I know this doesn’t apply to every single animation and visual effect, but I feel like the game isn’t at a good point as far as animations and VFX go overall.
Character immersion for me and many others is a paramount factor to an MMOs appeal. I think animations and VFX are essential to the games character immersion and enjoyment and this issue should be addressed in 10.0.
I think there are many great spells in the game with awesome projectile animation such as Lava burst, Elemental blast, Soul fire, Chaos Bolt.
However there are many more found on the other end of the spectrum that are just terrible. Almost everything introduced in 7.3 legion is just off and unsatisfying to look at or listen to. Arcane, Frost, Demonology, Boomkin, Rogue, Warrior are all just terrible for several different reasons.
As far as projectiles go, all the sounds are bad and it doesn’t sound good anymore. Everything sounds like you are hitting with a wet noodle. Remember the old ice lance? It sounded iconic and strong. Old demon bolt? same deal.
As far as melee go, I feel like sounds and visuals are ruined. Playing my fury warrior in tbc classic is more enjoyable than playing it on retail. There no feeling that parallels a sweeping strikes cleave whirlwind rotation feeling in terms of sound/visuals.
On another note I feel like combat is way too cluttered. There are several unimportant animations and VFX that blur the ground way too much to an unbearable point. I’m specifically pointing out to certain night fae particle effects, demon hunters, boomkin starfalls and several others. I am cool with important defensives showing up like barrier and link, but whats the point of having something completely insignificant completely cover up your character and the playing field?
I loved MOP boomkin mainly because of shooting stars passive and DOTS dmg
free insta cast starsurge
i miss that gameplay it was fun starsurges everywhere all the time
good days when classes were FUN to play
When you play a destro lock and you look like the god of fire incarnate… And you suddenly have to throw a green missplaced massive boogey man into your rotaion… Shm…
I don’t personally mind the chaos bolt animation. I mean, i prefer it to the old one, and the main problem of destro lock is incinerate. I seriously don’t understand what the animation artist was thinking when they were making the incinerate projectile animation. There is no way anyone likes the current one.
I know but …What if you wanted it the other way around? I swear… Desto locks looks more bad a* Than even fire Mages do and its not even their right element. As warlocks are supposed to be all about fell fire and so on.
Destro locks have better fire animations and looking spells than the Arch type of fire magic class even does… They might as well go the whole way with it.
That green chaos bolt just ruins everything to the theme.
I dont really play a warlock. I havn’t done so since they changed demonology which i loved in legion. But i would assume most warlocks love chaos bolt.
They do… Its just about theme and all that. as Desto lock. Everything else you cast. is Fire red. then suddenly out of the blue you throw a green massive Fire blast.
Its more a roleplayer issue. Normal locks propably dont care.
But many rp’ers choose warlocks for their awesome fire spells animations and looks.
Not least to mention! Warlocks always get the most epic cloth casters sets >< to everyones envy
Arcane is sadly so bad. The effects are very static, the sound isn’t good. It doesn’t feel magical enough. Fire mage, or even frost is so much better in comparison!
Ah, you mean the “1 animation for all skills” class. Some even have similar sound effects, causing confusion in what I just cast.
One thing blizz should do is remove autoattack. It messes up all class animations and it’s just passive damage you do while in range. Some classes don’t even have autoattack and that doesn’t make them unfun. Obviously this will entail some rebalancing. But autoattack animations play at the same time as skill animations, causing a total mess sometimes. WoW is so fast paced, with short GCDs and no downtime that it doesn’t need the autoattack anymore.
I loved arcane barrage. It had a thick texture and nice sound back in the day. I think it also changed in legion.
As far as the warrior goes, I just love old school fury in vanilla/tbc/wotlk overall, it plays and sounds very well.
Completely agree about the autos too. They are kinda redundant if you disregard the minimal amount of damage and rage generation they are responsible for. Back in the day you could feel the autoattacks.
Not only that, all races have the same fighting animations now except auto-attack. Which makes it even more boring, when all races had unique animations for their attacks.
Totally agree with that also. The only spell with a separate race animation on warrior is bloodthirst, and that is because its pretty much the old classic animation!
I’m of the opinion that I don’t like these super high VFX stuff - especially on warriors, who I think are the class that shouldn’t have much (or any) flashy stuff. It just doesnt fit my idea of a sheer physical/strength based class.
Shadows, specular lights, reflections, raytracing, high dynamic range, and so on.
If you want to see the clearest difference between poor lighting (not for the time, but by comparison) vs awesome lighting, look no further than this:
Note how everything else stays the same so overall the game still doesn’t look that great, but it really shows what good lighting can do and what it means exactly.
My hopes is of course not that WoW look like Quake, but rather that WoW starts looking a little more like its cinematics - which it totally can, even if the geometry doesn’t keep up.
