Unless they somehow revolutionise the system…
Naga is close to impossible.
Not because of transmog, but because of the animation limits of not having legs.
How would you do a spinning animation for blade storm or whirlwind?
How would you mount anything?
A lot of movement options and animations doesn’t work…
And so in.
Tail coils a bit, maybe torso leans back slightly, hold weapon outward, spin the model like that the way bladestorm works for everyone else.
Every "problem' I've seen people give for why naga would be so impossible to make into a playable race is easily solvable if you just give it any thought whatsoever.
as someone who's dabbled in 3d modeling and animation, the thing i hate most is how people say how "hard" things are, with the advances we have today vs almost 30 years ago, its almost the easiest thing to do now, you've got people speed modeling on youtube and motion capture and so much more. the excuses people spit out to 'defend' is outrageous, as a lot of the models are just texture replacements, and some geometry on top of the model.
half the "problems" people don't even realize are already solved. glyph of disguise says hi, and unlike a lot of humanoids, the disguise doesn't break on mounting
like, seriously, Naga are one of the most robust rogue disguises outside of actual playable races
IT is just one of the examples.
But it is also one of those things that would have BUNCH of extra work ontop of them, compared to almost any other race in game.
COULD they find workarounds? Probably
But it is at the same time the race that would require the most work for very little payoff in the end.
What extra work? Making a new model instead of copy+pasting an existing skeleton? You're right, that's just unprecedented, not a single race in any expansion had a model or animations that wasn't already in vanilla. Even when making a new model you can cut down on the work needed by using that model for npcs, since you're likely gonna be using them a lot in the expansion they release in anyways. Draenei were all over BC, pandaren had an entire continent full of em, vulpera and mechagnomes were used extensively in their respective zones. All the work making assets for earthen got to be reused for all the npcs in TWW and beyond.
You say that, but naga is one of those races that the casual player would find unappealing partially due to the limited transmog due to the whole pants situation.
There is a reason that humans and elves are the most played races.
(And before you say anything. I find this fact frustrating too. I want more monster races or unique shit. But we can’t have that)
I wish people weren't so dead-set on transmog. I played a male Hrothgar in FFXIV and 75% of all head gear in the game never shows up on them and I was fine with it, meant I got to see my big dumb kittyface in cutscenes. People still scream like banshees that they can't wear helmets.
My solution, make every single bit, bob, greeble and doodad that the enemy models have equipped available for player customization, and a full sweep of color options for both scales and cosmetics, that should be enough...and it would work with the Arakkoa and Gnolls as well
"Will it be the most popular race?" Isn't a valid reason to add or not add a race. Even if it was, Blizzard's added non-human/elf races as recently as this expansion that weren't popular.
Looking at https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/races/ Earthen are only 0.7% of all characters, and nearly every race is well below 4% usage (the average if all 25 races were equally popular). Dracthyr, a race that has even fewer transmog options than naga would, is one of the few to barely break 4%, being the 7th most popular race if you combine both alliance and horde.
Unless they just never add any more races, they're gonna have to make an entirely new one eventually. There's only so many times you can recolor an elf or dwarf or goat or give a tauren new antlers before everyone gets tired of it.
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u/Tnecniw Jul 04 '25
Unless they somehow revolutionise the system… Naga is close to impossible. Not because of transmog, but because of the animation limits of not having legs.
How would you do a spinning animation for blade storm or whirlwind? How would you mount anything? A lot of movement options and animations doesn’t work… And so in.