So Mark Jacobs has announced the first major content patch for WAR, as early as December. He didn’t give an exact date, and in reality only mentioned that the Blackguard and Knight of the Blazing Sun would be introduced in December. But in my books, new classes = new content.
I’m sure some will note that these 2 classes, as well as two DPS toons (the Orc Choppa and the Dwarf Hammerer) were scheduled to be released with the game proper, originally, and were cut due to quality assurance reasons. I’m not so sure. I think it’s a marketing ploy. They knew Wrath was coming in November, and that it would drop a slew of content for WoW fans, as well as a new class, the Death Knight. My conspiracy theory is that these cut classes were probably fine. If you look at how certain classes mirror others, the Ironbreaker for eg largely mirrors the Black Orc. Right now there’s no exact mirror for the Swordmaster and Chosen, so it’s easy to assume that Blackguard will mirror Swordmaster, and Knight will mirror Chosen. These classes are already in game and functional.
That said, I don’t fault Mythic for taking such an approach, if there’s any truth to it. Fact is, the game doesn’t strictly need the new classes right now. Everyone is quite happily zooming along capturing keeps and doing those scenarios and whatever, and there doesn’t actually appear to be any glaring class imbalances, or situation where only 1 side has access to certain mechanics (anyone remember pre-BC WoW, where only Alliance had Paladins and Fear Ward and, as such, were pretty much way ahead of the raiding curve than Horde?). This game could quite happily chug along for another 6 months, I feel, before a content patch was warranted.
And here we are, getting one within 2 months of release.
So I don’t particularly care if classes and content was cut for alterior, potentially nefarious reasons. It’s sneaky, but it works, keeps us interested. We’ll still get that content, and for free, and I suppose that’s fine for me. It’s a good marketing strategy from EA/Mythic, and fact is, they’re going to need it. They have to play by the market leader’s rules, after all. Staggering releases of new stuff is the only real way to compete with the content juggernaught that is Blizzard.
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