Ok, a day later (i took a long break lol), i did a few experiments with the warorc skin. I'm starting to suspect its just the skin itself that's not very good with specularity, and i'm guessing it's the specular map causing the problems. I did one test where i turned up the intensities of the lights and changed the specular color to pure white, and while this did bring out the highlights, they looked very splotchy/odd, especially in the chest area.

Then i applied ezskin 2 to the warorc skin. What i noticed is that it turned my specular color back to black, and turned down the specularity to 0 :X This hasn't happened with many of my other models i own.

So perhaps the war orc model was not designed with gamma correction in mind, or the specular map is a bit weird compared to most other specular maps. One thing i noticed is that the default war orc skin specular map is plugged into BOTH the specular color and specular strength in the advanced settings, something which i don't see in most of my other models.

Maybe i should just scrap the specular map?