You’re preaching to the choir, but I worry that’s the main reason against them ever being playable. Like it or not, a lot of, if not most, players want their characters to be “sexy”.
My point was, if that’s the “female sethrak” model and not specifically a model for Sethraliss, it seems odd that female sethrakk NPCs don’t use it(with the fancy doodads removed). Because female sethrakk NPCs already exist but they share a model with the males. If they intended on making them playable, it seems they would have given the female NPCs that model too.
Sethraliss’s model is representative of what a female sethrak is supposed to look like minus the horns. Vessina in Hearthstone reinforces that design. The short of it is female sethrak have a subtly more feminine figure, a slightly smoother chest, and most importantly they lack the rattle that male sethrak are depicted with.
It reminds me a lot of charr in Guild Wars 2, how female charr had fluffy tails and the male charr had lion tufts at the end of theirs. I like it a lot, personally, but I’m all for dimorphism that isn’t just, “big, burly male and thin, hourglass female.”
Fair, but if they’ve meant to make them playable at some point all along then they could be holding off on any kind of big NPC update until the models are finished. There was also all the early datamining on Vulpera animations and customizations that exploded and made Blizzard warn everyone that it didn’t mean they’re going to be playable necessarily. They got a lot more guarded and locked down with their PTR information after that, so they could be waiting on updating models to avoid tipping their hand too early.
Blizzard: “We swear they won’t be playable! We gave them more customizations than some base races, we based them on the goblin rig. We gave them custom animations, and cape-geometry. But they won’t be playable we swear!”
For anyone genuinely curious, feel free to swing by the Megathread. Plenty of good speculation and fan work on them, including mockups of how helms would work and female customizations.