10.2 Guardians of the Dream: Beasts Thread

[worgpower]

Ah, I knew bears wouldn't get the love. First owlbears, now the mislabeled spirit beast. One day, bears will get some special love :')

I think bears got more love this expansion, I used to be bored of the bears we already had, we had more variety of creatures with the bear skeletons, but weren’t bears, until dragonflight, we only had like two bear models, one basic, one old classic, Amani models but those are black bears. In DF we got 3 or 4 ish bear models, we got primal bears, ice bears, and dreambruins, umbraclaws are 50/50 since they’re Feathermanes. I agree they deserve more love, but bears had tons this xpac

[WerebearGuy]

I'm going to sort of rant a little here. There's a TL:DR at the end if you don't want to read the wall of text.

While we did get new models for bears this expansion (Three new, one returning), they have a problem. Just like real bears, most species basically have a very similar silhouette. Classic bears and their updated model are reminiscent of brown bears, Amani bears are just brown bears (and recolors) with armor, Primal bears are akin to American black bears, Ice bears are very clearly based on polar bears, and the upcoming dream bears are reminiscent of either Asiatic black bears or sloth bears. All of these bears, excluding the polar bears, are almost identical in silhouette. This is to be expected, since they're all related fairly closely. Ice bears stood out because it was a new silhouette, even ignoring the spikes, but ultimately it's just a real bear with fairly normal looks. When the owlbears were added, and some were classified as bears, it felt like the bear family would finally get something new. Something truly different.

Let's look at stags for a counterpoint. This pet family has dozens of unique designs, despite having a very similar body plan. Ignoring outlandish ones like giraffes and moose, every single stag in the family has a distinct silhouette, mostly in part due to their antlers and some having tails or thick bodies. Despite having similar locomotion and body part arrangement, you would never mistake an Outland talbuk for a Dragon Isles bruffalon. You'll never mistake Zereth Mortis' cervids for gazelles. You'll never mistake Shadowlands' runestags for Argus' talbuks. They even have some wildly unique forms, such as the aforementioned giraffes (these aren't even stags lol). This family is a great example of realism and fantasy blended together; things evolve down a similar route, but end up being wildly different due to environment or whatever.

Additionally, let's look at the ever abundant selection of cats. In the beginning, we had classic cats, the bulkier saber cats, and the maned lions. In BC, we were given lynxes (aka recolored night elf cat forms). In Cataclysm, we got an HD lion. Pandaria gave us tigers. Legion gave us nightsabers and the wildly unique panthara. After that, we got the grand nightsabers, the draconic rockfangs, and the two coming up in the Emerald Dream with dreamsabers and thornclaws. Cats have a very distinct physiology, and most of the cats in WoW have saber teeth. Despite this, most cat models stand out from one another with ease. Panthara have glowing fins, grand nightsabers have bushy cheeks and slender frames, the Pandaria tigers have a much more realistic shape, lions have their iconic manes, and so on. Granted, many of the early cats were just recolors, with female lions and cheetahs being the exact same model. Lynxes were a step up from there by giving us tameable red and brown druid cats, while everything else after that has a unique silhouette while easily resembling a large feline.

Bears, on the other hand, can almost entirely be generalized as "That looks like a bear" due to how lacking in unique traits they are. This is definitely alleviated to a degree thanks to ice bears and the returning bramblebacks, as those provide a MUCH needed diversity in silhouettes. While all bear models are different, the majority of them are just "bear but bigger head/armor/teeth/flowers", rather than having wildly distinct yet recognizable silhouettes. They're primarily "just bears", which is a shame. This is also kind of how it is in real life, since there's really only two (living) bear silhouettes; slender polar bears, and literally every other bear. Sun bear, Asiatic black bear, grizzly bear, spectacled bear, and so on; they are "just bears" in design. I know the Amani bears have their unique silhouette thanks to their armor, but unnatural adornments are kind of cheating in that regard. The bear doesn't naturally have gigantic tusks coming out of its sides, after all.

