The next World of Warcraft expansion, Midnight, due on March 2, does not include a new character class, but it does include the next best thing — in theory. The Demon Hunter, a class that was originally added in 2016’s Legion expansion, gains a third subclass specialization, the Devourer, which is already available in-game. As is often (but not quite always) the case with WoW specializations, the Devourer looks and plays strikingly different to the other two Demon Hunter specs. On the face of it, Blizzard has served up an exciting new flavor of player character for this 21-year-old game.
Like all the classes that have been added to World of Warcraft post-launch, the Devourer is carefully tailored to match the theme of the expansion it’s attached to. But in terms of the nitty-gritty of its design, it shows a lack of the refinement and rhythmic complexity that were once the hallmark of WoW’s class design and an important bedrock for its success.
Demon Hunters are Illidari: elvish disciples of Illidan Stormrage who employ forbidden magics in their ceaseless war against the demons of the Burning Legion — magics that make them somewhat demonic themselves, with curved horns and ragged wings. The Devourer expands those magics to include the Void and Cosmic energies unleashed by WoW’s current big bad, Xal’atath, the Harbinger of the Void. Void magic isn’t inherently evil, but it taps into a terrifying cosmic force that seeks to consume and nullify all existence. Using it is fraught with risk and considered bad form, to put it mildly.
Thematically, the Devourer ties in perfectly with both Demon Hunter lore and the Midnight expansion, which is soaked in the Void’s blue-black color scheme, and is partially set in the ancestral elvish homeland of Quel’Thalas. Practically, the Devourer fleshes Demon Hunters out with a third spec — almost all WoW classes have three — in a very different idiom.
Havoc and Vengeance are melee damage and tanking specs, but the Devourer is a mid-range caster. Like all Demon Hunters, it builds up rage and breaks soul fragments off its enemies, then collects the fragments and spends both resources in devastating attacks. Its signature skill is Void Ray, which briefly transforms the Devourer into a supersized, spectral form with a void-magic cannon instead of a face. That sounds cool, and it looks cool. But it’s not so cool to play.
The theory behind the Devourer is interesting: a magic-user that has some of the mobility of the Demon Hunter’s melee classes, as it scoots around the battlefield collecting soul fragments. Unlike most ranged damage classes, the Devourer can move and shoot. The trouble is that its combat rotation is very monotonous. It’s extremely reliant on a single spell, Consume, to generate rage and soul fragments, which are then spent by just a couple of others, Void Ray and Reap. You have to spam Consume constantly and it gets old.
Leveling a Devourer, I thought this might be an early-game problem, so I boosted the character to level 80 (the current cap, at least until Midnight comes out). At max level, the rotation was enlivened by some situational abilities: Voidfall replaces Reap with a meteor strike, Void Metamorphosis increases the rotation pace and damage output for brief windows as you stomp around as a giant cosmic demon. The visuals are awesome. But in reality, the combat rotations are still very limited and repetitive, and you’re still spending 80% of your time shuffling about and casting Consume, Consume, Consume, Consume. It’s kind of boring.
This would be more excusable if the Devourer had any reason to exist beyond being lore-appropriate and filling a conspicuously empty spot for a Demon Hunter spec. But it doesn’t really. It’s very close in feel and practical application to the damage-dealing specs of the Evoker, the last new class to be added to WoW in 2022’s Dragonflight. The Evoker is, again, a mid-range caster with high mobility. Did we need another one so soon?
It’s enough to make you wonder if World of Warcraft’s class design team is running out of ideas. The game is built on its original nine character classes, all of which unearthed specific flavors and satisfying mechanics from the broadest fantasy archetypes: Warrior, Hunter, Mage, Rogue, and so on. It is truly a classic lineup, a load-bearing pillar of one of the most successful and long-running games of all time.
To begin with, WoW’s development team was able to sustain this run. The Death Knight, a merciless undead warrior from 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King, and the Monk, a fleet martial artist from 2012’s Mists of Pandaria, created thrilling and distinctive new fantasies. Case in point: the Brewmaster Monk, a drunken master of a tank, who wrongfoots enemies with weaving moves and smashes kegs of beer over their heads.
The Demon Hunter worked too, but there was a sense that it existed more to fulfil a lore fantasy than to meaningfully enrich or expand WoW’s class roster. This sense deepened with the Evoker, a class that’s limited to the Dracthyr race introduced in Dragonflight, and that has a vague and ironically unevocative concept which basically boils down to “dragon stuff.” If you haven’t engaged with WoW in a while, it’s hard to remember what an Evoker is, or why you might want to play one. According to Data for Azeroth, the Evoker is the least-played class in WoW by far.
It might be that World of Warcraft simply has too many options already. Thirteen classes divided into 40 specializations doesn’t leave a lot of corners for the designers to fill. But surely it’s still possible to find thematically fun, mechanically interesting new spins on existing roles, as the Death Knight and Monk did.
At Blizzard, class and skill design is a deeply rooted institutional skill, bound into the studio’s DNA. It’s still evident in Overwatch’s heroes and Diablo 4’s classes: the new iteration of Diablo’s Paladin is a note-perfect take on a classical mainstay, while the animalistic, acrobatic Spiritborn shows there’s still room for true invention in fantasy role-playing class design. World of Warcraft could use some of that energy. Maybe there are only so many ways to flesh out the roster of a 21-year-old game, but WoW is always just one great class design from feeling brand new again.
