WoW News

In his AGC 2006 Keynote Presentation, Rob Pardo, Blizzard’s VP of Game Design, gives an example of how they designed the warrior class:

A lot of our initial class idea came out of Warcraft 3 because we’d been developing WC3 for one to two years before we started doing WoW, so a lot of our ideas around the classes came out of the heroes from WC3. Three of our warrior heroes were the Mountain King, the Blademaster and the Tauren Chieftain.

In WC3, each of the heroes only have 4 spells. One to one they don’t translate well to a deep RPG combat system. Rather than take all the heroes and make them classes in WoW, we concentrated them. We took cool abilities like thunder clap from the Mountain King, critical strike from the Blademaster, and shockwave from the Tauren Chieftain and out them in the warrior, which we thought made the warrior a much cooler and deeper combat class than if we’d taken all the WC3 warrior heroes which were very cool and visual but would have given us too many classes that were too alike one another with not enough unique mechanics.

We decided to concentrate that coolness in the warrior rather than spreading it out.

I haven’t played a Warrior in WoW (seemed too dull to be a tank) but I definitely agree some of the skills are useful. My PVP Hunter has quite a hard time with warriors, when they get close that is!