Battle for Azeroth creatures

[Equeon]

I actually like the one-headed lavadoggos. My headcanon will be that whether a core hound develops one or two heads depends on the nutrients it gets in the womb.

Two heads = more offense, more aggressive/territorial, but greater metabolism and energy requirements
One head = less offense, more cunning hound, and lower metabolism

[Valnaaros]

Either that or the Dark Irons taken the Core Hounds left behind after Ragnaros was defeated and started breeding and making different kinds for different purposes. Either would work

[SlickrockGhost]

I actually like the one-headed lavadoggos. My headcanon will be that whether a core hound develops one or two heads depends on the nutrients it gets in the womb.

Two heads = more offense, more aggressive/territorial, but greater metabolism and energy requirements
One head = less offense, more cunning hound, and lower metabolism

As long as the animations are good, I'm fine with them.

Now if they are only available to dark irons, that will make things interesting...

[Maizou]

Curiosity for those with alpha:

Are the rabbits still tameable, or was that just a bug?

[Valnaaros]

The ensorcelled hare, which uses two of the bloodied rabbit variants, is still tamable. Whether they will remain tamable is yet to be seen.

[Quiv]

I could've swore I checked those over the weekend and they weren't. I'll check again.

[Valnaaros]

They could've been changed since I last checked.

[Valnaaros]

Just checked them. It looks like they made them untamable with the most recent build.

[Valnaaros]

It looks like the old Darkhound model is getting an update

[Vephriel]

Gasp!!! I love them, wow those look fantastic.

The one major caveat I have is that they're no longer on the old hound skeleton which had really cute and unique animations. I always loved the run and the hopping idle especially, it gave them so much personality. Plus their walk animation had this great hunkered down shoulders stance...to have them slapped on the coyote skeleton yet again (even though I like that model a lot) feels like another loss of individuality. Too many creatures are ending up on the same skeletons because Blizzard doesn't want to fix the old ones, or they don't want to make an effort to create new ones, and it's making a lot of beasts feel too same-ish in my opinion. (see: the eagle skeleton - it's mostly good and much better than the cardboard folding wings of the old owl skeletons, but now *every* bird uses it and it's getting stale)

[WerebearGuy]

Welp, time to go finally tame one of those ugly mutts!

[Silivren]

I love it, I knew they'd get an upgrade since Dark Iron are coming. They're like THE Dark Iron staple pet, the corehounds make sense because of Ragnaros and all that jazz but they're always shown in dungeons with the Dark Iron, there's a mount model of one too. It is SUSPICIOUSLY dwarven in nature.

[Valnaaros]

The new models are indeed a replacement. Here is a pic of the red darkhounds in BRD

[Vephriel]

This is very bittersweet for me. I have absolutely no complaints about the textures or artwork, this is one of the most faithful revamps I've seen. But I'm really broken up over the loss of those unique animations.

I'm also curious if the runehound versions will be getting the same treatment. Perhaps they're just delayed, or their spell/texture effects aren't worth redoing at this point.

[Valnaaros]

As of right now, they haven't been updated.

[Rawr]

I will miss the jumping yip animation

[Vephriel]

I will miss the jumping yip animation

One of my personal favourite details of them.

To refresh everyone's memory, these are some of the unique animations I'm talking about:







For a vanilla skeleton it holds up remarkably well and has a lot of character. The walk animation in particular feels like a loss for atmosphere in places like Tirisfal - seeing the hounds skulk about between the trees really gave them a menacing vibe that I don't feel the coyote skeleton accomplishes. Even their run has a very determined gait, you can feel them pursuing you. And then the hop was just a really nice idle. :'(

[Valnaaros]

Here is the Phase Hound from Kara. Spectral effects currently do not work



Dreadbeast



Shadowbeast. The Spectral effects are also not working on this one.

[Lupis]

Oh huh, I'm actually really confused about that change! I like the coyote skeleton plenty, but ??? why...?? did they change it? The old one was a really nice skeleton and seemed to be doing just fine, and the new model is beautiful- by far one of my favorites so far in terms of faithfulness. It's really weird that they'd put it on a completely different skeleton. :0 It looks like a very different beast like that. Weird, for how spot in the model itself is (aside from the hunch)!

That said, STUNNING model. They did a gorgeous job and I kind of hope we see work like that done on the older revamps.

[WerebearGuy]

The walk animation has a really stretched leg, which looks really bad. It loses all of its mass, flattens as it extends backwards, and then returns to normal. The run animation doesn't really feel all that determined, but it's definitely a hound-like animation. I personally don't care for the yip as it looks ridiculous. While I don't mind the coyote skeleton being GROSSLY overused for everything remotely canine, I do hope it does get a better rig for animations that fixes all the problems and nasty errors in the models it's used on.

Though, I'm torn on what color I want to go get. The red is absolutely brilliant, but the subdued blue and purple ones are great too. The green one is also very nice, but the white skin feels a bit lacking.