The art team and 5.4's sets

[xuros]

I'll say it again.

Art.

Is.

Subjective.

If you say so. They are ugly as fuck. Another lock tier to be x-mog.

[Zaelkath]

I agree with this...so much.

So much so I made a thread about it on the official forums yesterday when I saw the DK set.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...2365?page=1#18 check it out if you're interested.

[JoeShmo]

I think part of the problem is when WOW was young and new, they already got a lot of the sort of iconic looks for each class done. Warlocks for example already have several sets that make them look like demons and some even have wings attached, so unless you keep spitting out more sets that look like demons (which people would complain about), the only way to avoid it is to try to do something "new" for it that doesn't match your expectations for what it should look like.

Paladins are especially bad about this, as it seems every new paladin tier I see it's like "what the hell is this?".

But what can you do? You gotta create new sets that try to look like they belong on the class but also try to not look like something they've done before and also try to look cool.

Frankly i've always been a fan of more "simple" sets that don't have the giant, goofy shoulders or fancy glow effects or whatever. The assassination set and valorous bonescythe are my 2 favorite sets in the game for rogues, and I really really wish monks could wear valorous bonescythe because it looks amazing.

I haven't seen any sets recently that i've seen and just said "wow that looks awesome". The most depressing part of the whole thing is that the monk tiers in MOP look like crap, but unlike other classes they don't have previous expansions worth of tier alternatives to fall back on for looking good. So you're very limited in what you can do.

I think a lot of it is stemming from blizzards wrong idea of what the players "wanted" from armor designs.

They had said previously, quite recently, that they have been designing armor to look "plain looking" so that its easier for them to have every armor piece seem to fit together. This was also because they thought that having vibrant colors meant "clown gear" . So the misunderstanding was two fold, the players were not complaining about the shear amount of color, and were not complaining about all of the gear not matching all of the gear.

What players were complaining about back in vanilla and tbc was that all of the non set gear, had no actual set to complete to create a fully functional look. Quest items gave you a mix of a lot of different kinds of armors (like conquest plate, blood knight, etc. ) that never had a complete set: IE, a lot only had shoulders, helms and gloves that went together, blizzard never made a complete set of some themed armor. So the only "complete" sets of armor were the tier'd sets. This is what people were complaining about, spending 90% of wow in "clown gear" , because there was no way to complete a look while questing or doing dungeons, save for a very small handful of gear sets.

Blizzard took this as "ok...so colors are too bright, and everything needs to match" , instead of "ok, we need to make more than 3 pieces of matching armor for each set, and have them actually be accessible/completable while questing/dungeons."

They started to do a good job with the wrath crafted gear, as well as the quest gear, but it was all so very generic and copy paste of each other. We had armor pieces that matched...so some degree, but it was now just a few armor sets that were recolored a dozen times. This would bleed into each expansion afterwards; where they would just take old armor sets and give them a new color, put them as quest rewards, and dust their hands off of the whole ordeal. Eventually, it was very easy for blizzard to just reuse everything, give it a different color of the same tint, and call it done for matching gear.

Its gotten to the point now, that any time they create new armor models they have to make them look similar to the previous armor models, so that they "match" . Gone are the days where armor sets had a very strong theme based on the class, and now they just need to look similar enough so that they are interchangeable, enabling the "non set gear" to coexist with everything.

Maybe its being in a "design rut" , where the art team and their higher ups, have been going in a direction so much that they dont think about, or are able to, get back to where they were the first 4 years of the game. Every now and then, you see a few sets show a glimmer of class representation, but often they look so very generic (and often straight copies/slices of previous sets, even from other classes).

I agree with the quote above though, that its good when the armors are simplistic, but it also doesnt mean they need to be generic. Im not a fan of how blizzard is obsessed with these giant shoulders, and yet many race/sex combos dont even use them (they look rather tiny in comparison). I think sets like the warrior challenge armor is a good design choice, which gives a rather distinctive look, and doesnt require some ridiculous art design like T shaped shoulders and helms to make them "pop" . The armor design should be both functional looking, as well as shapely for the given race. When i see things like shaman shoulders that stick out in a giant V pattern, or the paladin T14 shoulders that make the paladin look like a giant T, I beg to wonder what the art team was thinking. Its the same thing for a LOT of cloth helms, that have absurd collars on them, like they are just asking to get blown over from the wind, let along walk through a door entrance.

The things that are starting to really bug me though are how blizzard doesnt seem to know how to combine the theme of the raid with the theme of the classes anymore. Its one thing for the quest/dungeon gear to be more mellow and straight forward, but the tiered sets are expected to be distinctive to both the raid tier theme, as well as the class.

