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New race/class combos will not be live before Cataclysm
In a very short answer, the devs confirmed in the recent Twitter developer chat that the new race and class combinations will not go live until Cataclysm itself goes live. In a way, this isn't too much a surprise. Despite some rumors to the contrary, we didn't get death knights until the first day of Wrath, and we had to wait for Burning Crusade to play draenei and blood elves. So with that in mind, it makes sense that we have to wait until the last possible moment for yet another new breed of player characters. That said, it is probably true that the new race/class combinations are a bit different from the examples above. After all, they simply take existing races and existing classes and put them together, so it might seem that it wouldn't be too hard to just turn them on.
The Queue: Irrelevant
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Embedded video has absolutely not relevance to anything in this edition of The Queue. Why did I use it? Because I like the music. Do I really need more of a reason than that? Nope! Now let's jump into the questions. Some of them came from right here on WoW.com, and others came from Twitter.Lavoz asked..."With Cataclysm, the blood elves will finally have access to the warrior class. Is there any information as to what order they will belong to? Will they be a part of the Blood Knights, or will we refer to them as Spellbreakers?"
A discussion in defense of new race/class combinations
There's been a lot of news about possible new features arriving with the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. I covered one of those recently, that being the possibility of new race/class combinations, ones that were previously unavailable to player characters.Now, this feature would actually make a ton of sense, especially taking the following into consideration: - We've had the same 9 classes available for going on 5 years now.- With new races being added in Cataclysm, there's almost certainly no hero class.- It's quite likely that the new races will be unable to be Death Knights, at least at first.- The leaked information from MMO-Champion suggests that Azeroth is getting a makeover, graphically and design-wise.- The Paid Faction Switch service is coming soon, and adding these new combinations would bring almost 100% parity between factions in terms of classes available.- Blizzard has been tossing quests that hint at these new combinations into the past few patches and onto the PTR.But of course, the WoW community is a fickle beast, and what they seem to be focusing on here tends not to be the gameplay benefits of adding new race/class combinations, but the "lore-breaking" aspects of said combinations.Well, I don't think any of these are unreasonable, and in fact many of them have precedents in lore. To make the discussion more interesting, I've brought in my lore-hound colleague Daniel Whitcomb, and we'll expound on each new possible option to give you clear reasons why they're not only plausible, but likely. On top of that, I'm bringing in our class columnists to give their insight on the new choices and explain their pros and cons in terms of gameplay!Let's start, shall we?
