In another surprise, not just one but now a second character model preview has come out this week! However instead of an Artcraft blogpost they put the new model up on the Warlords of Draenor website. The preview is a bit different from others but check it out here or the images down below (click on them for the full image)!
Blizzard WoD Press Tour
Blizzard also started a WoD Press Tour in Europe and Korea, so we can expect more information from those in the next few days/weeks! To start off with the french site Mamytwink.com got to play in Draenor and he gave his first impressions. The full article can be found here, below is a translation (My french is not brilliant but I’ll do my best):
I played a Gnome Warrior in Shadowmoon Valley, the area of the alliance. After playing for about 5 hours and 80 quests I reached the end of the zone and lvl 92.
The new character models are excellent. The facial expressions are great!
At lvl 91 I had 63k health as a tank.
Mobs had around 100k health.
I did between 1k and 5k noncritical damage. I hit for 10k with crits.
To get from lvl 90 to 91 I had to get 597k experience and 640k exp for 91-92.
Quests grant between 10k and 15k exp with the hardest ones giving 20k experience.
There’s a new type of quest, the bonus quest. When you walk into a zone bonus quests can appear in your list. If you complete them you’ll get bonus experience and if you leave the zone it’ll be removed.
Shadowmoon Valley consists of big lush plains, everything happens in the moonlight. The surroundings are calm and feel good. The trees and plains are beautiful (colorful). The zone contains the Naaru, Draenei Villages and an Iron Horde base.
The Alliance starting area is very far along. Many details, impressive vegetation and full of different types of mobs.
I found a whole lot of The Burning Crusade mobs: Talbuks, Turtles, Larvas, Bears, Sporebats, Wolves, Bees. The new Talbuk and Sporebat models are EPIC.
The Alliance area focusses on Sporebats, Draeni / Iron Horde. Ner’zhul is the main bad guy in the zone.
The Zone ends with a scenario which I could not test. It’s called “Grommar’s Purge”.
I got to listen to the new music which was very good.
To conclude I thought the zone was really well done. The fact that it exists out of the colorful plains it immerses you in a new game with out a feeling of déjà vu (with the exception of the mobs but that’s not a real shock).
The Korean site Inven posted 3 videos with Warlords of Draenor footage on youtube:
Celestalon Tweets
And then to end this Warlords packed news post, Celestalon tweeted we’ll be seeing much more WoD information soon!
In the mean time, please hold tight, and forgive me for not answering every question until our big burst of info goes out. Thanks!
Welcome to the third edition of Artcraft! I’m Chris Robinson, senior art director for World of Warcraft, and today we’ll be discussing the revamp of the female Orc model. As part of that, we’ll touch on our overall character redesign philosophy, show before and after images, talk about our art process with this particular model, and give you a glimpse at some of her awesome facial expressions courtesy of our animation team.
Before we start talking specifically about the female Orc update, I’d like to address some questions we’ve received regarding our goals for these revamps. Boiling it down to essentials, our primary focus is to upgrade the aspects of player character models that currently exist in-game.
We’re all creative people with tons of great ideas, and we could certainly keep designing and redesigning and never actually release anything—and while we’d no doubt have a lot of fun doing that, obviously we need to set specific goals so we can actually create finished artwork for you to see and play. That’s not always easy to do—we’re a passionate bunch, and we get incredibly excited about new features and want to do everything. Nonetheless, staying focused and keeping the scope reasonable (while still ambitious) helps us stay on track and avoid having to make painful cuts later on down the line. We really wanted to prevent that with the player-character revamp, so we made the decision early on to stay focused on improving what already exists in-game, and making sure we really nail it.
That said, we’ve also read your great ideas and feedback about features that you’d like to see as character customization options. Your collective voice matters to us, and we’d love to bring some of the coolest ideas to life someday if we can. We’ll continue to share behind-the-scenes information with you in these Artcraft pieces, and I look forward to giving you more insight into our plans for character models beyond the initial release of Warlords of Draenor.
