There’s going to be a change to how eyes glow in patch 8.3

If you play a Death Knight,  a Blood Elf or a Night Elf in World of Warcraft (and seemingly not a Void Elf or a Nightborne) then you’re going to notice a few changes in patch 8.3, specifically to your eyes.  As part of the incoming Shadowlands changes that will be made to character customization options for all characters, Blizzard is going to test out some changes to the way that certain eyes glow, and the certain ones in question appear to be DKs, Blood and Night Elves.

The changed eyes and your character

The folks at Wowhead have already taken a few looks at the PTR vs live changes, and they’re pretty muted, but I felt like going to look for myself and I found the glows to be brighter on the PTR than I expected. But it’s a change for sure — looking at the Blood Elf up above, her eyes are definitely more visible through the glow than they are on live, I can make out her pupils. Because I’m thorough, I also did the golden eyes.

The golden eye option for Blood Elves do not appear to be as muted as the green eyes — you can just barely make out the pupil here, whereas it’s much easier to see it for the green. In both cases, however, you definitely can make out the pupils on the PTR, which is a change from live. If you’re playing a Blood Elf, and you’re concerned about your eyes, you should get onto that PTR as soon as you can to take a look — Kaivax specifically mentions that they’ll be updating them further in future builds, so now’s the time for feedback.

Being as my main (and my biggest alt) are both Night Elves, however, I decided to take a look at what’s different over there.

Night and Day

First up, if you’re playing a Night Warrior? Nothing is different on the current PTR. You still have inky pools of blackness and it’s really hard to see anything under there. Since that’s kind of the whole purpose of the look, I’m not surprised — more pleased, really. But what about if you’re not playing the Night Warrior look? Well, a quick trip to the Dalaran Barbershop had me ready to find out.

I feel like I have to make clear that this isn’t a DK, this is my Fury Warrior main. If you look at the Wowhead post, their image of the male Night Elf with the orange eyes is clearly darker than on live. This one is too, but not nearly as much — you still can’t make out any pupil details and the glow is quite prominent, just not as extreme as on live. It’s more reminiscent of the golden glow Blood Elf, and I think that might be a consequence of it just being a brighter hue overall.

Just to test it out, here’s the same character on live.

The glow is much brighter on live, actually leaking out onto the face in a way it doesn’t on the PTR. And that seems to be the main difference — the intensity of the color itself seems to be about the same but the glow is almost absent on the PTR, while it washes out the cheeks to some extent on live.

I also tested a DK, and again the look is muted — you can check out the header image and see it for yourself — but not as muted as I’d come to expect. What seems to be happening here is that those glow effects aren’t projecting out past the eyes the way they did before, giving an impression of a muted glow when it’s more that the eyes just aren’t as bright anymore — the color doesn’t appear to have changed at all. On the Night Elf it ends up looking a little flat on the PTR — I think they may actually have to dim it more in order to let the pupil’s show if they want to keep to that less bright look.

In general I felt the Blood Elf golden eyes and the DKs worked the best, with the Blood Elf green glow and the Night Elf glow both needing a bit more adjustment to look right. But you can test out your character on the PTR right now and see how you feel about it.

Oh, and I did a Void Elf for fun, but she didn’t look any different than she does on live. But there’s going to be further changes to glow effects on eyes, so we may see some alterations to Void Elves, Nightborne, and perhaps even the recently revamped Worgen soon.