So i’m here to pose a suggestion. Plain and simple, i think the game could benefit from having cosmetic progression trees for spells.
The idea is simple, we get a progression system that unlocks spell skins and ability animations for our characters. This is meant to be an evergreen system like transmogs and generally something that you’ll work on passively as well.
The animations can be themed around raids for one. Which means that they will use the same particle effects and animations used by the creatures there.
So for example if you progress your “Emerald Nightmare skin tree” you will get animations relating to that. Imagine a Nightmare chaos bolt for a warlock for example.
Another way this system could add more progression would be by class fantasy. You’ve seen the bosses we fight, right? You’ve got your Fel Warriors or Flame druids. There are Dark shaman. Night elf Priests with Elune’s magic instead of light. Frankly you can make a generous list of possible customizations for most classes.
Finally i believe this could have a place in the current game because it could fit nicely in the reward system endgame content has. People that do high m+ get a mount. Gladiators get special tints and enchants. This could work to bring back that old “cool factor” of seeing someone with a tier set and thinking they were cool and awesome. Its not like Blizz haven’t occasionally done such things either, mind you. I can’t remember how many times people whispered me to ask how i got that “Awesome Were-bear form”.
I think we would all benefit from such a system. Especially since most of the power we get in one expansion vanishes on the next one. At least with cosmetic unlocks such as these you have something cool to show off for your effort in bygone content.
While I agree it would be cool, the visual readability of the game would suffer a lot.
For example there is a game called Path of Exile, I have thousands of hours in it and you can buy like 5 different skins for every skill and at the end you can’t really know which skills is which just because everything can look like totally different even if you have that much time in it.
Imagine if the standard gpyro could change textures, so you wouldn’t notice it so easily. Or DnD from DKs could look more blueish just like the Resonating Arrow from Kyrian Hunters.
Another thing is, that it’s hard to find the right balance between changing things enough to be different, but not changing them entirely to cause the above issues. Most likely because re-skinning this much skills would cost lots of money there would be some micro transactions a well which is unliked by the playerbase.
I get where you are coming from and i honestly do expect some issues. But i also expect it will be one of those transitional things that people will learn to play around pretty fast. I’m not concerned about visual readabillity as much because this was one of the concerns people had when transmog became a thing. People back then were worried it would affect pvp. But it didn’t.
One thing i can trust in blizzard’s design is the art. So i expect they’d be able to pull off readability along with unique flavor.
If anything Blizzard is uniquely competent when it comes to using art assets correctly so any issues that might arise I’d predict to be short term only, this would be a welcome change in my book for another cosmetic drive behind end progression that would keep players engaged in their game.
People said that when they introduced unit skins in SC2.
It didn’t change anything.
Would be really cool to have more customization over things like this, sounds, colour, particle effects and the like.
There is some customization with glyphs and druid forms but yeah I think this would be really cool. Even if you can have enchants give unique looking effects on spells… Or heck more quests like Green fire for warlock which was an awesome challenge when relevant as well as a unique look.
Well they dabbled in that in MoP with the green fire questline for warlocks and it worked out pretty well I think. The key for it to be succesful I think would be to keep it relatively tame, like how the green fire only affects the color of the spells, not the animations or it’s shape itself. Like giving NE priests the ability to have silver spell instead of gold shouldn’t break the game.
I agree with a minor touch like that, I’m already using some glyphs that recolor stuff. E.g. rising sun kick on my monk is blue instead of yellow-orange etc.
Animations though… that’d make addons in pvp even more mandatory.
Yeah animations and the actual shape of stuff is a no no, when someone flings a chaos bolt at you you should be able to always tell it’s a chaos bolt.
I would have taken it a bit further but essentially yeah. I have this thing with tidesages after BFA. So i’d like to see the day for example where we get something like a more water elemental based ench Shammy. But stormstrike is still stormstrike right? What i’m proposing would simply make it cause a splash of water along with all the lightning.
I think it’s possible to some extent if it’s enhancement of a spell effect, not so sure about fighting animations meaning melee could end up with less customizations.
Also more in the future maybe but rn ppl are still trying to run WoW on potato pcs so unlike were-bear if they turn their effects lower they could not praise your extra animation effects, things are already messy in sth like epic bg fights.
But yeah overall why not, it’s up to them to figure out how far to go and customizing is always fun. Let me customize my kitty form just like my toon already :))
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