Vanilla made very few armor pieces that fit with where it was from, but they all matched their class exactly (even if they looked rather rubbish by todays standards lol), this might be a better design over all, but it also requires a great deal of imagination, which blizzard has shown to not be fully interested in anymore. ( Very few of even their monster models are unique at all, and usually are just adjustments to what they already had, and/or ripping model skeletons straight from previous races).

TBC made a great stride to correct this and set a precedent for the armor tiers. Some of the armors didnt quite fit the raid instance, but you could match them to the class immediately, and even point it towards something themed in the expansion. Everything fit in one way or another, and this was done pretty well in wrath, with some hiccups like the theme for paladin/warrior gear in all tiers. They didnt always fit the instance, but again they always fit the class.

Cata is where i started seeing some really horrendous corner cutting. Now wrath had a terrible problem with starting the rehash pandemic with Naxx 2.0 , but everything still fit. Things like the shaman tier 11 set just made you go "whaaaaaaa?!?" The dk tier 13 set, while "interesting" didnt fit DS or the DK at all (other than it was black....hurr hurr deathknights are a black colored class). In each tier...you could point out which armors met the "tier'd theme" immediately, and which didnt. And along those lines, what was not as simple, was figuring out which armor sets went to which classes all the time. The class diversity started to bleed in together with each class, so that cloth was almost impossible to tell who it was for, let alone trying to figure it out between druid gear being tossed in the mix. Rogue gear started to look like both hunter (or vise verse ) , warlock, and sometimes warrior gear ( this is very prominent with pvp gear ).

While on the subject of pvp gear, that really went downhill fast ( Right after blizzard stated that they were "done" with making special armors for classes in pvp, and were going with a "progressively more detailed" system for pvp gear progression.) Last season paladin armor..... "Am I Putress? ...wait...wasnt this VERY close to the warlock set as well?" , around same time of class identity crisis for all.

MoP just follows along the same degraded path, whether its they own blindness to what they are doing, or they just dont have a real choice anymore. The monk gear....all looks too similar, no actual theme to them. Paladin tier 14..."Im a lion from voltron....scratch that..I AM Voltron." (Voltron still > Power ranger themed tier 5 joke.) Shaman...... brb , going to go farm my Tier 6.

And you know, for the most part, i cant even remember off the top of my head what most of the semi current armor looks like anymore. I remember every tier, every dungeon set, up to midway through wrath; and then it just starts to go blank. Im sure i would remember them if i saw them, but i definitely couldnt point out what class it was for for most of them. The armor just isnt inspiring or memorable anymore. I can see amani themed armor and go "yeah! ZA was great!" , but i couldnt put mage tier 11-15 together and go "yea, that was for the mage in XXX raid" , I would probably say at least one of them was for the lock, and get all the squishies mixed up at the same time while i was at it.

I remember seeing the recent dk armors and thinking "Ok cool....we have an EVA suit..and a Zergling." While memorable looking, its because of outside influences, not because they fit the class well with the places you got them from. This pretty much goes with all the other classes and armors now. At this stage, they might as well just get rid of class restrictions and put the tier set bonuses onto trinkets / jewelry .

[Deleted]

T16 design is too much influenced by pandarian/mogu-theme. I was hoping for a more orc/garrosh-style tier.

[muwatallis]

Considering from a hunter perspective, the last "badass looking" hunter armor was Scourgestalker in Ulduar. Especially the T11 Electrofish and T13 Wyrmstalker were quite horrendous in terms of aesthetics and T16 seems to join them as well. I'm an artist myself and I believe I could have designed way way way better armor sets for this tier.

[Wildberry]

Considering from a hunter perspective, the last "badass looking" hunter armor was Scourgestalker in Ulduar. Especially the T11 Electrofish and T13 Wyrmstalker were quite horrendous in terms of aesthetics and T16 seems to join them as well. I'm an artist myself and I believe I could have designed way way way better armor sets for this tier.

The t16 armor sets are so bad, that the guy claiming to be an artist on a forum probably COULD do better.

(No offense, I'm being genuine here.)

[Sainur]

And here I thought it couldn't get any worse. Guess I was wrong.

[MoanaLisa]

Armor design generally suffers from having to do too many versions of the same pieces over eight years I think. At some point, it's easy to just run out of inspiration. Now that transmogrification is in the game Blizzard should step back and give some serious thought to whether or not the same design tropes that served them over the last years is either necessary or even a good idea. I honestly don't know what the answer is but 16 tiers of gear for however many classes split between PVE and PVP is a lot of design.

To my mind there's only so much you can do with a cape, or a helm, or on and on.

Sometimes less is more although that concept seems foreign to the gear designers. I don't envy them their task.

