Originally Posted by
Verain
Huh, interesting.
If we did get four specs, and hero classes were in the wings, I would so super hard want that DH spec to finally come home to rogues.
Right now, specs break down a bit differently by class.
Mages break down, not along their "spell schools", but along which ELEMENT of magic they can deal the most damage with. We don't have evokers, illusionists, and transmuters, we have fire, frost, and arcane. It's pretty obvious that all of them are mages.
Warlocks break down along which kind of warlock magic they are best at- it's the same thing.
Priests, however, break down upon philosophical lines. It makes as much sense for a priest to transition from holy to shadow as it does for a rogue to go from combat to demon hunter. Warriors are even worse- an arms warrior is a soldier or mercenary, a weapon master. A fury warrior has stuff he swings around, but HE is the weapon- he's a raging berserker. These are more than just minor twists.
So what a respec means per class is already wildly variable, and is already just as excessive as DH -> Combat.
The other reason this would be a solid idea is that, simply put, the game has a lot more room for specs than classes. If you introduce a Demon Hunter class (which is the most requested class), you'll have another melee guy in a game where you never want to really stack melee much, and where it's very common. If you introduce a Tinker, you probably get back your ranged guy, right? But how many people want to roll tinker, versus want to roll Demon Hunter. We just added a monk, and that's another melee. In a 10 man run, you have room for 5-7 dps, depending on the fight. Of those, it's very rare to be able to exceed 3 melee, and you are often best off with one or two. Yet out of the 34 specs, 12 are ranged and 11 melee. Ok, sounds fine... until you check again and realize that of the 11 classes, 7 of them can melee, 4 of them can melee as their only dps option, and 1 of them can only melee dps period. Melee is pretty contested, and adding more and more melee classes only hurts that a lot.
---------- Post added 2013-05-07 at 07:20 PM ----------
Warriors wear light armor, always dual wield, and have evasion? Or is that Paladins or Death Knights?
Is it the feral cats? They have much in common?
Maybe it's the shaman. Those guys dual wield, and totally aren't modelled after another hero class in WCIII.
Bottom line: Rogues are the closest you get to Demon Hunters. The furthest is paladins, shamans, and death knights, all of whom are already modelled after WCIII hero classes. Druids are based on units, but if you turn into a cat to do your job, you definitely aren't dual wielding paws. Of the warrior and rogue, the rogue fits much closer.
Warlocks are casters. I still don't know why they gave them some DH spells, I think it's because there's so much demand for the DH and the lock at least casts from the same source. But DHs have as much similarity to a warlock as a paladin does to a priest.