whether it can be argued that future classes could be introduced purely because it's fun and cool to have them, rather then so some vital absence in the class roster can be resolved.

[Schattenlied]

No class after the first 9 were necessary, or should have ever happened. Blizzard has WAY too much on their plate for balance concerns, and every time they add another class it just gets worse. I would rather have fewer classes with better balance, than more classes with shit balance.

[GamerDH]

Sadly they aren't really a necessity. They are cool AF though.

And Blizzard is determined to keep them undertuned in their own expansion which is incredibly sad story.

[Deleted]

No class after the first 9 were necessary, or should have ever happened. Blizzard has WAY too much on their plate for balance concerns, and every time they add another class it just gets worse. I would rather have fewer classes with better balance, than more classes with shit balance.

more classes doesnt increase balance difficulty, each class has seperate teams employed to handle balance / design. Balance is mostly fine unless your at the cutting edge.
It doesnt really get any worse, rogues will always dominate cutting edge melee spots until blizzard decide that they cant cheese mechanics anymore.

[Shirofune]

more classes doesnt increase balance difficulty, each class has seperate teams employed to handle balance / design. Balance is mostly fine unless your at the cutting edge.
It doesnt really get any worse, rogues will always dominate cutting edge melee spots until blizzard decide that they cant cheese mechanics anymore.

Sadly, Legion has shown this is not the case.

There're 0 developers that play a DH in the team and are in direct charge of gathering feedback and getting changes. Same as there were no elemental shamans until Sigma (developer) leveled up one.

The balancing team is one team, and it handles all of the classes. How do they do it without playing them? I've no idea.

But well, you can see the results.

[Ron Burgundy]

Mostly just cool imo. Also the elf only restriction placed on them will keep the population under control imo. Some people just hate playing elves.

[Gen4Glock21]

"because it was thematically appropriate for Legion" <====This was the only reason to add them. IMO WOW has too many classes now.

[Skayth]

Both. As it is, the story behind each class has its own thematics with each race on how they became what they are (including vanilla quests here as well). Lore wise it'd fine. Game play wise it's fine. Cool factor as well.

The problem is when they created the death knight class. Instead of simply making them an unlock able spec for (let's say paladins) we got a full blown class, under the premise of hero.

But that isn't the problem with any class, it's a problem with the developers and their inability to play x class with complete insight of another class. All classes are under powered and over powered by eveyone. So did the game need another 2 specs to balance? Meh not really. He'll you could probably cut a few specs and be okay, but that is a developer issue and their inability to balance. Did wow need the class? It actually depended on death Knights rather than dhs. But with how it turned out? Yes, wow needed the class for the sole reason of a fel wielding melee class (locks are a range fel wielder, similar to priest x pala and the dk x necro debate). It's cool, it's fun, made sense, and most of all... it was the most requested class at the time of wows all time low

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

We're fighting the Legion bud, where have you been living this past year? DHs make sense, just like Dks did, just like Monks did.

[Tinary]

You could argue if any class except the golden warrior, rogue, mage, priest and hunter made sense.

[Sylvaeres]

No class after the first 9 were necessary, or should have ever happened. Blizzard has WAY too much on their plate for balance concerns, and every time they add another class it just gets worse. I would rather have fewer classes with better balance, than more classes with shit balance.

Blaming the classes themselves is a silly argument. It would take 10 minutes for a competent developer to buff/nerf classes depending on how they're performing in a particular raid. Blame lazy developers for the failed balance.

[corebit]

more classes doesnt increase balance difficulty, each class has seperate teams employed to handle balance / design.

This is 100% false. There is only one class balance team and they handle all classes / specs.

[Deleted]

DHs are a thing because Blizz needed a big draw after the disaster of WoD. Strictly speaking no, the game didn't need them from a mechanical standpoint, but they made good business sense. Since the focus of Legion is...well, the Burning Legion, it would be kind of odd if they weren't a thing, since it's the most obvious time to have introduced them.

Blizzard are also locked into alternating a new class/race each expansion as a sales draw (WoD is the only time this didn't happen, go figure). No new class is strictly necessary from a game design perspective, particularly given balance issues. But they're necessary insofar as they bring more players in.

DHs definitely went for the cool factor, their animations are overdone to the point of stupid (Blade Dance makes Havoc feel weightless and unengaging to play, but I guess it looks "awesome"...)

[Olololo2r5]

WoW needed a proper "anime" inspired class.. Monks were half way there but ruined by being so strictly tied to lolpanda

people who know Warcraft know how iconic Illidan is and we wanted to play his class for a while just like we did Arthas. I think DH should be the last class added, atleast for a long time.

[Deleted]

more classes doesnt increase balance difficulty, each class has seperate teams employed to handle balance / design. Balance is mostly fine unless your at the cutting edge.
It doesnt really get any worse, rogues will always dominate cutting edge melee spots until blizzard decide that they cant cheese mechanics anymore.

That makes zero sense, how does having more things to balance not make it harder to balance? Unless none of the classes and their abilities interact and there is no aim to try and make specs of a given role relatively balanced.

It's fairly likely it exactly the reason DKs went from 3 tank specs to one.

[Lucifey]

Just to chime in, "bring the player, not the class" means, DH are not needed mechanic wise, just as jOust wrote, a few posts before. But this applies to every class, as long as you focus this question on a single class.
I feel pretty strong in m+, but sometimes I wish for more Raid utility. Having tanked before (before Pandaria) as Paladin, DK and Druid (Druid also in Legion), mobility is awsome. It sure feels different to play than these other tanks. So I'd say its a worthy addition to the game.

[Deleted]

That makes zero sense, how does having more things to balance not make it harder to balance? Unless none of the classes and their abilities interact and there is no aim to try and make specs of a given role relatively balanced.

