Zarhym: Death knight tier 13 coming "next week if we can"
Yo, death knights. Chill. Zarhym's got this.
It's no secret that the artists at Blizzard put a lot of effort and creativity into creating unique tier pieces for every class. It's a time-intensive process. But for death knights, it's been an uncomfortably long wait. After all, eachandeveryotherclasshadanofficialpreview of their tier 13 set by the end of September.
Well, it turns out there was a good reason for that wait. Death knight tier 13 was completed "weeks ago," but because the finished product wasn't up to Blizzard's standard of quality, the original idea was scrapped and a new concept was conceived -- or so said Blizzard Community Manager Zarhym last night via Twitter and on the official Blizzard forums:
Zarhym (who is totally welcome to come to next week's WoW Insider Reader Meetup and buy me a drink) says that Blizzard would "love" to post it next week, but with BlizzCon 2011 starting Friday, that may not be a possibility. I'm sure that few people will be happy having to wait another week (or longer) to get a look at death knight tier 13. But ultimately, I think they'll be glad that Blizzard didn't rush to implement a substandard product just to beat a nonexistent deadline.
This is just a thought but im sure it will get released before then. I'm just curious as to why all the other tier 13 models were datamined from the PTR but they decided to keep DK one out. Are they just still working on it or is there some kind of big announcement planned for DKs? The only thing datamined found on the PTR were the icons for the set which look a little frosty.
No, as far as I know we don't plan to make it a reveal at BlizzCon, though there's a chance the timing of its release could, by coincidence, be around that time. It's still planned to be revealed in the same manner the rest have been -- via a blog on our front page with the visual retrospective of previous tiers and developer description.
We'd love to post it by next week if we can, but I can't promise that with all the BlizzCon preparations taking place.
(The only reason I'm posting right now is because I've been at work for 13 hours today: twitter.com/talkingcongas/status/124695686452228096)
I'll give you a bit of the lowdown on why the death knight set hasn't come out yet, even in the 4.3 PTR files third-party sites are looking through. As with all sets, a concept art piece was done for death knight tier 13. When that was translated to the actual in-game look, we felt it wasn't up to par with the concept, and ultimately wasn't nearly at the quality level of the other tier 13 sets. But, that death knight set was completed weeks ago.
So, there are times where multiple iterations of how a set will look in the game are made, based on the original concept piece. In this case though, we felt there to be such a gap in quality that we went back to the drawing board and came up with an entirely new piece of concept art, scrapping the original concept and in-game art done for death knights.
Well, I can say the new concept art is done and the set is close to being ready for image captures. I've not seen either, but I've heard very good things. :)
Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
