visual-set
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How we see the World of Warcraft
One of the things I'm leeriest of is the idea of a complete overhaul of World of Warcraft's aesthetic. I've talked about it in terms of character aesthetics, and in terms of the visual set that defines the warrior class and what it all boils down to for me is that when I log into the game, I want it to feel like it's the same game, the same world. This is not to say that the game hasn't seen plenty of upgrades to its visuals over the years, far from it. As Takralus pointed out recently in a forum thread asking if WoW will ever see a major graphical upgrade, the game has seen upgrades, at least one every time an expansion has come out in fact. World of Warcraft is a game built out of all of these separate elements combined. It's got excellent sound design, both in music and in sound effects (although I can't watch a TV special on dinosaurs without recognizing a sound from World of Warcraft nowadays), which the graphics build on top of to create the world we experience. As such, I'm simultaneously interested in yet afraid of the long awaited character model redesign Takralus mentions. Yes, it's somewhat ridiculous that human wizards and warlocks, if male, have arms like coiled pythons, but by now I'm so accustomed to it I don't know if I could accept a more slender build for a spellcaster.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The visual set for warriors, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. At present it looks unlikely that other classes are getting dragon-aspect-themed tier 13 sets. This means that as of right now, with mage, warlock, druid, shaman, rogue and paladin sets also revealed, the warrior set is indisputably the best-looking set so far. We look awesome. Warrior tier sets in general tend to always look, at the very least, good and serviceable. One of the innovations moving from Naxxramas' tier 3 to The Burning Crusade's tier sets is that it took the idea of the warrior design aesthetic and branched it out to cover both role warriors could play in raids. When we talked about the visual set for warriors in classic WoW two weeks ago, one of the most glaring notes was that tanking sets got the unified look of a tier while DPS sets were cobbled together from various non-set pieces and had no unifying theme to characterize them. There was essentially one tier set per raid, and it was either tanking or tank-capable. Both Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj presented warriors with "sets" that were composed of both DPS and tank pieces.
