Monking Around

Sooo...

Monking Around

Something many people thought would never happened occurred yesterday: Blizzard announced a new class for World of Warcraft, the Monk. 

We're looking at a leather-wearing, agility based fighter who can tank, dps, and melee heal!  The last one has me very excited as a healer.  It's a brand new dynamic, and one I can't wait to try out. 

There are three specs:

• Brewmaster (Tank) 
• Mistweaver (Melee Healer)
• Windwalker (DPS)

One of the monk's distinctive features will be its lack of auto attack.  Every attack you do will be generated by a button press, giving you much more involved, "twitchy" feel.  The animations on the monks seem very expressive and fluid and are based off martial arts.  Of course, we've only seen the Pandaren animations; who knows what a gnome or night elf would look like?  (Or a Tauren!)

Monks will wear cloth and leather armor, and their resource is chi.  In the case of the Mistweaver, when you switch to a healing stance, your chi will convert to mana.  The healing model will be based on proximity: you can heal those who are standing close to you in melee, or you can heal via statues that can be strategically placed near ranged DPS.  This reminds me a bit of atonement healing in disc priests; I hope there is some way to target your heals more effectively that what my priest currently does. 

 

I haven't heard yet how the other two play styles will work out.  They will be using the same leather gear as a druid.  There is a possibility that Brewmaster will work like feral tanking- which I guess we should start calling guardian tanking- or might be a form of agility tanking.  Windwalker is likely to be similar to a rogue.

I'm already thinking about what to name my future monk, and what class she should be.  My main's a 85 disc priest, and my favorite alts are a resto shammy and resto druid, so I'm definitely trying out the mistweaver spec.  I will have to roll a pandaren - how can you not? - but I would like to see how the class feels on classic races, as well.

There hasn't been any new news on updated character models, but if all the BC-era classes are getting a whole new set of animations, there has to be some improvements made, if only in the skeletal system. 

It saddens me that it will likely be months before we get to try out the new class.  People at Blizzcon get to play a demo, but in the everyday world, the PTR is still working on Patch 4.3.  It would be nothing short of miraculous if the next PTR is for MoP. 

As soon as that Beta hits, though- I will be there!