Blizzard has quietly handed a chunk of its player base one of the most consequential surveys in the studio’s recent history, arriving shortly before WoW: Forever’s confirmed global launch on November 4, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. Starting around September 27, 2026, selected WoW: Forever players began seeing a temporary questionnaire inside the Battle.net launcher asking them to rate their interest in 11 potential new classes, among them a Bard and a Witch. Screenshots of the survey spread fast, and by October 1 outlets including PCGamer, Kotaku, Eurogamer, and GameSpot had all independently corroborated the list, pulling details from leaked images and forum threads rather than any Blizzard press release.
Every outlet that has covered the story has attached the same caveat, and it’s worth stating up front: this is an interest survey, not a content reveal. Blizzard has not announced any of these classes for WoW: Forever, and no surveyed class has an officially confirmed release date, final name, announced abilities, or confirmed inclusion in the launch version. Several of the concepts overlap so heavily with existing kits that some may never leave the whiteboard. Still, the breadth of the list, the specificity of the described mechanics, and the simple fact that Blizzard is testing concepts it scrapped decades ago make this one of the more significant pieces of WoW news this year.
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What the WoW: Forever Class Survey Actually Asked
According to PCGamer, the full survey was posted online after a participant shared screenshots, and it listed 11 proposed classes: Monk, Demon Hunter, Tinker, Illusionist, San’layn, Necromancer, a rune-based concept that different reporters labeled Rune Knight, Runemaster, or Metalborn, Bard, Warden, Witch, and Death Knight. Each entry reportedly came packaged with a short fantasy description, an intended group role (tank, healer, damage, or support), an armor type, and a handful of example abilities, formatted the way Blizzard typically pitches a class to its internal design reviewers.
Eurogamer’s write-up, sourced from posts on the Classic WoW subreddit, matches that same 11-class list almost word for word, which is part of why the story gained traction so quickly across separate outlets instead of staying a single-source rumor. Kotaku’s reporting adds an important wrinkle: the screenshots that circulated weren’t perfectly clean. The outlet noted that the Warden entry’s listed abilities actually appear to belong to San’layn, suggesting either a labeling error in Blizzard’s own survey or a mix-up introduced when participants photographed and re-shared the questionnaire.
Blizzard itself has not issued a statement beyond what’s visible in its own community spaces, where a forum discussion dated October 19 and updated October 21, 2026 says the survey presented 11 possible classes, including Bard and Witch. A thread on the official WoW: Forever general discussion forum, titled simply “New Classes,” shows players discussing the same list and debating which concepts Blizzard is likely to actually ship versus which ones were included to gauge baseline interest in long-shot ideas.
Bard: The Support Class WoW Has Never Had
Of the 11 concepts, Bard is the one generating the most discussion, largely because World of Warcraft has never shipped a true bard-style support class in over two decades of expansions. Reports describe it as a cloth-wearing support specialist built around performing songs and playing instruments to heal and buff allies, with musical instruments potentially filling the weapon slot instead of a staff or wand. That would make it mechanically distinct from existing healers like Priest or Druid, which lean on direct spells rather than sustained party-wide performance buffs.
The appeal is obvious from a design standpoint: other long-running fantasy MMOs have used bard-adjacent support classes for years, and WoW fans have requested the archetype since at least the Burning Crusade era. What the current reporting does not establish is a verified, complete spell list. Coverage consistently repeats songs, healing, and buffing as the core identity, but the finer mechanical details remain provisional until Blizzard publishes anything official.
Witch: Cauldrons, Golems, and Ranged Support
The Witch concept pairs ranged damage with a support toolkit built around dark magic rather than music. According to the leaked material, the Witch would wear cloth armor and use abilities tied to blood rituals and old-god-adjacent power, including the ability to place a cauldron that buffs nearby allies and to summon a golem companion. Some reporting frames the golem summon as costing the caster a portion of their own health, which, if accurate, would give the class a distinctive risk-reward rhythm compared to other cloth casters.
The obvious design tension here is overlap. Warlock already covers dark-magic ranged damage, and Alchemy as a profession already covers cauldron-style crafting fantasy. Community discussion on Blizzard’s own forums has focused heavily on whether Witch can carve out a distinct identity or whether it ends up feeling like a reskinned Warlock with a support lean bolted on.
Tinker: The Mech Class Fans Have Wanted Since Warcraft III
Tinker is arguably the least surprising name on the list, since it’s been one of the WoW community’s most-requested classes for well over a decade, with roots going back to the Goblin Tinker unit in Warcraft III. The survey reportedly describes it as a mail-armor class flexible enough to tank, deal ranged damage, or support, built around piloting a personal mech. Example abilities mentioned in the leaked material include a mech that fires rockets and deployable stations or gadgets that heal allies, giving it a kit that spans all three traditional roles depending on how a player specs it.
