LF Draenei, Dark Iron Dwarfes, Highmountain Tauren, Mag'har Orcs are reskins. All you change on them is textures, and the only different "shapes" are their hairstyles / horns which parent races have different shapes as well... They could be as well an option within a parent race with little to no difference. Void Elves are also very close to Blood Elf reskin.
Nightborne and Zandalari male have actually model alterations from the "parent race" and Vulpera use Goblin skeleton but have different model. Zandalari female is a Darkspear female reskin.
If all you do is change hairstyle, skin colour and paint some tattoos, that makes is a reskin. You can make for example 1:1 parallels between the faces of normal Draenei and LF Draenei, same with Ironforge Dwarf and Dark Iron Dwarf variant.
Sad part is all the hairstyles could be given to both parent and "allied" race instead we get half half. But I guess in your eyes the extra hairstyles make it not a reskin?
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I'm yet to hear any argument why better class balance would harm a casual. If it improves the experience of hardcore player but doesn't affect a casual who "doesn't care about it" then it's a net gain.
The only people "harmed" by balancing changes are people who are informed enough to know what's OP and abuse it - so not casuals.
Last edited by Marrilaife; 2019-12-08 at 12:26 AM.
To clarify: It stripped a theme. Enhancement shaman at the same time went less wind and lightning oriented, to more fire and molten lava themed. Monk got the winds, and still salty about it. Meanwhile, their abilities are summoning aid from elementals (the pandaria looking elementals) in some cases, dealing (elemental type) damage with this attack and that. It wasn't until WoD that shamans got some lightning theming back, and Legion for a good return to theme.
As to the topic of classes: If they stripped ghoul and various undeads from DKs to make Necromancers, people would loose it. If they stripped some hunter abilities for tinkerers, people would loose it. Etc. I am sure blizz doesn't want another predictable shit show.
Last edited by Dastreus; 2019-12-08 at 03:31 AM.
Define "fixed."
Because I promise at no point in this game's 15 year existence has class balance ever been "fixed." This idea that suddenly Blizzard will design the game perfectly and all players will be 100% satisfied with how their class plays in 100% of all situations is a myth and it's frustrating to see players pretending like this is a reasonable achievable goal for Blizzard to have.
Because the only way to balance classes is to dramatically reduce the number of abilities, and make everything play boring as fuck. Name a game with as many abilities as wow that has better balance in similar content. And this pursuit of "balance" already has harmed the game - read the forums - call it what you want; pruning, simplification, homogenization - it all comes from one core problem - a desire to obtain balance between the specs. This cannot happen when an arms warrior is an endless wrecking ball of AOE death and destruction, but an assassination rogue only has ST attacks - who gonna bring the rogue to M+ or on those bosses with AOE priority packs? So they pruned and pruned, and changed it so everyone was average at everything - and now thats all we have - competitive classes that all play really boring and all do the same thing.
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No seriously, its the biggest reach since the pc launch of reach. Monk and Shammy have next to nothing in common, there really couldnt have been a WORSE example.
Last edited by arkanon; 2019-12-08 at 04:20 AM.
To everyone talking about "balance":
"Balance" is anti-fun. The only way to achieve perfect balance is to completely homogenize everything. It's boring. In order to have cool, fun, interesting stuff going on, there *must* be some imbalance.
Unless one class/spec is so much better than another that nobody plays it (or nobody will take it to raids, etc.), it's fine.
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Races are almost entirely (aside from racials which...you know) art assets. And the allied races are heavily based on the existing ones to start with. They don't require starting zones or class design. A new race shouldn't =/= no new class. Same visa versa.
It's like me, who thinks that classes was so well designed in Legion and was so happy that I had 14 chars that I played regularly. But then we have my buddy Mick McBuffin who thought it was horrible so he wanted to go back to WotLK design. I said sure, it was pretty good then, but then my other friend, Larry O'Nerfin told us he wants the devs to go back to class design because it fucking sucks in BfA. It was then our good old buddy down the street, Brian Fixit told us that he wants the GCD change to be removed for Shadowlands and we all nodded, silently agreeing.
11 pages now, no graph. I feel a bit robbed.
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Warlords 2.0 hype. I guess new customisations are equivalent to new models.
Hopefully the fact that they do not have to develop the new class will give them more time to make the existing ones at least slightly more enjoyable to play. But I really doubt that will even happen.
Classes were the most "homogenized" in MOP yet people remember it fondly as the time when classes were actually fun before all the "pruning". Pruning happened to differentiate the specs, not to balance them.
And yes, sorry, specs like brewmaster monk and disc priest push other specs of the same role out of mythic raiding, and it trickles down to lower difficulties too. Same with resto druids in m+.
Meanwhile specs like enhancement shaman are generally unwanted in both m+ and mythic raiding, and subtlety is a completely dead spec since it got gutted after Uldir. Feral druids aren't in a good spot either.
Also I don't see that "fun" that we were supposedly getting as a tradeoff to "imbalance", classes that are "fun" to play are often in the bottom half performance wise, like demo locks. I know people who were excited to play demo only to realize it got so weak after 8.1.5 nerfs they no longer can justify sticking to their favourite spec and they have to play destro or affli.
And for a lot of players strong = fun. Look havoc demon hunter, it's a very simple class but highly popular exactly because it's so easy to play yet so strong.
