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Shifting Perspectives: Fun with race choice
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we have absolutely no excuse for the column we've written. I'll be honest; I wrote this week's column purely for brainless fun. You won't learn anything (not that you do normally), there are no insights to be gained (not that there are normally) and I don't have any new Cataclysm alpha information. I am very sorry to anyone who came here looking for a solid, informative column, and if you wish to excoriate me in the comments then I encourage you to do so. Anyway. When it comes to druids, the deal with race choice is that you don't really have any. If you play Alliance, you have to play a night elf; if you play Horde, you have to play a tauren. We're the most race-restricted class in the game, and even in Cataclysm, that's not really going to change. Some of you might recall a bug from a little while back that allowed you to model-swap between characters on the same realm by "choosing" two of them at once. I'm pretty sure it's been fixed now, so I wouldn't bother trying it if I were you, but I had lot of fun swapping non-druid races into our various tier sets and wondering what it might have been like to play them. I screenshotted like a maniac while doing so and then set them aside for a future column whenever I felt like doing something just for fun. That would be today. %Gallery-94013%
Client bug allows you to swap character models
We've been sitting on this one for a few days now to let people have their fun before we draw a little too much attention to it, but there's a rather interesting bug in the patch 3.2.2 client: you can glitch out the model being loaded for your character upon login, and switch it with that of another character. We don't know how long it's been around or how long it will stay, but watch the video above (which is pretty large, our apologies) for a demonstration. The WoW.com staff has confirmed it works, though the timing required is very precise. You need to be quick, but being too fast hitting one or the other is just as bad as being too slow. A few of us found that we had to slow down our fingers to do it properly, because "fast" to a hardcore FPS gamer is very different than "fast" to a casual MMO gamer. Click first, hit enter second. Not the other way around. Whether this falls into exploit territory or not, we don't really know. What we do know is that the model 'swap' is only visible for you on your client, nobody else sees it, so nobody else should be impacted by it. It's also only graphical, no benefits carry over from one character to the next. You might see your epic iLevel 258 shield on your level 1 rogue, but you won't have the stats. You can't be a Horde draenei to anybody but yourself, so no screwing with people in battlegrounds. You can't be a unique snowflake like an undead paladin to anybody but yourself. It's a whole lot of fun to see what a draenei rogue would look like, or a gnome druid. Check out the gallery below to see what came out of WoW.com's experimentation, and a few from our friends, too. %Gallery-76823%
