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Nightborne: The Fixes We Need - World of Warcraft Forums
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20769736819
NOTE: This is a repost of mine from May. Seeing as we’ve going through BFA’s launch and many months without a hint of changes to Nightborne, I am posting this to again try to get developer attention on these issues. While I believe everyone is glad…
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NOTE: This is a repost of Valquois US from May. Seeing as we’re going through BFA’s for quite a while now and many months without a hint of changes to Nightborne, I am posting this to again try to get developer attention on these issues. In this post, I will post her and my opinion on the matter.
While I believe everyone is glad this race was made playable, I think I speak for the majority of Nightborne players when I say the conversion from NPC race to player race went rather poorly and totally not to our expectations. In this thread, I will highlight the issues I have with the Nightborne model, heritage armor and racials as well as bring up suggestions to remedy these issues.
Foreword
Legion spent its first endgame story arc on the plight of the Nightborne. Understandably, its a very modern way of retelling of the Blood Elf storyline, the questlines of the Nightfallen, their rebellion and liberation of Suramar from Elisande and the Legion was amongst my favorite and most enjoyable parts of Legion.
The variety of the NPC’s is also amazing when you spend time and look through them all. Nobles, craftsmen, guards, arcanists, merchants and the very citizens; all have an incredible appearance and attitude (which is why I like them so much). They also have a variety of different armor types in different colorings which further contribute to the feel of Suramar city. Importantly, these armors are built in straight into the model, like Naga and Vrykul NPC’s.
When the Allied race system was introduced, and we learned this race that was so fleshed out, polished and contributed to a vast portion of Legion content was becoming playable, I’m sure everyone was excited. However, when the actual reveal and data mining happened, everyone saw how much Blizzard has changed the Nightborne from the NPC presentation, most of it not for the better.
Main issue #1: Lack of Options
Skin options: 3
Face options: 6
Hair options: 6
Hair color options: 6 (7 for males if you count no hair)
Earring options: 6 (including no earings)
Tattoo options: 4 (including no tattoos)
6 or less options across every field. Easily the least amount of variability or customizations of any race (except for Lightforged, which have similar if not less to these). There isn’t much to say about this. If you can find a way to give Void Elves 8 shades of blue/black/purple and 12 hairstyles (even though we didn’t spend any time of the Legion story about them) I don’t see why is it an issue to get similar numbers with Nightborne (considering the vast majority of Legion story was about them). The Void Elves even get 5 skin tones despite all being shades of blue/purple, similar shades that Nightborne use. After seeing the amount of fleshing out Dark Iron and Mag’har have received, Nightborne really falls by the wayside in terms of quality.
Considering the actual Nightborne that we unlock are the ones we cure with the Arcan’dor fruit, I believe lore-wise it wouldn’t be a problem if we can use the Nightfallen as customization options, similar as to how the Mag’ har orcs work. In the images below I have added 3 more skin options as well as 2 more tattoo options for each gender. Which in turn helps to remedy the skin/tattoo limitations. Considering these models share the skeleton with the NPC Nightborne, it wouldn’t be an issue to implement them.
https://imgur.com/a/O3V66VV
Main Issue #2: Differences from NPC counterparts
Barring a few specific examples (Blood Elf city guards), I don’t think any playable race has had to deal with regular NPC members of its faction looking so drastically different, and unfortunately better than, playable options.
One Image Summary:
https://i.imgur.com/cGvLXas.png
Firstly, faces. Nightborne faces look almost directly copied and edited from Night Elven character counterparts. This is especially true with the males. When you compare a Nightborne male NPC to a male player, it’s not even remotely close. The Nightborne NPC males are very gaunt-faced, with narrow features, yet stern looks. Player faces for males look fat, and their ears are far too wide, taking up nearly half the head. Also, all but the first face option for female Nightborne lack facial geometry, which is easily noticeable on the character selection screen and barbershop.
Secondly, and probably the biggest complaint: eyes. While I understand that facial rigging needed to be added, there’s no excuse for making such a drastic departure from the iconic Nightborne slanted/slim eye shape, considering player races like Blood Elf males and Pandaren males use smaller eyes just fine. Nightborn eye shape emphasized and captured the regal and haughty, proud, and proper flavor the Nightborne radiate as NPCs. On player characters, this is all but completely lost with big, bright, open eyes akin to Night Elves.
Thirdly, tattoos. While they are certainly a welcome addition considering their presence on the NPCs, they are so faint you can barely see them, and our heritage armor, especially on males, covers up so many of the tattooed areas that it doubles down on how invisible the tattoos look. A couple more pattern options wouldn’t be unwelcome here either…
Fourth, jewelry. Throughout the NPCs in Suramar, we see Nightborne dressed in 3 primary metal tones, Silver, Gold, and Bronze. Simple palette recolors for existing options would go a long way in increasing variability.