It's fairly likely it exactly the reason DKs went from 3 tank specs to one.

Because blizzard arnt struggling to keep up with it, they've stated numerous times that from their end with their stats they are happy with the current stat of classes and their output. the difficulty isnt preventing them from achieving their tasks regardless of how many classes their are. Only the workload increases but the task remains the same, adding another class has never prevented blizzard from doing their job, its just maths they will hire another person to help if htey need too. this conversation is pointless.

they've stated before that if they wanted to they could make it so every class pumps out the same numbers but they don't (I think it was around mists when they went away from class homogony). its not a matter of difficulty its a matter of what hey want their classes to do.

Your example isnt adding another class either, having 3 tank specs and expecting all those tank specs to work while also needing them to DPS isnt the same as another whole class. terrible example.

[Deleted]

they've stated before that if they wanted to they could make it so every class pumps out the same numbers but they don't (I think it was around mists when they went away from class homogony). its not a matter of difficulty its a matter of what hey want their classes to do.

I'd say how guardian druids were designed this expansion suggests that they aren't anywhere near as good at balancing numbers as they claim. Spec was suffering from armour capping very early on, players highlighted it to blizzard in the beta along with ST threat sucking. For whatever reason this was all ignored till 7.2 when more or less everything gets nerfed and amusingly the tier bonuses contribute towards the armour capping issue...

From a design perspective you used to see more complex DPS specs doing more damage when mastered. I believe blizzard said that for whatever reason they didn't like this. However you see the opposite with specs like feral where it's harder to play and at least earlier in the expansion did less damage. I struggle to believe this is intended and I was tempted to highlight survival hunters, except there's a good chance no one is playing it because they like the ranged spec as opposed to currently being a mediocre melee DPS.

[Deleted]

No class after the first 9 were necessary, or should have ever happened. Blizzard has WAY too much on their plate for balance concerns, and every time they add another class it just gets worse. I would rather have fewer classes with better balance, than more classes with shit balance.

Well this Thread is pretty old it seems, however one thing people seem to forget is that the first class that was added (DK) was meant to solve a fundermental issue with the game: Too few tanks.
The class was designed to be a capable tank in every of its 3 specs and with its higher starting level had the potential to solve the issue. During Classic and BC tanks were so rare that even full dungeon groups were looking hours to be finally able to start the run because no tank was available.
This was partly of course because of the fact that as a tanking class back then before dual spec and dps stats as tanking stats, a tank was barely able to solo play and thus many players didn't spec it if they weren't raiding and thus being suported by their guilds which then of course deminished the need to run with random people who were looking for tanks.

The Dk was designed, as I said, to solve this issue by providing a tanking class capable of tanking in 3 specs with a dps weapon and of course with its nimbus of being cool and awesome.
This of course didn't work out as planned and the ideas were later scrapped but the need for tanks still was extremely high. This led of course to the introduction of another tanking class -> the Monk. Surely these classes fitted thematicly but each of them didn't necessarily needed a tanking spec, but got one because of the rarity of tanks. Even today we somehow face the issue of having to wait for LFGs because of too few tanks, so it was just logical to implent yet another tanking class.
The main issue is that the side effect was the introduction of 3 melee classes that shifted the curve even mor ein favour of melees.

So was the DH necessary? I'd say there was and still is a demand for tanking classes and I'd say a demand for easy to play tanking classes. So the DH fitted really well.

From a broader perspective and ignoring the tank rarity at all, I'd say a class that needed to be added is a class that uses Bows, Guns and Crowssbows to make these drops much more usefull. Range weapons, after the removal of ranged slots, have become a one class item which allways caused loot issues. Same goes for Mail armor which is only used by 2 classes.
So from an itemisation point we'd need anothe ranged+mail class which might be able to heal.

[Schattenlied]

Well this Thread is pretty old it seems, however one thing people seem to forget is that the first class that was added (DK) was meant to solve a fundermental issue with the game: Too few tanks.
The class was designed to be a capable tank in every of its 3 specs and with its higher starting level had the potential to solve the issue. During Classic and BC tanks were so rare that even full dungeon groups were looking hours to be finally able to start the run because no tank was available.
This was partly of course because of the fact that as a tanking class back then before dual spec and dps stats as tanking stats, a tank was barely able to solo play and thus many players didn't spec it if they weren't raiding and thus being suported by their guilds which then of course deminished the need to run with random people who were looking for tanks.

The Dk was designed, as I said, to solve this issue by providing a tanking class capable of tanking in 3 specs with a dps weapon and of course with its nimbus of being cool and awesome.
This of course didn't work out as planned and the ideas were later scrapped but the need for tanks still was extremely high. This led of course to the introduction of another tanking class -> the Monk. Surely these classes fitted thematicly but each of them didn't necessarily needed a tanking spec, but got one because of the rarity of tanks. Even today we somehow face the issue of having to wait for LFGs because of too few tanks, so it was just logical to implent yet another tanking class.
The main issue is that the side effect was the introduction of 3 melee classes that shifted the curve even mor ein favour of melees.

So was the DH necessary? I'd say there was and still is a demand for tanking classes and I'd say a demand for easy to play tanking classes. So the DH fitted really well.

From a broader perspective and ignoring the tank rarity at all, I'd say a class that needed to be added is a class that uses Bows, Guns and Crowssbows to make these drops much more usefull. Range weapons, after the removal of ranged slots, have become a one class item which allways caused loot issues. Same goes for Mail armor which is only used by 2 classes.
So from an itemisation point we'd need anothe ranged+mail class which might be able to heal.

and all of that is entirely irrelevant because the lack of tanks has absolutely nothing to do with there being too few tanking classes. Most people just don't like to tank... You could give every class in this game a tank spec and we would still have a tank shortage, because people simply don't like doing it.