The Item Squish and the majority of the model graphics updates are now live.
My thoughts on the graphics... Not sure if it's my graphics settings or what, but a few of the females ended up.... not looking so good. The Worgen, Goblins and Pandaren are obviously untouched as they were made with these tweaks in mind:
Female Human - Do NOT look at her directly from the front, at least not zoomed in like at the Barber's. For some reason, their lips look like they're balancing a loogie on their bottom lip. When you look at them a bit from the side, they don't look quite so bad.
Female Dwarf - Maaaan, she is hiiiiiiiigggggh..... or so tired that she barely cares. The alternatives weren't much better. I'd swear a few made her look like she had a skin condition or disease.
Female Gnome - The only two faces I found worth my time either made her look exhausted or like she's fending off tears with her eyeliner starting to blot. I chose exhausted. Otherwise, not that bad.
Female Orc - There were more faces I found palatable than with the Gnome, but what I liked more was that FINALLY my female orc mage has some decent hairstyles. Sure, most of the ones that give her long hair make her look like she either hasn't bathed in a while or doesn't care for her hair much, but it's so much better than their previous options.
Female Tauren - OH GAWD! Probably the one that I ended up liking the least when I saw how their appearances ended up on my loading screen, I ended up changing both of my taurens far more than any other character I've looked at so far.
Female Troll - Not sure if I lucked out or not, but she still looked pretty good. Working as intended here.
Female Forsaken - I either REALLY lucked out or something, but she looked better than before. Working as intended here.
I don't have any Night Elves or Draenei, so I'm not going to review them; and Blood Elves aren't going to get their update until after WoD actually drops, so I'm still anxious about how they're going to look.
Aside from the faces, the graphical update is VERY nice and I'm glad to see it. I just wished I knew they decided to tweak some things, like the plots in the farm. Randomly, they'll rotate when you interact with them and I don't know WHY. It... it just didn't seem like it was worth the trouble.
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As for the item squish.... it's weird seeing it in action.
My Rogue, who was at item level 503 when the squish happened is now rocking only ~55,000 health; my druid, who was at about 500K+ health is now down to ~78,000. The first mobs you'll face from the Iron Horde outside of the Dark Portal are only 19K health, so even if you're in shit gear, you shouldn't have too much of an issue shredding them (but be careful of pulling packs if you're a tank spec as they can do some notable damage if you aren't managing them properly), but it's just bizarre to see my Druid use Faerie Fire on a level 55 mob and do ~27K damage, then use it on one of the Iron Horde right next to it and only do about ~780.
I ran both through Karazhan, where the horses in the stables also had about 55K health. Both of my characters were taking PIDDLY damage and dealing it back a thousand fold, to the tune of 78K+ for auto-attacks for my rogue (yeah, her weapons are garbage. ;;-_-;;) and 100K-200K damage for a SINGLE THRASH from my druid's bear form.
Also, if you're like me, you'll be surprised by how streamlined your character is, even if you knew they were trimming the fat when it came to abilities.
Oh, and heads up for druids, they removed Mangle from your hot bars. Instead of Mangle being a separate ability for both Cat and Bear forms, it's now a universal ability for both forms, so they needed to remove the "singular" ones.
Also, I have no idea what differentiates your travel form if you're high enough level to have flight form. I've used it and become a bird when I intended to go stag and vice versa. At least it auto-shifts if you go underwater.