Trolls and Shaman aren't already milking voodoo enough? Whilst Witch Doctor is nice I think it is too similar to shaman. Maybe a Shadow Hunter/Witch Doctor combo could be made enough separate from Shaman. Could also have it as a second ranged weapon using class maybe. The trouble again is which Alliance race gets the voodoo class? It really doesn't fit in with any of them in the slightest. At a stretch you could say some human sect copied it off the trolls but thats pushing it. The other 4 would be absolute no from me.

The Alliance could get nelf Sentinels as an identical in function but different in flavor class (think heroism/bloodlust). They're also big on ranged weapons, and being a part of Night Elf society should have some druidic ability.

But we already fight Vodoo Gnomes, surely some of them could rejoin the mainstream Allience.

I can see it now. A lost colony of gnomes living on a hidden island deep in the south seas that, over centuries, slowly degraded into barbarism and witch-craft, has been discovered. These gnomes retained their notorious curiosity and tinkering ways but in the absence of metal instead applied them to the creation and mastery of poisons, herbal brews, and various occult magics, making them some of the deadliest Witch-Doctors on all of Azeroth. The gnomes of Gnomeregon worked hard to bring their long-lost brethren into the folds of the Alliance, but who truly trusts these dark, deadly, and savage Voodoo Gnomes?!

Hm... if the idea is to add a combination ranged/healing class, maybe horde gets Shadow Hunter and alliance gets what Tyrande actually was in WC3, Priestess of the Moon -- a petless bow-user who can heal.

Completely different shift of gears here, but do we know what ANY of the bosses could be in this Colosseum? I'm still struggling to understand what this Colosseum is even for.

WoW -> Info -> Under Development
Does this imply that we're going to be combating against the Argent Crusade's champions and/or opposing faction? (Alliance fights Horde, Horde fights Alliance). I've somewhat been assuming that we'd be battling undead champions, but now that seems very naive.

Who are the champions of the Argent Crusade? And what would this mean lore wise if we defeat the Argent champions? Nothing?

It seems perplexing that we'd go from lore-rich Ulduar to just a near dead-zone in the Colosseum where our actions hardly matter.

Hmmm . . . if you look at the tournament so far, it's very focused on each race, and each of their 5 home cities. Hmmm . .

Ok, so they haven't said whether or not normal bosses == heroic bosses, so what if you had to fight 10 bosses (5 normal 5 heroic) representing each home city in some way - say a troll witch doctor, a gnome mechaspider, an orc warlock, etc.

Now that you mention it, having 5 race-based bosses seems so obvious that I'm kicking myself for not having thought about it earlier. Idle speculation only is fun so long though. Here's hoping that the fights themselves are fun since as mentioned before, the lore will be nearly non-existent and our characters' actions will not matter at all apart from proving that we are actually Heroes of the Alliance and the Horde and our numerous accomplishments to date are no flukes.

That'd be cool, but after they only solved the balance issues with paladins and shaman by giving them to each side I doubt we'll get different classes for each faction again. Although maybe they could make them mechanically the same while still having different names for things, like Bloodlust/Heroism.

I can see the bosses being the champions for each city we see in the tents right now.

This suddenly reminds me of the Canonner/Fusilier from FFTA2.

And I think conceptually it's pretty neat, both on accounts of the Horde/Alliance flavor. (Although even though Blizzard has taken the route of calling Horde Paladins as Blood Knights, their official class is Paladin, so I wonder what would be the "official" name).

Cannoneers could shoot buffs at people from far away. Or shoot enemy targets for either damage or debuffs.

I can see some neat things come from this. Such as even shooting injectors (mana or health) from far away. I think there is even room for more unique mana-restoring abilities. Sort of like a 1 time mana-injector on a 2 minute cooldown similar to Hand of Salvation.

I think there probably are some faction specific fights (albeit models only, mirrored otherwise). I’m expecting something like an opposite faction fight, a mounted boss fight vs some Argent champion, some sort of arena based skirmish fight (think 10+ NPC Magister’s Terrace arena), the Black Knight fight, possibly another fight vs some tournament Argent Champion and the last fight against one or more lore characters as a skirmish (“Congrats, you are the tournament champs, you get to face Tirion!”).

I’m still expecting it to have minimal scourge contact, just be a normal medieval style tournament so we fight in the Jousting competition, the swords, grand melee, etc... rather than other things I’ve seen suggested like fighting captured scourge/monsters/animals.

I can tell you: if one of the possibilities for a representative of Darnassus is Staghelm, I know plenty of people on my (RP) server who will line up around the block for a chance to slaughter him, even if the fights are tedious or vehicle-based or whatever other option would make them otherwise hate it.