[l33t]

Well, I'll join teh bandwagon here. T16 sets are definitely awful (ex. paladin's one, dat set is the only one I don't want to mog just at the moment I'll have it). They are awful not in terms of art or looks, which is plain subjective. Problem is that they don't match neither class theme, nor the t16 raid theme. In fact, they match only one theme: a theme of similar lookiness, blendness, uniconicness and ununiqueness. Which is, obviously, bad, and its source is lazyness of Blizzard. I think Blizz should reconsider tier sets creation process totally.
And please stop dat bullshit about "how much raid content you wish to lose in favor of nicely looking sets". Everyone knows that this is definitely a work of a different teams.

[PenguinChan]

I honestly don't know what the answer is but 16 tiers of gear for however many classes split between PVE and PVP is a lot of design.

To my mind there's only so much you can do with a cape, or a helm, or on and on.

Sometimes less is more although that concept seems foreign to the gear designers. I don't envy them their task.

Granted they do have a lot of sets to design, there hasn't really been a good class representation gear for a good while. It's all based around the expansion pack, raid, or bosses. Which is fine, I understand the idea; but I have trouble even connection some tier sets with their inspiration. Or even if they are meant to be an inspiration piece, and just an idea they flung around that didn't look like something else already created.

Hopefully Blizzard doesn't shore-horn in class looking gear this next expansion.

[Tirilka]

I like most of 5.4 sets.
Especially DK and Paladin T16, they are brilliant.

[Fiddlesnarf]

What can I say, I'm glad to be a Paladin right now. Every set so far from 5.4 looks awful except for the Paladin set. I especially feel bad for Rogues and Mages, I had a grimace on my face when looking at those 2 sets.

[Lazy Gecko]

I really noticed a shift in design style during WotLK, where it seems the old armor designers were replaced by the current ones. I immediately disliked the new texturing style with all its quirks. Everything needs to look "big", like scales, belts, ropes that bind the armor together, etc. The more desaturated colors. And everything has come to look so samey it's flat out getting hard to tell classes apart from eachother. There's really no distinction between cloth/leather/chain/plate anymore. Just look at the mage and paladin tiers on the front page right now. They're really not that different from eachother.

[Deleted]

They aren't bad. They are cool sets. Just not really tier worthy. As a dk though, I am disappointed. Take away the glow from the sets and you have the new common/rare models for 90-92.

[Felarion]

Imo noone from t16 sets have a "oh wow effect" for me. And i don't get at all why warrior set isn't Garrosh inspired, instead of that we get piece of leather crap with flashing disco lights.

[Deleted]

I have one opinion on most of WoW's art, and it can be summed up just by dropping one name, and one name only:


Rob Liefeld.


WoW's art is very... Rob Liefeld.


BLIZZARD'S art is very... Rob Liefeld.


This is a very big insult!

Nah, there's not enough pouches on these sets for that.

[Armourboy]

The longer the expansion has gone on the worse the sets have gotten overall imo. Sure there are some that are nice, but for the most part this tier I haven't found any that I think are just awesome, nor do they make me say " Yeah thats X class ". I haven't seen the Shaman set yet, but I'm scared as hell tbh.

Joe Shmo nailed it on the head as far as Blizzard's misunderstanding of what players meant when they said they didn't want to look like they were in " clown gear" anymore. People weren't asking for more toned down boring gear, they were asking for gear across instances and quests to have a theme to them so that we didn't look so stupid at times. Really what people wanted was more things like the Dungeon Sets, but more wide spread. At some point they took this to mean that everything need to be bored down.

Honestly with us fighting Garrosh and much more in our Horde and Alliance groups I was hoping to see a return to more of a faction based gear. Now I'm not talking like Tier 9 where everyone looked the same, but it would of been nice to a faction set blended in with more of Asian theme. Maybe thats asking or expecting to much, but I don't think so, and I don't many of you do either.

So far the Tier 16 releases have been very disappointing imo, especially that Druid set, it doesn't even closely resemble a Druid at all. In fact it looks more like a wierd Mage or Paladin set.

I think they really need to stop and take a look at things. Now I know not every person will like every set, but if you never see anyone using a set as a transmog its probably a good indication that you failed in some way. Think about the popular transmogs, its not just because they are easier to get, but because they also look good.

[Yunru]

I dont know what happened with sets inspired after the raids. Maybe 2 or 3 look like tier sets from those raids but most of them not.

Wtb sets like this back:
http://static.cms.runicgames.com//as...r_ingame_2.jpg

[TEHPALLYTANK]

I am sadface, t15 is ugly on paladins and now we get this horrendous looking helm for t16? The rest of the set doesn't actually look too bad, but that helm is very unfortunate...kinda reminds me of the pigtails on gnome females (which is very much NOT a good thing).

[Lochton]

I'm not complaining, I really like the paladin tier.