IF they were to pick one to switch to mail user, which should it be? Druid or DH?
Monk is out of the question, - the whole fighting style, fantasy, requires lighter armour - monk could have worked as a cloth user even. Def not mail.
Rogue is def leather - to sturdy for cloth, and mail makes too much noise for stealthing.
This leaves DH and Druid - both are strong contenders.
If I were to pick, my vote will go for druid. - both Moonkin and bear have a heavier armoured feel to them anyway - and rest doesn’t require leather if we’re honest - resto, being neither fast or sequestered indoors which usually necessitates lighter armour that benefit more from cloth and might as well use mail - makes no difference there. Cat form’s shapeshift negates any inconvenience mail may have, and it wont’ bother moonkin or bear either who prefer being heavier.
Meanwhile, DH could use mail, but most of their attacks are very speed orientated, . the demon form is enough for the armour the tank spec needs.
Shaman feel even less a mail class than druids… i mean the shaaman we see are almost always in furs or cloths as spiritual or tribal leaders - often constuled for wisdom… Thrall was a unique type wasn’t he, twho’s typeset doesn’t appear very often…but alss, again i think her eis lack of development of thier class concept properly, failign to pruseut he mail and shield waering shaman, and falling back to traditional impressions.
I think both DH and Druid are better mail candidates, if we are to have a mail calss…
Anyway, I think armor types should have abilities, or ability trees. There should be some noticeable advantages taht affect gameplay, both positively and utility wise
Out of these two i’d pick DH simply because i feel like they could at least make some sense with thin mail tunic. Like mithril armor in lotr that was given to MC.
As for druid, leather is too important symbolically - since we basically morph our skin and armor into cats/bear
Also druids aren’t the physically unfit typical caster types you see in most cloth users, one of the things about heavier armour is that you require some amount of fitness to be able to hold your weight up in them.
Hunter in mail comes from the time i think hunters use to be able melee with swords too, because they were modelled in part after a Ranger - which is great with both bow and swords too - but that is confined to classic. They’re exclusively mail now.
Rangers kinda do, but then again baking them into the hunter class doesn’t really make sense either. It probably happened because Blizzard didn’t have enough abilities and classes to distribute between two ranged physical classes back in the day.
Why do you even think druids are a contender to become a mail wearer? I would say okay to a demonhunter despite leather fitting better for the mobility. But druid makes no sense at all.
There should be some new mail wearing option, however changing existing classes to change armor type doesnt make sense. You could allow plate classes to wear mail as tmogs if you really want more mail looking classes. But mail doesn’t even look like mail ingame
Why would a hunter use mail armor and not leather, it makes no sense. Most mail in the game isn’t even chain mail it’s some sort of beast-scale armor.
You could argue than shaman have mail due to being a melee class but they would equally be effective in leather, it’s the same stats after all.
They could make chain mail for plate classes, it would at least give them some variety, it’s dire.
I agree but I wouldn’t say Shaman are mail because they have a melee spec, I reckon Blizzard shot themselves in the foot when making the armor types and needed to have the hunter share an armor type rather than just move it to being a leather wearer thus Shaman were giving mail armor. This is just my own theory but it makes sense when you think that it could have caused leather to be an even more dominating armor type.
Only choice I see is DH, as druid actually are the leather class FARTHEST from mail armor.
Traditional druids (think of DnD druids) actually even have a requirement to not wear metal (forged) armor, and only use “natural” (leather/cloth/hide) armor. From all those classes it would feel the strangest lorewise to wear mail armor.
DH would feel kind of “fine” I guess? the dhs in the lore/early days actually did not even wear armor.
The monks on the other hand are abit less restrictive. Do not get me wrong, it is rare for monks to wear heavy armor, it is just that there are SO many “monk” archetypes, that you could find some of them that do. At the moment, blizzard uses the heavy oriental/Buddhist monk archetype that actually would fit the “cloth” armor treatment.
Actually at the end of the day, it would work better to change monks to agi cloth, bring hunters to leather, and move shammies to plate (lorewise warcraft shamans are the most flexible, so they could do that), and BOOM, you got 4 of every armor type.
Problem is most cloth armor is robes, which doesn’t really work with melee classes, especially an agility one. Even if all their tier sets get converted into cloth that’s mostly what they’d have to work with.
Actually most monk orders/traditions were using robes, so it is kind of the point.
But yeah, don’t think it will happen cause of the long history of them in the game. Different armors don’t even pose a problem until master loot returns, unless that happens it is ok with different splits.
