I feel like it’s only fair to compare the Drakthyr/Evoker release to the Pandaren/Monk release.
I never really thought about it until now, but I can actually now appreciate how much effort went in to making Pandaren and Monks. Think about it; they made a brand new rig for Pandaren, a from-scratch new skeleton with no re-used assets whatsoever. Additionally, they made Pandaren able to be other classes than just monks, meaning not only did they do a crazy amount of new animations for the monk class, but they also spent a large amount of time doing animations for other classes as well (Such as stealth, charge, casting animations, leap, whirlwind, ECT.).
Even more impressive is they made Pandaren able to wear all 4 armor types, Plate,Mail,Leather, and Cloth, and spent even more time making sure every transmog option in the entire game fit properly on the Pandaren model.
Another thing that I don’t think gets enough admiration is they made the Monk class playable for all other races too, meaning they spent EVEN MORE time coding unique animations for every race in the game to do the monk moves.
Compare this to Drakthyr/Evoker release and it’s like night and day. I will, however, cede one point, that Evoker should be Drakthyr only. So I don’t fault them for not making the class accessible to all, however, I still think this should be a point in the monk’s favor because of how time-consuming the process of adding their animations to every race took.
Drakthyr, unlike Pandaren, don’t use a unique rig. It uses the female demon hunter meta rig, with updated features and polygon textures. While it looks good, for sure, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the entire race re-uses assets that are already in the game.
Darkthyr also CAN’T TRANSMOG? At least anything other than shoulders and belt. Why? What for? I can’t think of any logical explanation why Drakthyr can’t transmog except that the devs just couldn’t be bothered going over all the transmog options in the game and making them fit the Drakthyr model.
Would it have taken a lot of time? Absolutely. But it should be a labor of love like the monk and pandaren were. This just feels lazy. There was 10x more work effort and passion put in to the monk and pandaren class/race combo than there was for Drakthyr it’s honestly depressing.
They also didn’t allow Drakthyr to be basic classes like Warrior and Mage for seemingly no reason other than they didn’t want to code any other animations for the race. The Drakthyr into cinematic literally has Drakthyr warriors with spears and shields in it, so why can’t Drakthyr be warriors? The only thing that makes sense is laziness. Even if they said they’re open to the idea in the future, why is this not just standard practice for launch?
They can’t be bothered to fit armor models onto Drakthyr and they can’t be bothered to add other class animations. It just doesn’t scream passion like WoW used to, and it’s very upsetting.
It’s just really starting to feel like the developers are getting fatigued with this game, and are cutting corners to make ends meet because the passion just doesn’t feel there anymore.