New Druid Forms!

After waking up around noon and doing a few things around the house, I went to the main page of the World of Warcraft website and was pleasantly surprised with this:

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.

We'd like to share with you this new art for each form and faction in four installments. So without further ado, our first preview is for the five new textures of the tauren druid bear form. We'll also show the current form design so you can easily see the extra detail and textures of the new art. Work continues on new looks for the remaining druid forms and we hope to add them in future content patches.

(click for a larger image)

Huzzah! New forms! I'm rather pleased with them, but many druids are not. I'm excited to see cat form, personally (and hopefully a travel form update). I am, however, a bit miffed that the skin changes are directly connected to our fur (Tauren)/hair (Night Elf) color. Luckily for me I was hoping to use the brown bear (upper right), and I believe that will correlate to my splotchy light brown fur that I have on Corgii now.

Ideally they'll think of some way to change it, but until then I'll be satisfied with this polished up bear =D