Windwalker has a cool theme with the "combo strike" idea and quite matching visuals, but I rarely see them because they're weak, and also people probably still hate on the "kung fu panda" concept. But for example in Antorus when WW was strong, there was many more people playing it.
After the removal of artifacts and 3 waves of pruning, the classes are the simplest they've ever been since TBC (where 1 button spam rotation still existed). That didn't create either fun, or balance. It's a lose-lose scenario.
Another issue is Blizzard is trying to balance classes in a way that every class should be represented in a similar % of playerbase, which means classes that are popular when they aren't strong, will never be strong. Like hunters or ret paladins. Meanwhile classes that were pin pointed to have low representation in the playerbase, like rogues or warlocks, were getting constant "helping hand" until they became "meta" in at least 1 spec and people started playing them not because they wanted to, but because they were strong.
I swear they did the same in the past with racials, races like Trolls and Dwarves were getting buffs to racials while Humans were getting nerfs. To this day there are horde players who only play Trolls due to racial, not because they enjoy it. The imbalance doesn't facilitate "fun" it actually works anti-fun because it makes people forced to choose between what they enjoy, and what's considered "strong" or "meta".
I'm pretty sure for every person who thinks it's "fun" and "unique theme" that rogues get free pass to m+ due to mass stealth, there are 10 non-rogue players who despise the fact majority of groups end up as "LF1 dps, rogue".
The above applies to you as well, because you also make the wrong assumption that pruning = homogenization. Pruning happened as the answer to whines about "homogenization" so we can get specs like affliction warlock that is broken OP in raids but useless in a dungeon because it has no aoe. Is that fun? Ask all the warlocks who are declined from m+ for being a warlock, but they have to play that class because their raid team wants the warlocks.
Also aff warlock at least can be said it has strengths (2-3 target multidot situation) and weaknesses (aoe) meawhile you have specs like enhance vs havoc and the second one has better aoe and better single target. So where's the balance? And where's the fun? Because I can see neither. The "fun" only exists for people who don't mind rerolling to what's fotm and abusing it. To people who want to play their chosen class, the fun often never comes because it's not one of the Blizzard's precious projects.
To many people classes were more fun before all the pruning happened, and that's exactly when they were more homogenized and "everyone was good at everything". Not that many people miss the times when rogue could only single target, paladins could only heal tanks while shamans only spammed chain heal, hunters were only good for kiting and trapping, warlocks spammed shadow bolt all day, and feral was a poor excuse of a rogue.
Having diverse toolkit is more interesting than being a 1 trick pony. Also the concept of creating "1 trick ponies" means sooner or later you'll run out of ideas and separate niches, and someone ends up being left with none. It was especially visible with healers, disc, hpal, druid, shaman had defined niches and that often left holy priest and mw monk without specific identity.
It's also really bad when you create a spec that is only good in x scenario then you never put that scenario in game. For example how resto shaman was in Uldir - resto shaman niche is aoe healing stacked targets, but majority of fights asked you to spread.
If you want to keep classes "specialized", you would have to also design content that plays to all of these strengths. And that's much harder. Otherwise you might end up as the guy who was given a hammer in a job with no nails to hit.
I see it the opposite way. Making all the old expansions relevant again (you'll level through an entire old expansion not just a few levels and done), it allows them to make content for them and not waste it entirely.
E.g., they could do a new Mercenary Order Hall, or something like that, to catch all new post-Legion classes with some few new quests and call it a day.
Enough classes and specs as it is.
36 is way too much.
Animations are the same. yes
again
Its a remodel, not a reskin. A remodel means
same skeleton-
Differnet model+
different texture+
Different colour+
Reskin is
Same skeleton-
same model-
different texture+
different colour+
Void elves=Reskin- But they do have different hair
Lightforged= Reskin- again different hair and horns, so they do have differences
Dark iron= reskin- again different hair and bears
Kultirans= Brand new model and skeleton so literally not any of the things above.
Mechagnomes= Remodel, same gnomish skeleton, but ENTIRELY different model, and a fair few new animations
Nightborne= Remodel- Brand new model on an already used skeleton
Highmountain tauren= Reskin- but they do have different horns
Maghar= Reskin- different hair styles, plus they did bring with them the "standing orc" so
Zandalari= Remodel/reskin- male is remodel as its brand new, female is reskin as other then a few changes its mostly just female darkspear+different hair and stuff
vulpera= remodel- brand new model ontop of the goblin skeleton, including new animations and the such.
So yeah... half of them are reskins. New hairstyles / horns are not really "new model" they did add new hairstyles to old races at some point, like the double ponytail nelf or the gnomish hairstyles ported to female undead... They also added new horns to tauren. They could add new hair / horn styles and new skin colours to these races and bam, we'd have half of these "allied races" covered.
Basically what they're showing for Shadowlands with the new hairstyles / skin colours for Trolls, Dwarves and Undead. They also said they'll add new tail shapes for Draenei.
That's what's bugging me, half of these allied races could just expand customization options of already existing race and it would be fine, but naaah let's make people rep grind and pay for race changes.
Vulpera or Kul Tirans, okay, at least it's a new model so it's justified to be a separate race.
But yeah, someone tell me why Wildhammer Dwarf or Frost Dwarf is a slider within a "Dwarf" race but Dark Iron is a separate entity.