Kris Zierhut, Principal Game Designer for Combat, Items, Classes and Talents, opened the class and item section of the World of Warcraft: Forever Deep Dive panel at BlizzCon 2026 with the team’s combat philosophy: Classic combat stays as it is. “It’s important to us that we do not change how that combat feels,” he said, and every rule on his slide follows from that.
Ana Resendez, lead software engineer on the team, handed him the stage at the end of her realmless section and introduced him as a 21 year veteran of World of Warcraft. “It’s been two years since we stopped work on Season of Discovery,” Zierhut said. “What have the class and item designers been up to since then? We’re going to need to move quickly.”
He gave the order for his section: combat philosophy, changes to itemization, new racial abilities, and a deep dive on Paladin talent and class changes, chosen “to illustrate all of our class design across the game.” A show of hands for Paladin players drew a cheer.
The six rules
“Our team loves the feel and pacing of combat in World of Warcraft Classic,” Zierhut said. The slide, titled Combat Philosophy, listed four rules with two nested under the last. Keep Classes Simple, which he qualified as simple “but with surprising depth”. Keep Classes Distinct, “each having unique strengths and weaknesses, no homogenization”. Combat Pacing is Slower: “It takes you about 15 seconds to kill a creature on your own.” And Group Gameplay is Tactical, which he read aloud as dungeon gameplay.
The two sub-points say what tactical means. Crowd Control Matters: “You need a polymorph, banish, root, trap, to keep your healer from getting killed, to keep the tank from being overrun from too much damage.” Threat Matters: “Our tanks can only do threat on three or four targets at once. You can’t pull a whole dungeon all at once.”
The slide’s inset image was a group fight on open sand: an orc with a sword and shield squaring up to an elf character with a sword, with a caster and one more party member behind them. The stream camera pushed in on it during the crowd control and threat points.
What this section did not give is anything beyond that one number. No ability values, threat figures, or named class changes were given here; those came in the sections that followed. Whether “slower” means kill times identical to Classic or a retune around a 15 second target was not said.