When we had owlbears mislabeled as bears rather than feathermanes, I was ecstatic. Finally, a bear that stood out. It had a beak, long ears/eyebrows/whatever, and it looked wildly different from a regular bear. Alas, as with the ankylodons and shardhides, it was never meant to be. Couldn't have turtle bears, couldn't have weird alien reptile bears, and now we are denied fluffy bird bears. Even in the sense of spirit beasts, we only had Arcturis, who still uses the extremely outdated classic look (love my ghost bear, don't get me wrong). The bramblebacks are a nice supplement to my complaint, considering they're bears with branches sticking out and a form unlike other bears entirely, but they're not really new. As we all painfully remember, these bears were tameable in the BfA alpha, and we were saddened when they were taken away. I'm appreciative that, once it's fixed on PTR, we're finally being given our bramble bears again along with the wonderful cat and stag variants as well, but as with many other pet families, it's really not enough to stand out.

The TL:DR is that bears keep getting new models that aren't really outstanding in the same way as stags, cats, and so on. The variance is dreadfully minimal compared to other families with common repeating patterns in design. I got a little off topic, but ultimately the message is that bears shouldn't be restricted in design as much as they are. The art team makes some nice things, but they're limiting themselves so harshly in this case. This has been my Ted Talk.

[Jangalian]

Hey look what I found! There's a firelands bird attached to the quest "Forlorn Hope". He's tameable, but a certain NPC is there with you and keeps shooting spells at the bird. Feign didn't work once they had started attacking, the NPC was pulling a lot of aggro that I couldn't pull off. So I died, and when I rezzed it was far enough from the bird that combat hadn't started yet. A simple ice trap later, and I have one hot turkey dinner.

Edit - He's named Sylvanesh the....burning, I think. Does not keep the name. He's a little oversized!!

EDIT - at some point there was a rollback and I lost this guy, as well as my sprite dragon mount (??) for some reason. I cry because I really loved my flamebirb.

[worgpower]

Werebear, I agree, many families lack silhouettes that can be based on real animals, Scorpids fall in there, they don’t have anything too distinctive other than either having Amber or crystal, but they still run the same, Wolves also somewhat have this issue, they only had either the limping skeleton or the normal one which was very boring for me compared to other families, lupines were a good new skeleton introduction, but not enough to make me feel satisfied, many families especially ferocity lack variety in skeleton and shape, I’m looking at families I mentioned and crocolisks, gorillas, they need a breath of fresh air, it’s always stags, feathermanes, and serpents get all the love, they need a chill pill for a few expansions

A lot of family opportunities could have been put in this expansion and patch, like weasels which includes ottuks, marsuul and the new skunks were getting, same with Mollusks, snails and slugs, but we were stuck with similar models we had in the past even though they were lovely, im looking at you, bears, stags and cats

[Wain]

Help please! Help not needed after all! I figured out a foolproof way of getting all possible look variants.


The Watchful Somnowl added in this latest build introduces some new tameable colours. The problem is, they have so many possible looks that it's hard to pick up all of them, and Wowhead's looks for this NPC are very incorrect so we can't rely on that as a backup. Spamming F6 to get all the looks doesn't really work on this model, because (1) scaling in the dressing room means half their heads are clipped off so you can't see the antlers, sometimes not ears or half the brows either, and (2) you can't see the tails in the dressing room, anyway.

But through the help of the datamining folk I managed to get a method of reading the creature cache that our games accumulate as we play. Whenever you encounter an NPC it stores all possible colours for that NPC, and the chance of each to appear.

So, for the Watchful Somnowl, there are 11 looks. But one of those will appear roughly 25/35 = 71% of the time:



The other 10 looks each have a 1 in 35 (~ 3%) chance of appearing:




Of interest, that brown one is the only one so far that is almost missing a tail. Or rather the tail is very, very short, and I'm calling it a "Stub-Tail" in the looks descriptions, as opposed to the regular short tail. A couple of the black ones also have a medium-length tail, and I think they're the first - most others have either the long tail or the regular short (not stub-tail) one.