Enough about philosophy—now on to the female Orc!
We’ve actually been working on this particular model for quite some time now. You may have caught some brief glimpses of her new model in the Warlords of Draenor announcement cinematic at BlizzCon. Since then, we’ve been balancing our effort among all of the models currently in progress, and she’s received some additional polish along the way.
When we first discussed the direction for this character, I think we all agreed right off the bat that we wanted to focus on her “warrior” side a little more. That means moving away from the more doe-eyed version we know now toward a character you would expect to see fighting on the front lines alongside any of her Horde brothers and sisters. We’re still ironing out the fine details, so the art you see here is subject to change, but I’ll let Senior 3D Artist Dusty Nolting and Lead Animator Steve Aguilar expand a bit on where we currently are with our green-skinned . . . oh wait, green and brown-skinned, long-tusked heroine.
Lead Animator Steve Aguilar:
“The original female Orc’s facial expression is pretty much a blank stare, which sadly doesn’t convey much life or personality. We wanted to give her more of an edge so she would project a confident ‘Don’t mess with me!’ attitude. Now that these new high-definition models have a facial rig attached, the animators can bring to life the personality that has been so sorely missing. She now looks and feels more like you’d expect an Orc to. When you get your hands on the expansion, be sure to take a look at her talking animations, dancing animations, and emotes to see all the various expressions the team has created for her.”
Character Artist Dusty Nolting adds:
“Orcs are one of the most iconic parts of the Warcraft universe. Because she’s so identifiable, it was important for us to use the original female Orc as a starting point and stay true to the silhouette and proportions that existed. The goal was a new model with much higher fidelity, while still retaining that classic look. We want a strong female counterpart to the male, equally battle-ready in appearance, yet still feminine.”
That’s all we have for the female Orc right now. We hope you’re continuing to enjoy this series as we invite you to meet the team, get some insight into our development process, and get an early look at some of the art we’re creating for Warlords of Draenor.
Let’s start off with the most recent news, the price for a lvl 90 character boost was shown on the US servers today, a wooping $60! Is it a fair price? I have a hunch we’ll be discussing it on the podcast this week, so check it out saturday night!
Next up, Patch 5.4.7 has hit the US servers and will hit the EU servers in the morning. Blizzard has released the patch notes for the patch, of which you can find the full notes here. However some highlights that are not class balance changes:
Celestials now drop Season 15 Prideful Gladiator gear in place of Season 14 Grievous Gladiator gear.
Rare spawns in Krasarang Wilds now award Honor Points only when they are defeated for the first time each day.
NPC guards around PvP vendors on the Serpent’s Spine have been upgraded to have more health and deal more damage.
Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
Siege of Orgrimmar
Garrosh Hellscream
Garrosh Hellscream and Minions of Y’Shaarj now have less health on 10-player Heroic difficulty.
Unstable Iron Stars now triggered when 4 or more players are together (up from 3 players) on 10-player Heroic difficulty.
PvP
Season 15 has begun! With the start of the new season, Prideful Gladiator gear, and weapons are now available for purchase.
Season 14 Grievous Gladiator gear and weapons can now be purchased using Honor Points instead of Conquest Points.
Base Resilience for level-90 players is now 77% (up from 72%). Base Resilience for players below level 90 remain at 40%.
Resilience Diminishing Returns curve for Resilience has been adjusted for the new base resilience value to maintain the same value per point of Resilience as previously.
Battle Fatigue now reduces healing received while in PvP combat by 60% (up from 55%).
Gladiator’s Distinction, the set bonus for wearing two PvP trinkets, now grants 5280 Resilience (up from 2600).
Battlegrounds and Arenas
Arenas
For the 2v2 Arena bracket, Dampening is now applied to the match starting at the 5 minute mark (down from 10 minutes).
For 3v3 and 5v5 Arena brackets, there is no change. Dampening will continue to be applied at the 10 minute mark.
Alterac Valley
The following NPCs now have more health and deal more damage.
Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth, Stormpike Defenders, Stormpike Bowman, and all Marshals.
Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek’thar, Frostwolf Guardian, Frostwolf Bowman, and all Warmasters.
The following NPCs are now immune to disarm, daze, and Death Grip.
Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth
Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek’thar
Terrain outside of Frostwolf Keep has been modified to prevent players from jumping over the walls.
And then finally, blizzard came out with a blogpost today about some updates to their plans for PvP in warlords of Draenor! Highlights are the scrapping of trial of the gladiator, the return of skirmishes and the addition of the much requested Spectator mode! Check out the full article below:
Warlords of Draenor will introduce tons of new features and updates to improve and expand upon many aspects of World of Warcraft, including the PvP experience. We gave you a first look at some of our PvP plans BlizzCon, and as with any development process, plans can sometimes change as they—well—develop. We’d like to share a few of those changes with you today.
The Tale of Trial of the Gladiator
At BlizzCon, we unveiled plans for a new form of ranked Arena competition called the Trial of the Gladiator, a mode of play that would available during certain hours and which would require players to use a special Trial-only set of gear. The goal was to concentrate high-level competition to specific times, to better match players against competitive opponents, and to make exploitation more difficult.
While there were a lot of potential benefits to that system, ultimately we agree with some of the concerns community has raised about the way it worked. Ultimately, players who couldn’t play during the pre-set times for Trial of the Gladiator might feel like they’re missing out, and it was possible that normal Arena games would lose a lot of their replay value without rating to push for. Because of these issues, we’ve decided not to continue development of Trial of the Gladiator and to focus our efforts on giving players more ways to find PvP that suits them—so here’s what we’re doing instead:
Arena for Everyone: Skirmishes
You might recall the Skirmish feature that went alongside ranked Arena play when that feature was first introduced. It was virtually identical to ranked play, with the exception that there was no ladder or rating involved. However, Skirmishes felt very redundant at the time, and few players took advantage of them, so they were removed with the release of Cataclysm. However, as more and more players get involved in PvP, a higher demand for a form of “lower-pressure” Arena gameplay made us think it was time to revisit the Skirmish idea . . . and make a few important improvements along the way.
In Warlords of Draenor, Skirmishes will return as a form of unranked Arena play that will allow you to queue for 2v2 or 3v3 battles with friends or by yourself. Winning a Skirmish will reward you with Honor and a random bonus, which could be gold, more Honor, a small amount of Conquest Points, or possibly something entirely different. We think this will be a great way for players who haven’t tried Arenas before to get their feet wet, and will allow experienced players to experiment with alternate specs or builds without worrying about tanking their rating.
But Wait, There’s More: Spectator Invite System
While Skirmishes should provide a great opportunity for some more laid-back PvP gameplay, we also wanted to address top-end competition as well. Tournament organizers, often with the use of various third-party add-ons, have been able to piece together a “spectator mode” of sorts and run online tournaments, but they’ve been required to jump through several hoops to actually make that work. We’d like to simplify that process and put more power in the hands of add-on developers so that community-run tournaments will be easier to organize, manage, and broadcast.
Our new Spectator Invite system will allow a match organizer to invite two teams to play against each other in a PvP spectacle called a War Game. Then, when the match begins, everyone in the match organizer’s party will be able to watch those two teams duke it out. We’ll also be opening this feature up to add-on developers so they can come up with tools for tournament organizers to customize how the match is presented on the screen. Finally, we’ll be providing Tournament Mode gear—a special set of gear that can only be used in War Games—to help tournament runners ensure that all players are on equal footing.
We’re excited for these new features, and we feel they’ll allow a much broader spectrum of players to be able to find a type of PvP gameplay they enjoy. Whether you’re looking to compete against the best of the best in a tournament or just want to hang out and relax with a little bloodshed, we hope these updates provide something for the PvPer in you.
