Greetings, dear Shaman community.
With this thread, I would like to bring up to you all the issue of the Ascendance form’s visuals. Yes, again.
If you look at very popular threads on the subject on the official forums or on Reddit about the recent visual update, you’ll see the following two things constantly being echoed by many shamans, even after the new form got fixed:
- This is why I don’t pick Ascendance
- I want to look like Kurog Grimtotem / Dathea, Ascended and not like a Twilight Cultist lookalike
Simply put, even after the fixes it received, Ascendance absolutely doesn’t fit any Shaman that isn’t an orc or a Zandalari. Bigger races get compressed into this thinner frame, trolls, taurens, etc. gain some extra fingers,… It’s a mess. And I think that it’s really annoying for a buff that has such long uptime depending on your build. I’m clearly not the only one, considering how many upvotes many threads and comments on the matter received. People are opting out of Ascendance just because of how it looks. And to be clear: The new ascendance forms look good. But they do not fit most shaman races, including some of the most common ones.
I would like to present a simple solution to this issue, that I didn’t even imagine myself: Blizzard did, and even put it into the game before removing it.
Glyph of Ascendance.
Your Ascendance form now appears as an elementally enhanced version of your normal humanoid form.
Added in patch 6.2.0 and removed patch 7.0 for no discernible reason, this glyph was essentially Druid’s Glyph of Stars for Ascendance. Elemental gets a red hue, Restoration gets a blue hue, Enhancement gets a grey hue. If clarity is an issue with this, they could add a big colored lightning strike effect coming down on our character to clearly signal the transformation to all players. Many variants of such effects already exist in the game. Why can Druids and Warlocks receive so much attention and customization options while we keep receiving none? Next to all their exclusive quest chains and barber appearances, I believe a simple glyph would be a simple, realistic addition to the game that would make many shaman players very happy. We want to see our characters!
If Blizzard wished to go the extra mile, they could also grant us something similar to Dathea, Ascended’s appearance, essentially granting us a small levitation effect & encasing our body into a corresponding elemental.
If you agree with what you just read- and I don’t doubt that some of you will, I would like to ask you to Submit a Suggestion using the Support menu found in game to ask for more customization options for Ascendance. Also feel free to bump this thread and start a thread on the same subject in other languages/regions that you can access. Alone I cannot be heard, but if some of us band together, perhaps there’s a chance they will listen. Thank you!