Because Tinker has such a long fan history and an established visual identity from the Goblin engineering questline in vanilla WoW, it’s widely viewed in community threads as the concept most likely to eventually ship in some form, even if the exact ability list changes dramatically between now and any real announcement.
Illusionist, Necromancer, and San’layn: The Deep Cuts
Three of the survey’s concepts lean further into Warcraft lore and design history that most current players have never seen in a playable form. Illusionist is described as a leather-armor ranged DPS class built around conjuring illusory monsters, including murloc-style summons, plus mirror-image-style copies of the caster for added confusion in combat. The overlap with Mage’s existing mirror image spell and Warlock’s demon summons is an immediate point of debate among players parsing the leak.
Necromancer carries more history than any other name on the list. It’s a class Blizzard originally planned for the original, vanilla release of World of Warcraft before cutting it during development, and the version now being tested is reportedly a cloth-armor caster built around shadow and death magic. Coverage repeatedly flags the same design question: with Death Knight, Warlock, and Shadow Priest all already occupying death- and shadow-themed space, how distinct can a new Necromancer actually be?
San’layn, the vampiric undead elves tied to the Scourge and later Horde-adjacent storylines, round out the trio. The survey reportedly frames San’layn around blood and vampirism mechanics, though as Kotaku pointed out, the ability details attached to this entry in circulated screenshots may actually have been mislabeled and could belong to the Warden concept instead, muddying exactly what a San’layn class would play like.
Warden and Metalborn: Tank Concepts Rooted in Warcraft Lore
Warden is pitched as a plate-armor tank and melee DPS hybrid, drawing on the Warden order associated with Maiev Shadowsong and the night elf justice system seen across multiple Warcraft games. Reported abilities lean toward glaives, pursuit, and imprisonment-style crowd control, fitting an enforcer fantasy rather than a straightforward shield tank.
The rune-based concept is the messiest entry in the leak, and that’s by design of the leak itself rather than Blizzard’s. Different people who saw the survey reported the same class under four different names: Metalborn, Runemaster, Rune Knight, and Runesmith. The overlapping reports suggest this was one concept with inconsistent labeling across different survey variants or screenshots, not four separate pitches. The shared thread across every version is a tank, healer, or melee DPS class that draws on Titan-linked runes and can transform parts of the body into metals like iron or silver.
Why Monk, Demon Hunter, and Death Knight Are Also on the List
Three names on the survey aren’t new concepts at all. Monk, Demon Hunter, and Death Knight are all existing retail WoW classes, which tells us something about the scope of WoW: Forever rather than about Blizzard inventing anything new for them. Their inclusion suggests Blizzard is gauging interest in porting already-proven classes into the vanilla-rooted Forever experience, alongside testing appetite for entirely new archetypes, rather than treating this purely as a new-class pitch deck.
That distinction matters for how seriously players should take the rest of the list. A studio doesn’t need a player survey to decide whether an already-shipped, already-balanced class belongs in a new mode. Mixing known classes in with speculative ones points toward Forever being treated as a genuinely separate ruleset that needs its own class-availability decisions made from scratch, similar in spirit to how Minecraft’s first new dimension in 14 years required its own standalone design pass rather than reusing existing systems wholesale.
WoW’s Class-Addition History, in Context
Blizzard doesn’t add classes often, and each prior addition has been a flagship expansion feature rather than a routine patch item. Death Knight launched with Wrath of the Lich King in 2008 as the game’s first hero class. Monk arrived with Mists of Pandaria in 2012. Demon Hunter followed with Legion in 2016. Evoker, the most recent addition, launched with Dragonflight in 2022. That cadence, roughly one new class every four to six years, is the backdrop against which this 11-concept survey looks unusually large: Blizzard is testing more potential new classes in one document than it has actually shipped across the game’s entire 20-plus year history.
| Class | Expansion | Year Added | Role Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Death Knight | Wrath of the Lich King | 2008 | Tank / Melee DPS |
| Monk | Mists of Pandaria | 2012 | Tank / Healer / Melee DPS |
| Demon Hunter | Legion | 2016 | Tank / Melee DPS |
| Evoker | Dragonflight | 2022 | Healer / Ranged DPS |
| 11 surveyed concepts | WoW: Forever (unconfirmed) | Not announced | Mixed, per reports |
The 11 Surveyed Classes at a Glance
Pulling together the reporting from PCGamer, Kotaku, Eurogamer, and the German and French outlets that independently confirmed the same list, here’s how the 11 concepts reportedly break down by armor type and role. Treat every mechanic below as provisional, since none of it comes from an official Blizzard design document.
