fbpx
Menu Close
  • WoW Weekly

New female orc character model revamp preview!

Blizzard just released a new character model preview, and this time it’s the female orc model! Check out the preview below:

Quote from: Blizzard
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.

Thanks, and see you next time!

Patch 5.4.7 Patch notes, WoD PvP Changes and instant lvl 90 character price

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:

Quote from: Blizzard

Creatures

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:

Quote from: Blizzard

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.

Podcast Episode 22

This week’s podcast is now up! This week in Warcraft Challenge modes, Garissons art and the ideal raid instance! Also, LJ manages to go into many different areas not warcraft related!

Challenge Mode removal indeed not in patch 5.4.7

Community Manager Rygarius took to the forums today and had the following to say about the challenge mode season ending:

Quote from: Rygarius
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!

Targeted Heroic Garrosh 10man nerfs imminent

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:

Quote from: Blizzard
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.

Still need to do Challenge Modes? Now is the time to do so!

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:

Quote from: Blizzard
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!