Challenge Modes are not going away in 5.4.7. The End of Season Early Warning blog was meant to provide advance notice it will go away in a patch after 5.4.7 but prior to the Warlords of Draenor expansion.
So it’s still not known which patch will end the season, but at least you can stop stressing if you thought it was going to be in a week or two with patch 5.4.7!
Blizzard just announced that in patch 5.4.7 Garrosh Hellscream on heroic 10man difficulty will be nerfed in certain aspects to bring it in line with the difficulty of 25man heroic. Check out the announcement below:
Re-using this thread for an additional update.In the upcoming patch 5.4.7, we will be making a few small adjustments to the 10-player Heroic Garrosh encounter. There a few factors that contribute to a disparity between the difficulty of the encounter in 10-player mode versus 25-player mode, and these changes are intended to help correct for those differences.
We are slightly reducing Garrosh’s health in all phases (by roughly 5%).
The fight as a whole is a series of hard DPS checks, where failing to meet certain benchmarks makes things tremendously harder if not impossible, but extra DPS above and beyond that threshold doesn’t necessarily help all that much. We’re seeing some kills (a minority, but some groups nonetheless) feeling the need to single-heal the fight even at this point, and that has a number of negative gameplay and social issues. We can’t really prevent single-healing (other than by increasing the outgoing damage, which isn’t an option at this point), but this change should at least make it so that no one feels they need to single-heal in order to meet the various checks, without lessening the coordination requirements of the rest of the fight.
We are reducing the health of Minions of Y’Shaarj (by roughly 10%).
Most 25-player groups are able to kite and otherwise control the Minions thanks to the additional available manpower, while 10-player groups generally have to kill them. This change should improve parity between modes by reducing the difficulty of this particular mechanic for 10-player groups.
We are increasing the clump size required to trigger an Iron Star in the final Heroic-only phase of the fight from 3 to 4.
Iron Star detection previously required 3 players on 10, and 8 on 25 (a standard ratio), but this causes a discrepancy when it comes to the overlap between Bombardment and Malice. Malice requires 2 soakers on 10H and 5 on 25H (again, a standard ratio), but this means that the total clump sizes required to handle Malice are actually 3 and 6 respectively, such that a 25-player group could cover soaking Malice #4 (which fully overlaps with Bombardment) without triggering Iron Stars, whereas a 10-player group generally could not. This change should, like the rest, increase parity when it comes to this mechanic.
“Why did you wait this long to make these changes?”
We’re very conservative when it comes to reducing the difficulty of a Heroic final boss, since the entire point of such encounters is to represent the pinnacle of raiding challenge. For most of the initial months of the patch, the sample size of players killing Garrosh on each difficulty was too small to draw meaningful conclusions about the relative difficulty on 10 vs. 25, but now we’ve reached a point where it’s clear that there’s a problem, so we’re taking the above actions.
“Thanks Blizz, way to nerf the only hard fight left in the game…”
Sorry, we do wish we’d gotten the tuning right in the first place. 10-Heroic Garrosh will still be plenty hard — this is just bringing the encounter in line with its 25-player counterpart.
Blizzard put up a new blog post today and announced that if you still want to get the rewards from challenge modes now is the time to do so! Sadly no time frame was given. Check the full announcement below:
Countless adventurers continue to brave the most trying versions of Mists of Pandaria dungeons, but the clock is ticking. This “season” of Challenge Modes will be coming to an end with the upcoming release of a patch prior to the expansion’s release.
Challenge Modes are designed to offer as close to a “normalized” difficulty as possible, and they’re tuned to be tough to master. With Warlords of Draenor’s class changes, itemization changes (e.g. the removal of Hit and Expertise), and—of course—increased level cap on the horizon, the difficulty of Mists of Pandaria’s dungeons will no longer be tuned the same as they were. In the spirit of fair play, when the aforementioned patch is released a little while before the new expansion launches, the current slate of Challenge Mode dungeons will no longer be available, and the achievements they award will be converted to Feats of Strength. The reward items will still be available for purchase by those who qualified prior to the end of the season, but it will not be possible for new players to earn those rewards going forward.