| Class | Armor Type | Reported Role | Core Mechanic (per reports) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bard | Cloth | Support / Healer | Songs and instruments buff and heal allies |
| Witch | Cloth | Ranged DPS / Support | Cauldrons and golem summons |
| Tinker | Tank / Ranged DPS / Support | Pilotable mech with rockets and gadgets | |
| Illusionist | Leather | Ranged DPS | Illusory monster summons, mirror images |
| Necromancer | Cloth | Ranged DPS | Shadow and death magic, cut from original vanilla WoW |
| San’layn | Unclear | Unclear (details possibly mislabeled) | Blood and vampirism themes |
| Warden | Plate | Tank / Melee DPS | Glaives, pursuit, imprisonment-style control |
| Metalborn / Rune Knight | Unclear | Tank / Healer / Melee DPS | Titan-linked runes, body transforms to metal |
| Monk | Leather | Tank / Healer / Melee DPS | Existing retail class, not new |
| Demon Hunter | Leather | Tank / Melee DPS | Existing retail class, not new |
| Death Knight | Plate | Tank / Melee DPS | Existing retail class, not new |
How the Leak Spread: A Timeline
The survey first surfaced around September 27, 2026, when a WoW: Forever participant posted screenshots of the Battle.net launcher questionnaire online, according to multiple outlets tracking the story’s origin. The initial wave of coverage stayed relatively contained to community aggregation sites and forum threads through September 28 and 29. By September 30, mainstream gaming press in Germany and France had picked up the story independently, publishing their own translations of the same 11-class list. English-language heavyweights followed over October 1, with PCGamer, Kotaku, GameSpot, and Eurogamer all running their own corroborating pieces within roughly 48 hours of each other, each citing slightly different combinations of Reddit threads, Blizzard forum posts, and the original screenshots.
The speed and geographic spread of the pickup is itself notable. Stories built on a single leaked screenshot often stay siloed in one region’s gaming press. This one jumped from English to German to French to Hungarian coverage within roughly 72 hours, largely because the underlying source material, the survey itself, was specific and consistent enough for multiple outlets to independently verify the same class list rather than relying on each other’s reporting.
Community and Analyst Reaction
Reaction inside Blizzard’s own community spaces has split along predictable lines. Some players are treating the list as a wish-fulfillment exercise, pointing to that forum thread on WoW: Forever’s general discussion board where fans are already ranking which of the 11 concepts they’d want to see ship first. Others are more skeptical, noting that Blizzard regularly tests concepts in surveys that never make it past the interest-gauging stage, a pattern long-time WoW content creators have pointed to when discussing how previous, narrower-scope surveys compared to this unusually broad one.
The scale of community engagement with this leak mirrors a broader pattern across live-service games this year: large, loyal player bases respond intensely to even unconfirmed hints of new content, a dynamic also visible in how quickly players piled into Modern Warfare 4’s open beta the moment it went live, or how closely fans tracked player counts after The Witcher 3’s remaster topped 120,000 concurrent players. In each case, a legacy or long-running title generated outsized attention from a relatively narrow piece of news, underscoring how much latent demand exists for meaningful updates to games players have already invested years into.
Competitive Context: WoW: Forever vs. Classic, Retail, and Rival MMOs
WoW: Forever occupies an unusual spot in Blizzard’s current lineup. It sits alongside WoW Classic, which re-releases the game’s original expansions on a fixed historical cadence, and WoW retail, the continuously updated modern version, which is now World of Warcraft: Midnight, with patch 12.1.5 live since October 13, 2026. Where Classic deliberately preserves old systems and retail pushes forward with new mechanics every expansion, Forever sits between the two, which makes a class survey like this one a genuinely open question rather than a foregone conclusion the way a retail class reveal might be. Blizzard has not confirmed any surveyed class, and reports only mention a Skyborne race for Forever, which is scheduled to launch on November 4, 2026.
That three-way split also shapes how WoW: Forever competes for attention against rival MMOs and live-service games more broadly, a dynamic sharpened by Blizzard’s confirmation that the new Skyborne race can join either of the game’s two established factions, Horde or Alliance, rather than being locked into a third camp of its own. Players choosing between a vanilla-flavored WoW variant and other long-running online games are making the same kind of engagement bet seen across the genre, where platforms increasingly compete on how often they can credibly promise meaningful new content rather than just raw subscriber counts. That same dynamic shows up in how aggressively Valve has been rewriting Steam’s discovery algorithm to keep attention on games that update, rather than ones that go quiet.
What a New Class Would Mean for Blizzard’s Roadmap
Adding any class to a live MMO is a multi-year commitment, not a single patch. Every past WoW class launch has required new talent trees, itemization rules, balance passes across every existing raid and dungeon tier, and new starting-zone content, the same kind of build WoWHead reports will span levels 1 through 12 for Skyborne’s new starting experience when WoW: Forever launches. That’s a large part of why Blizzard has only shipped four classes in more than 20 years. If even one or two of the 11 surveyed concepts, Bard and Tinker are the two most frequently cited as fan favorites in community discussion, actually move from survey to development, it would represent a significant resourcing decision specifically for the WoW: Forever track rather than the main retail game.
