I must admit that I got excited for a moment when I read: “Colossus Smash and Warbreaker have new visuals.”
But the added visuals are a disgrace (silly-looking & low effort). Whoever designed them should be coached by the developer who designed the new shaman animations.
The old CS/Warbreaker animations weren’t anything special, but at least they looked thematically fitting. Please revert the animations of CS/Warbreaker to their previous state.
Completely agree. The new visual effects for Colossus Smash and Warbreaker look absolutely awful, cheap low quality. They also look very delayed. In addition, the sound design is pretty awful as well. What is going on…
I have never seen such a massive downgrade to what I consider a perfect skill animation and effect before. This will make me never pick Warbreaker ever again… Why are they ruining so many skills with pointless stupid effects that shows up?!
I don’t usually post on the forums, but this needs to be reverted.
The new effects look out of place, low-quality, and adds a whole lot of visual clutter.
Colossus Smash looks… ok-ish ig, but Warbreaker is a massive downgrade, both aesthetically and in visual coherence ingame. Even the weapon models themselves used in the animation look shoddy. All the effects even face away from the target area for some reason.
Warrior doesn’t need weapons to magically manifest like they insist on doing with paladin, they need the swings and effects themselves to look meaty. Warbreaker in live feels like it packs a punch, this feels really lame and lightweight.
Go back to the drawing board and keep the previous one on both of these.
I second that, the new animation looks dubious. I can’t understand why there are axes at the end that aren’t even aimed at the target. The animation itself doesn’t say that they’re from WoW, but from some other game (I won’t point a finger at Korean games).
Colossus Smash is what you’re expecting from it, a powerful blow that will break the target’s armor. Making an animation for it is a piece of cake, since the conditions are simple.
But with Warbreaker, it seems more difficult to me. The name itself, the description of the skill, and the fact that this skill takes its roots from Colossus Smash. As a result, you’re expecting a combination of 3 conditions, which in my opinion is difficult to implement and you’ll have to make some compromises. But I would like the animators to try.
Back to the drawing board, pronto. This is by far one of the worst visual downgrades I’ve seen in years for warriors - hell, across the board. As someone else put it:
This is a hard miss. And I mean that in near every way. Warrior spell effects are usually orangey-red or a brown/white, outside of the thunder effects. This pure white looks really bad. Why are we summoning weapons. That is extremely Paladin. The MS/WW animations for the actual character?
Also the way the weapons swing makes no sense. If Csmash is ST the weapons should hit the target, not the area around it, and Warbreaker seems to be the same animation, but on each target. Which is strange because it should originate from a single target (either the warrior or their target if they are going that way), that animation feels like a chaining effect.
Same here.
This is litterally the worst visual i ever seen for warriors.
Why weapons hit the ground around the target like an aoe when it’s single target?
WHY THAT DELAY IN ANIMATIONS !?
Why did you change the jump for warbreaker, bringing back to that awful whirlwind animation???
Reverse it please Blizz.
With all my respect, theses animations suck and are a big, big downgrade.
Forget that thing with many weapons, this is not the way to improve visuals.
And it’s a nonsense cause we only can use 1 weapon.
It’s the “Weapons manifesting out of thin air”-part that irks me (Especially in multi-target, warbreaker spawning a veritable arsenal of weapons, very cluttered), warriors don’t use magic, their movements do the talking, or the impact of them, if they kept the old animations, but added a “ground smash”-effect to them (Maybe like one tick of the “Earthquake” visual), that would be more fitting.
It wouldn’t even be particularly difficult, the groundwork for a cool warbreaker that still gives a sense of what its range is is already there with what they had before. The new animation makes it even harder to see what you’re actually hitting and how far away it is. The models they’re using for the weapons don’t even look good.
Obviously all of this is just my personal opinion with a pinch of knowledge in the field:
I have to say these animations are a complete miss for me.
Some of the reasons I see for this are:
Flavor - Warriors are THE melee class which does not use magic or even uses other elements etc. Why would a warrior summon multiple weapons to strike their target. The character itself should act and not some sort of magic happening.
Visual clutter - The breaking armor visual effect is more than enough for showing what is happening. This icon itself already has too much detail, why bother with a pseudo roman body armor and fancy splintering effects with blue light, if it is done within way under a second. It is too much detail for such a short frame of time, all those small armor fragments etc will just clutter the screen on warbreaker for example.
But the REALLY big problem is again the multiple magic weapons spawning. They will clutter the screen completely and make it hard to make out what is happening in a melee scenario this is completely unacceptable and should be avoided. (In this case, simply deleted)
Timing - The timing of the animations is completely off. It leads to the skills feeling weak and lacking impact. Old versions of the Warbreaker had a jumping animation with shattering ground effects which made it feel heavy and powerful. This version is lacking every bit of this. I hope it is just a placeholder, because I don’t see any merit in the new version of warbreaker. The magic weapons also add to this as they strike with a very long delay.
Logic - On a logical level the animation is flawed. Why would the weapons float away from the target and strike outward? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Color - The white + blue coloring of the particles makes it feel like a frost effect. Which again doesn’t fit the warrior.
Overall it feels like the person who created and or oversaw the production of these effects + animations had no idea what a warrior ability is or should feel like. It just feels like it was built by a person in a studio outside of Blizzard who just got the task “Build a VFX for a MMORPG where an armor gets broken with weapons”. The Art-Lead in this case or their communication failed for me and this is the result… underwhelming
Its terrible, both the sound and the animation has lost the crunch, and… whirlwind animation and burning crusade weapon models? really? are you this lazy? this is “new”? where does all the money go from the full priced expansions, monthly sub and money store?
Ventured out specifically to say this ‘update’ is terrible. Who even asked for this? There’s nothing wrong with the current animations.
You Did Not Cook.
The new Lighting bolt is the worst animation i’ve seen so far
Anyways yeah the new warbreaker is just horrible
Just going to add my opinion of:
It looks really aweful, and it it probably better to bring this back to the drawing board. It doesnt look or feel warrior. Not to mention the visual clutter is insane. Pull more mobs and it gets worse.
Instead of this, just use the old animation as a base, then add maybe a more solid slam effect with sound. For reference, just go and pick up a sledgehammer and hit down a spike into asphalt.
Make it a bit more fantasy with a rumble effect and you are good to call it a day.
If you want to make it visually clear to the player that things got shattered, just add a close to see-through little broken shield icon over the enemies affected. Tho, that is not really needed in WoW that already got debuffs shown.
The hell even did this come from? Why gorehowl, some tbc polearm and a wod mace?
For CS keep the armorbreaking bit but ditch the rest.
For warbreaker ditch the whirlwind intro and bring back the jump.
Is this really the best you can do?
I just want to say, that those animations do not look like WoW at all.
Not a fan either. Feels cheap and doesn’t fit.
Completely agree, the animations do not fit with the class fantasy at all. I should be just a guy thats skilled with a sword, not summoning magic weapons like a Paladin that forgot to bring the lemons.
Crash Lightning though chef’s kiss