If you still need to earn your Undaunted title, Ancestral Phoenix, or class-specific Transmogrification sets, now’s the time to get out there and prove your worth. In Warlords of Draenor, an entirely new set of Challenge Modes will be available . . . and with them an array of new rewards for you to earn. Until then, stay sharp!
It’s a great image isn’t it? Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi shared it on twitter today with the message “A sleepy Talador. Work In Progress.” .
Yesterday 2 noteworthy things were shared by Blizzard on their website. First of all the Garrisons Artcraft blogpost that was promised to us, so take a look below.
Quote from: Blizzard
Greetings, and welcome to another edition of Artcraft! I’m Chris Robinson, senior art director of World of Warcraft, and for this second entry I’ve gathered a group of Warlords of Draenor developers to talk a bit about Garrisons—specifically, how our artists are working closely with the game designers to ensure that the visuals we’re crafting support their design goals.We’re not really going to get into the details of how Garrisons work here, like specific mechanics of their design. Think of this more as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our art process with two of our groups: our dungeon art team, which is responsible for all the Garrison’s large buildings, walls, gates, and so on; and our prop art team, which is focused on the profession buildings and all of the awesome details you’ll find inside of them.
Gameplay First
Before we get to that, first we’d like to talk about a few aspects of the art team’s relationship with the game designers. We’ve asked Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton to talk a little about how the Garrison works, and how design and art come together to get something as massive as Garrisons into the game. Here’s Cory:
“Hey Everyone! The Garrison feature is going to be a huge part of your core experience in Warlords of Draenor, so it’s really exciting to get a chance to talk about it. As Chris mentioned, it’s a massive feature with a lot of different moving parts, one of the biggest of which is the visuals—and that’s where our art team comes in. We knew we wanted the Garrison to feel like a big new feature, but we also wanted to keep it familiar, like bringing a piece of home to Draenor. There is just something about running into Stormwind or Orgrimmar that evokes that sense of faction pride, and that’s exactly what we wanted out of the Garrison. The art team was able to work with us to deliver brand new art that still evokes those feelings from our faction capitals.
Nailing the look is just one part of the process though. A big part of the feature is being able to increase your Garrison’s power over time, and we wanted to make sure you see that reflected in the art. This means that all of the Garrison buildings have to have multiple, and increasingly epic visual upgrades. The plot system used for Garrisons—which allows you to customize your layout and place buildings anywhere—presented a unique challenge for the art team, since even though a building needs to look more epic at each upgrade, it couldn’t actually change shape at the base. Check out some of the under-development examples below.
—Cory Stockton, Lead Content Designer
TheDungeon Team: Making Old Look New… or Is It New Look Old?
Hi there, I’m Wendy Vetter, lead artist for the World of Warcraft dungeon team, and next I’m going to give you an inside look at how we’re bringing the Garrison buildings into the world.
When working on the Garrison, we decided to start with the Alliance buildings first, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today. When we first began, we thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool for players to get to have some of the original buildings from back in Elwynn and Redridge in their Garrison? Our resident Concept Wizard (actual title) Jimmy Lo ran with this idea of a “trip down memory lane” by bringing back a lot of those early buildings, and we worked on trying to keep a lot of familiar parts of the buildings intact while updating themwith new textures.
After trying that idea out, we began to notice the buildings were looking too familiar—it wasn’t epic enough, and wasn’t looking like something you’d expect to see in this big new feature. So we updated the recipe to “extra-crispy”—and that meant going far beyond a new coat of paint on an old asset.
We didn’t, however, ignore the past—we built upon it. Keeping the original spirit of the old buildings, we began exploring new designs. We created fresh silhouettes and pushed the individuality of each building, creating visually exciting upgrades as you progressed. This way, when you get that first shack you call a Lumber Mill—an oversized crate with some sticks and a dull saw in it—you’re excited, but you know there’s lots of room for improvement. As you build your army and finally get that third-tier Lumber Mill though, you feel like a badass ready to fight back against the Iron Horde.