Also, while a minor nitpick, female Nightborne bust areas seem downsized from their NPC counterparts to the point that their sternums poke out further than their breasts, which looks really, really weird.
Lastly, Nightborne NPCs are shown to have things player models omit entirely, such as glowing arcane fingertips, arcane strands flowing in their hair, and a couple of ear directions (some Nightborne NPCs curve upwards, while some flow straight backward.
All of these issues on their own wouldn’t be consequential but combined they all only serve to make the player version of Nightborne seem diluted and uncool. This should not be possible with how amazing their presentation was in Legion.
Main Issue #3: Heritage Armor
Even though the Heritage armor uses the palette established by the nightborne the overall armor look is extremely ugly in comparison to the other Heritage armors (such as Void Elves) and in comparison to the Suramar NPC’s.
Firstly, the chest piece robe simply determines too many of the 3D “attachable” as I like to call them, the extra armor plates and bits and bobs seen in various new armors. In this case, the neck armor, chin cap, thigh plates, and back skirt are ALL attached to the chest piece. Also, the robe on males completely covers up the chest area, where Nightborne males and females typically bare their chest in this type of armor, or at least have the option, considering we have tattoos we’d like to show off. The Nightborne NPC’s have armors who reveal quite a bit of their figure with very subtle actual armor pieces, which are always enhanced by arcane magic.
Even though I appreciate the effort of creating something new as a Heritage armor, considering that you are supposed to complete leveling from level 20 - 110 to get it, to say that is underwhelming would be an understatement. The fact that you have to do old content in order to achieve the armor is fine, however it doesn’t feel rewarding at all to level so long for an ugly transmog outfit that doesn’t even properly represent the Nightborne. Below I have attached a few images of armors that would be great as Heritage armor for the Nightborne that actually feel quite special and representative to their heritage.
Male & Female Heritage Armor (suggestion):
https://imgur.com/a/7HFB6gO
Subsequently, heritage armor is a great addition to the Allied races, however players often find themselves difficult to transmog it with existing weapons, so my suggestion is why not add to the Heritage armor their respective weapons. Not only will that make the heritage armor more alluring, also considering it is purely cosmetic would give people a full transmog set.
Also, there have been different color variants for the heritage armors that have been datamined, It would be great if we can obtain those, let’s say through a challenging scenario similar to the mage tower one.
In addition, the scaling of Nightborne armors all seem to use the direct values of their Night Elf counterparts, leading the males having absolutely tremendous shoulders for their body size, and females having shoulders set extremely far apart, floating, and at a strange angle.
Main Issue #4: Racial abilities
I didn’t really want to open the Pandora’s box of discussing racial abilities, but here we are. In the original datamined, Nightborne had two abilities that sounded neat, and definitely appropriate flavor-wise for Nightborne: “Masquerade” and “Dispel Illusions”. These definitely sounded more interesting than what we got. For those that did not see the initial datamining, Masquerade allowed you to take on the appearance of another Nightborne (unclear if it meant NPCs, players, or both), and Dispel Illusions was a short ranged stealth and invisibility dispel, very much akin to the iconic ability Nightborne guards use in Suramar city.
Overall, I know racials have been getting a harder look at, considering how things like Mythic+ have made every little edge more important (why we saw things like the Arcane Torrent and EMfH nerfs).
However, I was under the impression that Blizzard learned the lesson from legendries, in that it doesn’t feel good for some abilities to feel super powerful or impactful in the same space (racial in this case) where some are subpar or useless. Racial, in my opinion, should be the place to shove the flavourful and the rule-of-cool abilities and leave damage or crowd control abilities to the classes.
That being said, a racial like Masquerade, Dispel Illusions, or one we did get, Cantrips, are good. Flavourful abilities that make sense for the race that don’t affect DPS in a direct or impactful way, and are utility at best. Otherwise, you end up with Arcane Pulse, a damaging racial that is situational to the point of near uselessness. It’s a joke; a racial Arcane explosion that does pitiful damage, and a near-useless AoE slow.
When I think of what fits Nightborne flavor-wise? Wine. Masquerades. Illusions. Arcane. We got one Arcane ability and that was the end of it, and it’s not even a cool or powerful one. If you ever lose your disguise in Suramar, many of the guards do a really cool ability called “Arcane Charge” or “Arcane Rush”, where they go transparent and blaze towards you, ending in a small Arcane Explosion when they reach you. That would’ve been way cooler, and more of a polar opposite to the Spatial Rift ability Void Elves got, and also been useful on both melee and ranged.
Thank you so much for reading if you’ve come this far. Please share your support or thoughts bellow, and I’ll pretend that Blizzard will read this or any of the numerous posts made about Nightborne, and hopefully, the action is taken.