This would be a somewhat-awesome chance for us to face our own leaders, as the opposing faction does in PvP from time to time. Or, if they... imagine if we face the opposing leaders. Is there any chance that they'll use this as a way to open up access to black warbears?

Indeed, facing faction leaders would be huge. Poor Mechatorque and Vol'jin would no longer feel shafted.

As for black warbears - no. Killing enemy leaders is PuG land, if necessary. And if you could complete the PvP kill achievements by defeating them in the Tourney, then you'd probably be able to earn Tourney achievements by going and doing them in enemy cities. You know, with no max player limit? People can participate outside the raid, just not earn credit until respawn and repeat.

It looks like we will be fighting captured Scourge and other Northrend creatures.

Yeah. It sounds like it will be "random monsters" very much in the style of the Ring of Blood and the ZD Amphitheater. Which, lore-wise, is a bit of a shame. Even the Under Development text calls it a "mystery", so I suppose it doesn't really have any particular story. After all, why would the Argent Crusade have a hostile val'kyr, or a bunch of jormungar at its disposal?

Getting back to the always fun speculation on hero classes and expansions. What about if the new expansion, assuming that involves the South Seas, adds both a new race *and* a new hero class. Specifically, I'm thinking about Goblins as a new race for both factions. I would hesitate to make them truely neutral (ie being able to talk crossfaction), but you could easily add Horde Goblins and Alliance Goblins and give them more or less the same quests, like Death Knights. The Goblins would then be able to be become Tinkers, a class maybe like the WAR Engineers (basically, 'reverse' hunters. they build turrets/constructs that do ranged dps, while the player is the tank).

Alternatively, sticking with the South Seas, a possibility could be something like a Buccaneer class. Pirate-related classes are very easily suitable for all the existing races. It would be a fun and light-hearted class, exactly opposite of the dark and depressing Death Knights. The problem would be to make them sufficiently interesting and different from, say, hunters.

Yeah, I have to say that I'm pretty disappointed with the "fight random monsters" emphasis of the Coliseum. Not only does that sound pretty unepic, but it's not lore-relevant. I really liked the idea of getting to fight major friendly figures in the Warcraft lore (Ronin, Valeera/Broll/Varian, Velen, Thasaurrian, etc.) but.. this is just lame.

Lets be happy that Blizzard is not attempting to create a laughable story to explain everything (Did somebody say Infinite Draonflight?). Saying that it 'remains a mystery' is better than that, at least.

However, after Ulduar, I think we'll all agree this is a bit anticlimatic and disappointing. We went from Titan lore, Titan watchers, The Ulduar complex itself, Old Gods (Yogg had a large lvl 70-80 Northrend build up) - to a bunch of scourge in an arena (and not one, but two worms!).

I've got no doubt the encounters will be great. But i'll be interested to see if they attempt to spice up the lore - and give some notable backstory to the bosses and characters introduced. Compelling story/lore is an important part of the game for many players. We want a compelling reason to be there. Maybe not all will feel this way, maybe not the majority - but a nontrivial portion of players do.

Will Blizzard really take a gamble by giving us a 'bunch of bosses/mobs in an arena' after the lore-rich feast that is Ulduar? Future updates on the 3.2 instance hopefully will give us better insight into the likely answer.

I get the feeling the Jormungarr statement may return as a meme to bite them in the arse.

As for Goblins I still don't see them ever becoming a playable race, and if they did never a dual playable race. It just creates identification issues in BGs and pvp and the like that don't need to happen. If Goblins ever became playable my bet would be for Horde as a small race counterpoint to Gnome. What Alliance would get, who knows. Either way, it won't happen as they are quite happy to have Goblins as entrepreneurial bystanders profiting off of the war.

I still think we might get a few cosmetic changes to allow Orcs to be Mag'har and such might make it in though, especially with the rumoured at revamp of the main 8 race models.

The first thing I saw when I loggged on today was guild members making fun of the, "Not one, but TWO Jormungarr worms" line. It has good meme potential.

THe optimist in me is saying that Blizzard is going to devote an Ulduar-level of design resources (art, sound, lore, story, tie-ins etc) to Icecrown, instead of this instance. I'm ok with that - this expansion really is about Icecrown after all. It would be nice if every instance was like Ulduar, and we can expect Icecrown will be, but if expansions are expected to come faster, its entirely reasonable that every instance simply won't have that much detail.

That intro reads almost so tongue-in-cheek that I have to wonder if it's misdirection and you are going to get some sort of shocking lore event out of the Tournament. In terms of story structure, the "end" of the Argent Tournament would be a perfect time for a reminder that, yes, you guys are fighting a war and the bad guy is right next door.

That's what confuses me about this patch. They've put a fair amount of effort into keeping everything a secret and being very coy about hinting at the "Secret Raid™" and we get worms. Two worms. I can't help but think there's something else planned.