Classes of Azeroth

The hub. Twelve of the thirteen WoW classes are playable. Each has its own page with lore, level-1 identity, every specialization graded against a 2024 subclass, and species pairings worth stealing.

Availability

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Books In Play

The Master Mapping Table

Every WoW specialization graded against a 2024 (5.5E) subclass.

Tally across 35 specs: 17 direct · 5 shared · 11 close · 2 thin. Twenty-two need nothing but flavour, and only two are genuinely thin — both of them Warlock.

The Four Systemic Differences

1 · No threat, no aggro

Affects: Protection Warrior · Protection Paladin · Guardian Druid · Blood DK · Brewmaster Monk

Nothing in 5.5E makes an enemy attack you. 5e assumes positioning and the Sentinel feat do the work that threat does in WoW, and the WoW sourcebook adds nothing here either.

What to do: play the flavour. Stepping in front, shouting, and refusing to move are all roleplay, and Banneret (Heroes of Faerûn) makes the shouting mechanical. Nobody at the table will miss a threat meter.

Caveat: the book could ship a threat mechanic inside a class skin. If it does, this section is wrong and that is a good outcome. Recheck 3 November.

2 · No stacking timers

Affects: Affliction Warlock · Restoration Druid · Restoration Shaman

WoW is built on applying and maintaining damage- and healing-over-time. 5.5E has perhaps three such spells and no management game around them. Healing here is burst and reactive rather than pre-emptive.

What to do: say it at session zero. An Affliction warlock who curses people and watches them rot plays fine as a character; they just resolve their damage immediately. Undead Patron (Ravenloft) gets closer to the decay theme than Fiend does.

Caveat: 60+ new spells ship with the book and some may well be damage-over-time. Recheck 3 November.

3 · One pet, not six

Affects: Demonology Warlock

Pact of the Chain gives you a single familiar. 5e limits summoning deliberately — six pets is six extra turns and the table crawls.

What to do: your imp is the whole pact, and it gets nastier as you level. If the player wants a horde, they want a different game, and steering them to Destruction is kinder than homebrewing it.

4 · No resource meters

Affects: every class, slightly

Rage, combo points, runes, chi, and mana-as-a-bar all refresh per-second; 5e refreshes per-rest. There is no equivalent and building one makes the conversion worse, not better. Reflavour freely and do not build a subsystem.

What the Sourcebook Adds

The classes with no WoW equivalent

Bard has no WoW class. The nearest thing Azeroth has is a troll drummer or a Tauren storyteller — a background, not a class conflict. College of Spirits (Ravenloft) is an excellent troll voodoo build, and College of the Moon (Heroes of Faerûn) suits a priestess of Elune better than any cleric domain does.

Artificer would be the gnomish engineer, and it is not available — the class lives only in Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, which I have not bought. See the books table above.

What Your Class Means Here

Quick Concept Table

If a Player Just Wants It To Work