[Druid] New Forms at Last!

I can scarcely believe it! When Blizzard said new forms would be on the backburner for us, I figured it was waaaaaay in the back (somewhere next to the dance studio), but now it's coming. It's really coming!

In our next major content patch, druids will find a host of new textures for two major forms, cat and bear. There will be five different designs for each of these forms for the Horde and Alliance. Night elves can choose to change their cat and bear look at any time by visiting the barber shop and changing their character's hair color, while tauren will be able to change which look they use by switching skin tones in the barber shop -- a new feature for tauren in the next major content patch. Given that there are more hair colors and skin tones than unique form looks, some colors and tones will overlap with these new textures. The hair and skin colors chosen will, in most cases, correspond with the color seen in the look of each form. Some similar colors that may share a particular cat texture will not necessarily share the same bear texture.

It sounds like players won't directly get to choose their new bear form, so much as the bear skin will correspond with the color of the character's hair (if a night elf) or skin tone (if a tauren). While choice would be nice, it does make sense that the character's bear form would resemble the character itself. (And yay for the tauren being able to change skin tones? The female tauren seriously only have five hair styles, and we didn't get any new ones with WotLK.)

Tying the bear form to hair color/skin tone means my main, being a brown cow, would probably end up with this skin:



Whereas my semi-twinked 59, being a black cow, would probably look like this:



I really like the druidic touches to the form, with the arm bands and the stone pendant hanging from the neck. I'm not sure I like the darker one as much though. Maybe because it's not actually black like my tauren.

The polar version looks really nice and I wonder if we'll see an upswing of white cows comes 3.2. (If you want to see it, click the link at the top of post.)

I'm hoping somewhere down the road we'll see new moonkin and tree forms as well, but every druid has a cat and bear form, so these new skins will be immediately usable by all druids.

I wonder if we'll finally see a fix for the tauren cat form's mouth always hanging open.