Kor'kron 501st

Every week, Blog Azeroth proposes a Shared Topic for World of Warcraft bloggers to discuss. I began participating late, so I’ve decided to go back and write to the old prompts. This topic was proposed by Fumbleknock.

Does WoW need another party role?

Nope. It might be interesting, but it wouldn’t be worth Blizzard’s effort when you consider the new balancing they’d have to do. Would the new role be optional? If so, how would you balance content? Dungeons would require either a tank, healer, and three DPS, or a tank, healer, two DPS, and one of the new role. How would that be done? And what about old content? Would that be rebalanced or just left as is? I would think they’d leave them, but then, how would you level as the new role? It would have to be able to do dungeons especially considering the Dungeon Finder.

Let’s overlook that and consider an idea for a new role anyways. It would need to be some sort of support class. What if there was a class that specialized in buffs. Its DPS would suck, but it would have more powerful buffs. If it was a bard, maybe it could have multiple songs with only one active at a time. One song would raise the DPS of all party/raid members a certain percent. Another could raise healing done, and a third could raise health or dodge or some other tank thing. (Can you tell that I’ve never tanked?) Perhaps it could have even stronger single-target buffs. For example, it could buff a target player’s DPS by 20% for a small amount of time at the cost of stopping the raid-wide songs. I’m not sure how it would level effectively though. I’m not sure what to do about scaling between 5-man, 10-man, and 25-man content, but I’m sure it could be done.

Alternatively, there could be a CC-specialized class. I suppose it would be like the controller role in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Many classes can already CC, but maybe a class that has many CCs but incredibly low DPS. It could CC multiple targets at a time and use a variety of knockbacks. I’m not sure how useful this would be, but it’s an idea.

To be clear, I don’t think introducing a whole new role into World of Warcraft would work. However, I do have a soft spot for bards, so I’d love to see one added. Admittedly that’s because Mooglegem loves to play bards in other games, and I’d like her to have that opportunity in WoW. I suppose there’s a chance we’ll see a bard in WoW, but I don’t think we’ll ever see a fourth role.