Au'ra

[MegaElite]

I am not sure where to post this, as this is my first time posting to the forums as a whole. But I was hoping to make a request, which might be unreasonable but I know the dev's read the forums. I sort of wish that the Au'ra had a more equalized height, because while the guys are built like Elezen, the gals are inbetween Miqo'te and Lalafell in height. I understand the two have broadly different appeals, but maybe just having the option, like between Midlander and Highlander Hyur to have a different build that affects more of their general characteristics like height, rather than what color of scales they have so players could enjoy playing as either a more 'cute' male to a more rugged female. I know it would be a lot of work to include this sort of feature and maybe more than a bit unreasonable, and perhaps I am late to the party, but this is something that I hope we could see going forward.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I vaguely recall a possibly giant thread about this back in HW when the race was introduced. It basically boiled down to using the gender differences to allow players to either have a fierce and powerful looking character or something soft and cute. The only complaint I really have at this point is there wasn't a race that essentially flipped this later by having tall fierce powerful looking females with small soft cute males.

[Kolsykol]

Tbh tall Female Au'Ra would just look weird, you'd have to more significantly change their builds.
Their designs lean into cute more heavily than just height and it'd be the same with making short Male Au'Ra their builds and proportions are designed to emphasize them being tall.

[DeaconMoore]

While I agree tall, fierce, Au'ra females would've been cool, this is something that would've had to be done back in alpha/early beta of Heavensward.

[SturmChurro]

It's Au Ra though, and I think they look fine.

[Absurdity]

Tbh tall Female Au'Ra would just look weird, you'd have to more significantly change their builds.
Their designs lean into cute more heavily than just height and it'd be the same with making short Male Au'Ra their builds and proportions are designed to emphasize them being tall.

That's what the original design for female Au Ra seems to have been. Their early concept art looked a lot fiercer and also more demonic.

[Kolsykol]

That's what the original design for female Au Ra seems to have been. Their early concept art looked a lot fiercer and also more demonic.

You can actually see the more cutsey ones in the middle.
I think people should be a bit careful about pulling up concept art and talking about supposed '' original designs '' tho.

Concept art exists to play around with ideas too, it's like people saying that Ashe in Overwatch was supposed to be black because she was in one of the concepts and that they '' changed her to be white ''.
The truth is that it was simply on the table as one possibility and you can see that the cute Au'Ra that we got were even in those drawings ( and I am like 99% sure that these weren't the only ones ).

On a personal level I actually would've prefered the ones in the upper right corner, they remind me a lot of the Succubus and look pretty Gothic.
I like the idea of fully scaled arms too.

[Tsiron]

I don't think I'll ever get over the way the devs handled (female) Au Ra, I'm still just as disappointed after all these years.

It wouldn't address their other problems, but at the very least increasing female Au Ra's height range would really not be difficult at all, the only caveat being that they can never be anywhere near as tall as the males because it would look wrong due to the way they were designed. But making them... idk, just below like female Highlander in height would alleviate them looking like a joke next to the male Au Ra quite a bit I think.

This is one of the big reasons I wish they'd overhaul character creation sooner or later... even though they most likely wouldn't change the designs much, if at all. A naive hope...

[kaynide]

I vaguely recall a possibly giant thread about this back in HW when the race was introduced. It basically boiled down to using the gender differences to allow players to either have a fierce and powerful looking character or something soft and cute. The only complaint I really have at this point is there wasn't a race that essentially flipped this later by having tall fierce powerful looking females with small soft cute males.

While it's not exactly the flip you're saying, the Viera will fill this gap somewhat. The boys are much shorter than the girls and much more..what's the word.. feminine? than other males.

[Recon1o6]

You aren't the only one, lots of female au ra players want to be taller. There was a huge thread about this in HW and even today you still get complaints about this amongst other things like horns not being decoupled.

Tis no wonder the moment it was discovered modders piled on correcting this making xaelas in particular taller. Gives them the menacing yet good looking look thats missing for females but filled for the menfolk by the au ra.

At the very least, they could change the max height of the female au ra and leave the minimum alone, so those that want to be cutesy lizards can continue to do so while those that want to be tall badass dragon girls can have their fun too.