FOR REFERENCE

And before anyone comments that it's impossible to tell gender between animals....


1) It's entirely possible with warmblooded organisms, even easier with mammals


2) It's a stylized game, meaning the gender should be even easier to tell apart.



Anyways, that's the biggest issue with her new look. Her human form is fantastic, but her feline form looks way too masculine.


I don't know exactly why, but something about the mane, giant sabertooths, and head that makes her panther form look too masculine.


Compare her classic and french maid form with her cat form in her egyptian skin. Huge difference. Couldn't you make her panther form sleeker or more feminine? Her egyptian skin's feline form is fine, but the other's just look off.


edit: She looks just like Diego from Ice Age! THAT'S WHY she looks so masculine! She looks even manlier than Diego in fact.
edit2: Here's a picture of Diego with a female tiger. Notice how it's very easy to identify the gender of the two character. Diego is clearly a male sabertooth tiger and Shira is clearly female.

Cougar.
Sabre-Teeth.
Cougar.
Sabre-Teeth.

Something in this math does not add up. This is my problem with the visual rework. Otherwise I'm mostly happy. I think in the main skin they could get away with shrinking them a hair.

The male/female thing, I think it's the face structure. Females tend to have slightly narrower features to a degree around the nose. A face overall can be broad on either ***, but usually the nose I think is what needs to feel "feminine". Which may come off weird or wrong, but does translate visually a bit better.

I'd like to know why Riot decided to change Cougar to Sabre Tooth Tiger myself. I thought being a cougar was pretty iconic for the character. She looked a lot more sleek and beautiful with the old cougar model, rather than badass vicious.

This seems like the same issue as with lore. Some of the old characters no longer have the same feel when they're updated. They're still good, but not in the same way that made me fall in love with them.

I didn't notice this at first glance, but I do agree to some extent. To me, it could be either gender, but leans towards masculine. Making distinct genders on animals seems like it would be difficult with this game's art style without going over the top.

The Egyptian cat is by far the best one IMO, and a black version of that may look good.

I just want to chime in that I agree with it being an odd direction to take that they make the head especially much more like a saber tooth than a cougar, when i thought that was one of the defining things about Nidalee.

It removes a particular flavour from the character, which I also felt happened when they updated Soraka (legs less exaggerated in form, hair styled in a less interesting fashion and with the removal of the stars. Play to who that character was/is rather than dreaming up something entirely new.

Also, I thought they initially made Nidalee transofrm into a cougar as a reference to "cougars"....making her become a Sabertooth Tiger kinda throws that flavour of hers right out.


Hence the name of her ultimate. "Aspect of the Cougar"

I agree about the masculine thing, but who is to judge what is masculine and female. Anyways.... the visual upgrade looks a lot better and the old "cougar form" wasn't very amazing

While the old cougar form wasn't amazing, it........was actually a cougar.


As for who's to judge what's male or female, well...all of us have been exposed to a lot of males and females, and any of us have seen animals given genders in various media to know it's very easy to accomplish.

Wow, the furries are up in arms. I guess I was distracted how badass her new skins look, and well, the sexy.

I personally like the rework, but i dont know if i find it more alluring than the previous one.

Her default skin for her in-game human form actual skin is too red, I like the darker tone of her tan compared to her previous pale one, but there's a red in it that just doesnt match the tan. She looks like Nicki Minaj. Then on her Leopard skin she became a ginger. I have nothing against gingers, but for a chick raised in the jungle, shed have to have more tan than that. I love French Maid Nidalee; she looks terrific.

I love the new auto attack, it looks so fluid and you can actually see the whole proyectile moving towards its target (not only a part of it after thrown, and before landed).

I like the new spear, looks really cool and the particles in it are nice.
Not too much to say about her human attacks though, they're farly common.


Though there are a number of features with her cougar form that are all but appealing, that's where the main problem is.

Male lions are supposed to have manes, even male tigers, but females of neither species of felines have manes. Now Nidalee is a cougar, male cougars dont have manes, so why should females. Nidalee is a female cougar who looks like a male tiger.
Her paws are brown in contrast to her yellow body, and are tiny in comparison to her other features, and to real life cougars felines, which have paws of the size of about one third of their heads.
She has no visible ears, Felines have great ears.
A cougar's tail is even at its proportions, from beginning to tip, it is circular and firm and has no hair lock whatsoever. Nidalee's tail looks more like that of a rat's with a hair lock at its tip.
She has a weird green thing on her forehead - if human Nidalee doesnt have a jewel between her eyes, why would her shift include one.
Her back has a curve, making her look "fit", but only relatively: if a feline's body part should be fit to look athletic, its not the back, but the abdomen at the very waist. Seen a leopard chasing a gacele, or a house cat climbing up a wall? The back must be strong, the curve in it only makes her look as if she has anemia.
The stripes at her back just look awful: Nidalee has stripes herself, but to her sides and not directly on her back.

Her cougar's AAs look fine to me, they're fluid and aggresive, they really give the impression of a a strong paw bash.

Her takedown is good, i think. It does what it should: Take down, by leaping onto its target and performing another jump on them, taking them off of balance.
Pounce looks fairly good to me, its going to take a while to get used to its difference with its predecessor though.
But now Swipe is horrible. She gets up on her hind legs and performs this front paw smack in midair, mimicking a 1st grader's fightning style (hands in front of body, head with the face looking elsewhere, swinging wrists up-down in synchrony), or a T-Rex attempting to catch a mosquito. It should be more of a horizontal sweep of her paw instead. If you've played WoW and seen the Druid class on Cat form use its Swipe(Cat) ability, you'd catch the drift.



This is not meant to be a rant or destructive criticism: It has comparisons to real life cougars, personal opinions and common sense points of view.

I attached a pic of a cougar i found in Google image search, for references to be taken from, and differences to be tell.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4eC-pzkEK3...00/cougar5.jpg