Thanks!

[Wain]

That damned brown one also meant I had to make up a whole new set of look combos for owls with stub-tails. That added 128 new looks and blew out the total number of looks to 512

[WerebearGuy]

A necessary sacrifice. This is just proof that we need additional stable slots. At least 500 new slots! I'll go on a murder spree later and record the looks I find to see if any are not listed yet.

[Wain]

I updated my above post about the Watchful Somnowl. I no longer need help, as I have a reliable solution for determining all the looks now

The updated post has some interesting data on the chance of each appearance to spawn.

[WerebearGuy]

Ah, well I feel like I wasted some time now lol. I just came back to complain that I see the black one with the long tail way too often. Oh well. The brown one is still a nice one, when it decides to spawn.

[Wain]

Ah, well I feel like I wasted some time now lol. I just came back to complain that I see the black one with the long tail way too often. Oh well. The brown one is still a nice one, when it decides to spawn.

Oh I'm so sorry! I only found out how to do this a few hours ago or I would have posted sooner. It turns out there were 2 looks I was missing and it could have taken a very long time for them to spawn. Thanks for your help and sorry for wasting your time.

[worgpower]

Wow battle pet rarity on a hunter pet, sweet, I want the black pronged antler with large ears and medium tail

[WerebearGuy]

Ah, well I feel like I wasted some time now lol. I just came back to complain that I see the black one with the long tail way too often. Oh well. The brown one is still a nice one, when it decides to spawn.

Oh I'm so sorry! I only found out how to do this a few hours ago or I would have posted sooner. It turns out there were 2 looks I was missing and it could have taken a very long time for them to spawn. Thanks for your help and sorry for wasting your time.

It's not a big deal lol. I play in fullscreen, and I'm the kind of person who gets very easily railroaded in a task. Once I start, I need either a brick wall or a similar good reason to stop. I didn't look at the thread at all from the time I posted the first time to the time after you posted the update. The only "waste" of time is someone showing up and ruining what you're doing (IRS, police, angry landlord, etc). It's all good otherwise since it's just a game.

[ApiBiru]

WoW rare coloured owls!
What, they are still Cunning can can't be respected to get Leech?
Nvm.

[worgpower]

It’ll take me a while to find the look I want, most of them are similar with tiny differences

[worgpower]

I was just testing a little more with thorn heart farming, and then I see some watchful somnowls in the area, I patrol around that area and out of stupid luck since this is PTR, I found the Somnowl look I want to tame when the patch releases, I hope it wont take me long on live, Wow is disappointing when you get lucky on the PTR

WoWScrnShot_100123_134704.jpg (463.41 KiB) Viewed 10586 times

[Beviah]

All the new tames look great. This patch would be perfect to introduce Greater Gorms, especially with us getting to tame the Daughter of Kimbul. Here's to hoping at least.

[Aroim]

They have changed Nah'qi, we now need an item to tame her/have to learn it

[Talihawk]

Oh dear. I hope it doesn't end up overly rng to get. I'd like a quest line like what Gara gave us. But if it's like the dang meat for the alien cats I'm gunna be so bummed out. Sounds kind of like the Ottuk, that'd be okay I guess.

[WerebearGuy]

I don't like that. Being a patient hunter and risking one hell of a landing is significantly more fun than buddying up with some dumb owl "god" that runs away like a wimp when you ask for help. I'll do it, but I'm not gonna like it.

[Wain]

I don't like that. Being a patient hunter and risking one hell of a landing is significantly more fun than buddying up with some dumb owl "god" that runs away like a wimp when you ask for help. I'll do it, but I'm not gonna like it.

If you mean that annoying owl loa, that's Q'onzu, not Anu'relos