Does World of Warcraft Have Room for a Darkmender?

[Veyne]

I've always loved the concept of a darkmender - and I use this term vaguely, not in reference to a specific class. A class that uses shadow magic to heal their allies. According to Warcraft lore, Shadow Priests are technically darkmenders, but in game, they're primarily damage dealers. There is also some lore that supports Death Knights being darkmenders of sorts (they served the same role as Paladins did for the Scourge campaign) in Warcraft 3. With Rift's Storm Legion expansion releasing soon, with the new Defiler soul for Clerics, my interest in darkmenders has been revitalized. I was just curious how the World of Warcraft community feels about the possibility of a dedicated darkmender style class. Of course, there would have to be at least one damage dealing spec, which is where I see a problem coming in. With Shadow Priests and Warlocks, I don't think there's a whole hell of a lot of room left for another shadow-based caster.

As a long time Shadow Priest myself, I might even support the conversion of the Shadow spec into a more dedicated healing or hybrid spec, like Rift's Chloromancer, or countless other MMOs' blood priests/mages, or something.

Perhaps it could be part of an Old God-themed class. There's also still room for more shadow-based melee classes (ie, Lightslayers - something more Rogue-like as opposed to the Death Knight's Warrior-like style).

Kind of just rambling, but anyone have any thoughts on the subject?

As a side note, I think that Shadow Priest's Glyph of Dark Binding should alter graphics and icons to something more shadow-appropriate, but there's a ton of minor cosmetic things I'd love (for example: Paladin abilities having different names and spell effects depending on your flavor (sun-themed abilities for Tauren)), but meh, it's whatever.

[Arkenaw]

Pretty sure lorewise, forsaken healing priests are darkmenders, but they just use holy magic in game cause there's no way blizzard would modify one spec of one class to fit one race.

[Jtree]

If Blizz ever starts giving more classes fourth specs, I'd love to see a DK healer using Int plate.

[Rivelle]

Are you asking if they'd ever add it as a dedicated healing spec (a la Rift's chloromancer)?

If that was the question, I highly doubt they'd add any new healing class or spec, at least for quite awhile since they've just added monks with mistweaver spec into the game.

I played Rift as well and while my main there was a cleric I did have a chloromancer as well. I would fully support a class like that in WoW but I'm thinking Blizzard is too far in keeping the Holy Trinity in game to ever add something that does quite that much damage. Even mistweaver monks which are meant to do some healing through damage still do very little damage overall comparatively and I think that's how Blizzard wants to keep it.

[Faithshield]

If Blizz ever starts giving more classes fourth specs, I'd love to see a DK healer using Int plate.

Yes, that would be very fun

[freakyduck]

If Blizz ever starts giving more classes fourth specs, I'd love to see a DK healer using Int plate.

Yes, that would be very fun

Yes, a DEATH knight should heal people. Every class has at least one healing ability, why not just make ALL classes healers? We should totally have rogue, hunter, warlock and warrior healers while we're at it.

Some classes are not meant to be healing classes and some specs aren't meant for healing. What's the difference between using "light" to heal and using "shadow" to heal? Semantics.