WoW Source: Warlords of Draenor, New Undead Female Character Model Revealed

New Undead Female Character Model
No animation work has been done yet, so this is still a work in progress!



New Cloak Test Models
The team has looked at making different shapes for cloaks, but keep in mind this is definitely an early test still.



WoW Source: Warlords of Draenor
Another episode of WoW Source has been posted. You can find our recap below!

Warlords of Draenor Story

• The team has been talking about Warlords of Draenor since a few months before the Mists of Pandaria launch. Starting on it so far in advance let them set up the Garrosh story for the next expansion.
• One of the ideas tossed around was having different Mongrel Horde races united by Garrosh to attack Azeroth. They realized it would be a cooler story if he was reassembling the old Orcish Horde. Then the team had to decide how it would be done, with one idea being resurrecting all of the old leaders. That would be confusing as far as if they were undead or how everything worked, so the idea of going back to Draenor was decided upon.
• Early versions of old Draenor weren't going to use what is now Zangarmarsh for anything, but someone made a concept art of the giant mushrooms underwater that made the team decide to use it after all.
• Old Draenor is supposed to be a mix of the familiar and things people have never seen before.

New Models

• The new Undead Female model is far along enough to show off, but no animation has been done yet.
• There was a bug that made the eye of the Human Female model look different and people got really upset about it, which is why the team is being so careful in building the new models.
• The team is looking forward to seeing what machinima authors can do with the new models.
• The robe models are a little tired at this point and they haven't been improved as much as the team would like.
• The team also looked at making new cloak models that use alpha to mask out some of the cloak to make new shapes.
• The team has talked about the different ways they could roll out new character models, including just switching them one day or allowing people to opt out and keep the old ones for performance reasons.
• NPCs will also benefit from the new models and get some touchups to fix any custom work that was done that doesn't match the new models and animations.

Garrisons

• Garrisons will take gold and some kind of garrison resource like wood or stone to upgrade.
• Garrisons are mostly an individual thing because if it were a guild thing first, the guild leaders would take all of the fun parts.

Mythic Raiding

• A 15 player size was discussed, but the devs are already asking 10 player guilds to grow so they selected the size that would work best going forward.
• Mythic raiding was set to 20 because of the advantages it gives the team when designing raids.
• With 20 players, raid designers can assume there is at least one of each class in the raid, something that they can't do with a raid size of 15.
• Having 20 players also allows for more complex mechanics for the most challenging raid content.

Misc

• The free boost to level 90 won't expire. You can boost any character to level 90, as there is no level requirement.
• Ashran will allow you to collect scraps from other defeated opponents to build something like strong armor, a vehicle, or launch a wave of NPCs at the enemy. Players may even have longer term objectives they can work on that span multiple days.