World of Warcraft

Now as long as this post will turn out to be do not get excited about anything here. I must apologize since this submission isn't up to my usual standards, but having been an avid WoW player for many years (now deservedly retired), I feel it's worth mentioning that there are a lot of entries from this game. Now as I said be warned that none of them are particularly amazing, and this is mainly due to the way modelling and targeting works in WoW, it is getting on a bit now and is a bit dated in some aspects, NPC animations being one.

With the next expansion launching next summer, it has just gone into beta. The expansion is called Legion and focuses on a demonic invasion. With demons usually comes Succubus, whose model is as old as the game itself, so I am really hoping it gets updated, and we get some interesting npcs and bosses.

First we'll talk about existing ones, and then touch a bit on the beta and some things we might hope to see in Legion:

Enemy: Beth'tilac
Ability: The Widow's Kiss
Effect: Healing % reduction % AoE damage

Beth'tilac is a cinder spider in the Firelands raid, and during phase 2 of her fight she will debuff the main tank with a debuff that reduces his healing taken, thus forcing a tank swap, he also does AoE damage around himself, so the other tank has to stand further away. It really isn't anything that exciting, since they design fights to require two tanks, and when they can't think of anything else to warrant having two tanks they just throw in a silly "swap on debuff" mechanic.

Go to 5:11


You will see the main tank, in this case a Bear Druid get hit.

Enemy: Mistress of Pain (Lord Jaraxxus encounter)
Ability: Mistress' Kiss
Effect: Next spell cast is interrupted, deals shadow damage, and locks out that school for 8 seconds.

Lord Jaraxxus is an encounter from the Trial of the Grand Crusader (the hard mode only in this case). A summoned demon that you must defeat as the trial in order to progress. One of his abilities is called "Summon Nether Portal", what this does is summon a portal which has a HP bar, and continuously summons demons called "Mistress' of Pain", and thus the portal must be burned down extremely quickly, and then the raid will move on to deal with the Mistress. In most optimal heroic (which is the hard-hard mode, pros/elite raiders only) will burn down the portal before a 2nd Mistress spawns, and only deal with one. The Mistress inflicts heavy melee damage, does a spinning whirlwind which targets a random player, and also has an ability called "Mistress' Kiss", this is arguably the best looking kiss effect in WoW, as it has a cast time, in which floating hearts will start coming out of the Mistress' mouth, and once the cast is completed will float towards random players, 3 in 25 man and 2 in 10 man (the closest thing to a blown kiss effect in WoW you will get, despite the lack of any real animation). The target will then have floating hearts over their heads until they cast a spell (which could be a long time considering this could target tanks and melee units who had no spells to cast).

Go to 0.45


Now this is not the best quality video I could find, but is the closest zoomed, sadly it also seems speed up, so you might have to play it a couple of times to see the effect (I did warn you, it was nothing to get excited about).

Enemy: Simone the Seductress
Ability: Temptress' Kiss
Effect: Reduced (nullified) ranged attack

This is a very old enemy that is not even in the game anymore, but I remember her well. In vanilla WoW, when things were generally harder, not so casual & noob friendly, and more classiest, there existed a drop from a raid that was a hunter only quest item, and set them upon a class specific quest in order to obtain a very good epic bow. However this quest was very hard, and involved defeating four very secluded and hard to find demons dotted around the world, all solo, as if friends intervened they would go berserk. One such demon was Simone the Seductress, a succubus disguised as a troll, that would randomly patrol a high level area (which was generally avoided since a similar patrol was high level elite Devilsaurs, the WoW equivalent of a T-rex). All four of the demons generally tested the hunter in different ways, and Simone's method was continuously debuffing the hunter with "Temptress' Kiss", which completely killed his ranged ability. The funny and ironic thing was, that generally, with hunter being a ranged dps class (but able to use most melee weapons), "melee hunters", as in, hunters that had equipped weapons obviously intended for melee classes (such as a "chance on hit to..." weapons) were generally regarded as the laughing stock of most guilds, where a common joke was to denote an epic or legendary weapon as a "hunter weapon" for a laugh. Yet the irony is that due to the effect this boss had, the hunter had no choice but to equip a good melee weapon, and thus buff himself and equip himself, as, none other than, a melee hunter.

Start from the start


Now this is a very old video so the quality isn't great, but you will see the person recording get hit right from the minute he pulls to the moment it ends.

Now there are a few more similar npc or boss abilities throughout WoW, but I haven't listed them because quite frankly, like the ones mentioned, the animations are either crap, or non existant.

As for Legion, as I mentioned earlier, I am seriously hoping that the succubus gets a model update, along with some decent animation updates (as all other demons had it the previous patch, since it was a demon orientated raid). As for what I have seen in the beta datamining, so far it's nothing particularly exciting, but one find did catch my eye:

Enemy: Blood-Princess Thal'ena
Ability: Vampyr's Kiss
Effect: Inflicts "Essence of the Blood Princess", which increases damage done substantially, nullifies all threat, however after the duration, the player must "bite" another player to renew and pass the effect on, otherwise they become mind controlled.

Her bio: Blood-Princess Thal'ena is the daughter of the powerful vampyr Queen Lanathel. She has been locked inside Violet Hold for years, suffering the gnawing pain of her eternal hunger. Now that her cell has opened, she intends to feed on the world.


She is located in the Violet Hold, a wizard's prison where various imprisoned entities have begun to break free from their cells (this is a revamped dungeon, Blizzard love revamping old content, which no one liked in the first place - a.k.a VH was probably the most boring and dull dungeon in all of Wrath of the Lich King, and now they feel it's a good idea to revamp it?) Not only are they revamping the dungeon, but the boss encounter looks basically like a revamp of her mother, Blood Queen Lana'thel, who was a raid boss in Icecrown Citadel (a raid that is 6 years old). She possessed pretty much the exact same mechanics and abilities, however her ability was a "bite" rather than a "kiss". Currently acording to the WoWhead beta website she shares the same model, which if that's the case would be really lame (Blizzard love to rip off old raid bosses (which are typically 10 or 25 man) and dumb them down to 5 man dungeon versions in later expansions, even using the same models, which were originally unique to that boss). Now the Queen did have a fairly hot voice over ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vdAFT6GebI ) although there are better sexy voice overs (google: Jandice Barov) and hopefully the Princess gets her own.

Anyway I remain hopeful that they a) give her an actual voice over (not all 5 man bosses are lucky enough to get one), b) it's sexy, c) she gets her own new model rather than just her mother's one reused and lastly d) that maybe the kiss, will actually be a kiss and have it's own animation, rather than just be another way of using "slang" for a Vampire Bite (I haven't got my hopes up here, since I know the pattern from expansions past). I am also hopeful that the Succubus gets a major model and animation revamp, and shows up regularly as an enemy, with hopefully some kiss attacks!

That's all for now, like I said there are some other kiss attacks in the game, but since none of them have animations any better (or worse) than the ones listed I figured I wouldn't mention them all. I apologize that this post is not up to the usual Varys standard but like I said I figured I should mention it for catalog purposes at least.

Next up I have some new and fresh ideas for a battle RP with some interesting enemies and a new format. Give it time and they may just appear...