A confidential Blizzard survey put 11 WoW class ideas in front of players, Bard and Tinker included
Screenshots from a targeted Battle.net survey about WoW: Forever list 11 class concepts, among them Tinker, Bard, Necromancer, Warden and Illusionist. Blizzard has announced none of them, and the survey asked participants to keep quiet.
A survey tile appeared in the Battle.net launcher for a subset of World of Warcraft players in late September, asking them to rate possible class concepts for WoW: Forever. It carried a confidentiality notice. Screenshots got out anyway, and they amount to the first concrete look at which class fantasies Blizzard is actually testing.
The list
Reconstructed from several independent participant reports, the 11 concepts were Demon Hunter, Warden, Death Knight, Necromancer, San'layn, Witch, Tinker, Bard, Illusionist, Monk - and one rune-and-metal idea that different participants saw under different headings.
That last one caused most of the confusion. Metalborn, Rune Knight, Runemaster and Runesmith all circulated as if they were separate classes; according to community reports collected by Guided.news, they were alternative titles on the same concept, with some participants saying the body text still described Runemasters while the heading changed. That reads like a name test or multiple survey versions rather than four ideas.
Not everyone got it
Posts on Blizzard's own US and EU forums show the tile was targeted and short-lived: some players saw it, others never did, and at least one said they were screened out after questions about their country and their WoW Classic activity. One report has the tile already gone by September 25. Participants also described the survey links as tied to individual recipients.
What it doesn't mean
Market research is not a roadmap. Surveys like this routinely include control options and deliberately weak ideas to calibrate the responses, and the reports that leaked include no ranking and no winner. Four existing classes in the list - Demon Hunter, Death Knight, Monk and, in a sense, Warden - also suggest Blizzard was measuring appetite against known quantities. Until Blizzard says something, the WoW: Forever beta remains the only authoritative source for what is actually going in.
Why it matters
WoW: Forever rebuilds around the vanilla game, where the class roster is the whole identity of the thing. Even as unconfirmed research, a list with Bard, Tinker and Necromancer on it tells you Blizzard is at least willing to ask the question.
Why it matters
Class additions are the single biggest lever Blizzard has in WoW, and this is the first look at which concepts it is testing for WoW: Forever - though none of them are announced.