It also raises a market-positioning question. A successful new class in a vanilla-flavored product could pull some retail players toward Forever, or it could simply expand WoW’s overall addressable audience by giving long-lapsed players a reason to return to a version of the game that still feels familiar. Either outcome matters for Blizzard’s broader live-service strategy at a moment when attention across the gaming industry is unusually fragmented between dozens of competing long-tail titles, a dynamic reflected in how even dominant free-to-play platforms have seen their playtime share shift as players spread their time across more games than ever.
Predictions: What Happens Next
- Expect Blizzard to stay silent on specifics for weeks, if not months. Companies that run interest surveys rarely confirm or deny leaked contents quickly, since doing so would short-circuit the data-gathering purpose of the survey itself.
- Tinker and Bard are the most likely candidates to eventually ship in some form, given Tinker’s decade-plus fan campaign and Bard’s status as the one true support-class gap in WoW’s current roster.
- The rune-based concept’s inconsistent naming (Metalborn, Runemaster, Rune Knight, Runesmith) will likely get cleaned up into a single official name if Blizzard ever moves forward with it, since the current confusion stems from leak conditions, not a Blizzard decision to use four names.
- San’layn’s unclear ability set, muddled by the possible Warden mix-up in circulated screenshots, means it’s the concept most likely to be reworked or dropped entirely before any official reveal.
- Expect follow-up surveys. Reports note that previous WoW: Forever surveys tested narrower sets of ideas, suggesting Blizzard is iterating through player feedback in stages rather than committing to this exact 11-class list as final.
Why This Story Matters Beyond WoW
Player surveys like this one are a window into how major live-service studios actually make content decisions, which is increasingly by testing ideas with real players before committing engineering resources rather than relying purely on internal design intuition. That approach has become standard practice across the industry’s biggest ongoing titles, and it mirrors how other long-running games have used player data to decide which large, resource-intensive features are worth building, a pattern also visible in disputes playing out around other live-service titles, including ongoing legal scrutiny of engagement-driving design choices across the broader games industry.
For WoW specifically, the fact that Blizzard is willing to test a scrapped, decades-old idea like Necromancer alongside brand-new concepts like Witch suggests a studio digging deep into its own design archive for Forever rather than treating it as a throwaway side project. Whether that translates into an actual shipped class in 2027 or simply useful player-sentiment data remains, for now, entirely Blizzard’s call.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the WoW: Forever class survey officially confirmed by Blizzard?
No. The survey itself appeared in the Battle.net launcher for selected players, but Blizzard has not published any official statement confirming which, if any, of the 11 surveyed classes will actually be added to WoW: Forever.
What are all 11 classes in the leaked WoW: Forever survey?
According to reports from PCGamer, Kotaku, and Eurogamer, the list includes Bard, Witch, Tinker, Illusionist, Necromancer, San’layn, Warden, a rune-based class reported under multiple names (Metalborn, Runemaster, Rune Knight, or Runesmith), plus the existing classes Monk, Demon Hunter, and Death Knight.
What does the Bard class reportedly do in WoW: Forever?
Reports describe Bard as a cloth-armor support and healing class that uses songs and musical instruments to buff and heal allies, filling a support archetype WoW has never had before.
What does the Witch class reportedly do?
The Witch is reported as a cloth-armor ranged damage and support class that uses dark-magic abilities including summoning a buffing cauldron and a golem companion.
Is Necromancer a brand-new class idea?
No. Multiple reports note Blizzard originally designed a Necromancer class for the original, vanilla release of World of Warcraft before cutting it during development, and the concept now being surveyed appears to revisit that scrapped design.
Why are Monk, Demon Hunter, and Death Knight on a “new classes” survey if they already exist?
Their inclusion suggests Blizzard is also gauging interest in bringing already-existing retail classes into WoW: Forever’s ruleset, separate from testing entirely new class concepts.
When did Blizzard last add a new class to World of Warcraft?
The most recent class addition was Evoker, which launched with the Dragonflight expansion in 2022. Before that, Demon Hunter arrived with Legion in 2016, Monk with Mists of Pandaria in 2012, and Death Knight with Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.
When could a new class actually launch in WoW: Forever?
No date has been announced, and no surveyed class has an officially confirmed release date, final name, announced abilities, or confirmed inclusion in the launch version. Past WoW class additions have taken years of development between internal testing and launch, and this survey represents an early interest-gathering stage rather than a confirmed development milestone.