I have to say I love, love—did I mention LOVE?—the Mage Tower. The library invites the player to grab their favorite book of spells (mine is Beatrice’s Magical Exploits Into the Wilds of Wildervar), wrap up in a blanket, plop on a nice soft chair with their favorite pet sitting on their lap, and read till the light of the fire dims to crackling embers. When we’re creating the art, we actually use small stories like that as a way to guide the scene. We use lighting, material choices, silhouettes, and carefully crafted details to invite the imagination of the player to look beyond the pixels and textures, and bring their character into the world. I like to think of the buildings as characters themselves, each with a personality, from the little nicks on a doorway, to the warm hearth in the Town Hall.
We hope you feel right at home when you step into each of these places.
The Prop Team: Showing a Story
I’m Eric Browning, the lead prop artist on WoW, and my team is responsible for props, FX, and initial set decoration. For the Garrison, we’ve put more emphasis on the “set decoration” aspect than ever before, giving us a much better sense of how well a particular kit is working right from the start. I’ll let the three of the artists working on them explain a bit more.
“One of the most powerful aspects of an artist’s mission is storytelling, and working to fill the space in the Garrison has allowed us to really focus in on that. Decorating a particular set or building provides an opportunity to communicate a lot of information about how the space is used and how it was made, and all the pieces come together to help convey an overarching theme. Little nuances and details in the props can help give the player context into what’s happening in a particular area of the game, and ultimately, really help to tell the story of an entire zone.
We approach each of these tasks on both micro and macro levels—evaluating how each smaller piece comes together as a larger whole. This is where the real challenge lies, since we don’t want to visually overwhelm the player—but at the same time, we’re giving everyone the visually striking, high-quality level of art they’ve come to expect from World of Warcraft.”
—Jordan Powers, Associate 3D Artist
“In Warlords of Draenor, your Garrison is your fortress—a foothold in a savage world, and ultimately a place to call your own. One of our main goals with the Garrison was to really bring some life and sense of purpose to the characters who inhabit the world, and to make them feel like they belong in their environment. What that entails for us as artists is to brainstorm, develop, and refine a scenario that not only gives a narrative to a particular space, but helps make the player feel like the world is cohesive and real. We strive to give each set of props—what we call a ‘kit’—logical treatment and placement so that the NPCs look as if they truly belong there. In doing so, it hopefully allows for a more visually rich and rewarding journey for the player.”
—Eric Braddock, Associate 3D Artist
“For the profession hubs, we wanted the player to be able to experience leveling up their chosen professions not only with skill points, but also visually through their Garrison. As the player progresses, each profession hub will level up, and the associated building will become more visually impressive. We treated each profession hub as an opportunity to describe the NPC who works there—how neat or messy they are, how they might work, and how they’ll grow with you as you level up your Garrison. We also thought it would be fun to throw in small hints of different races that might be associated with certain professions, such as draenei for Jewelcrafting or dwarves for Blacksmithing, to tie in the many races that give the World of Warcraft its depth and history.“
—Jay Hwang, Senior 3D Artist
One More Thing
Hey there—Chris here again, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this closer look at the buildings for your Garrison. While we focused on Alliance Garrison this time around, we’re definitely making a lot of great progress on the Horde counterpart, and look forward to giving you a more in-depth preview in a future episode of Artcraft. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect. See you soon!
And then lastly the scroll of resurrection will be discontinued very soon! Check out the announcement below:
Quote from: Blizzard
The time has come to bid adieu to the Scroll of Resurrection. It’s served its divine purpose, but like most scrolls, it only has so many charges before it loses its magic and crumbles into ethereal dust. For those who’d still like a chance to use the scroll, you have until February 18 before players are no longer able to send invitations. For those who have an invitation outstanding, that’s still good for 30 days from the time it was sent, after which point the invitation will expire and the benefits can no longer be claimed.
