Mittwoch, 17. August 2011

Transmogrifuck me - finally some GOOD WoW-related news!

My previous entries might have given me away: I hate WoW with a passion. I don't actually want to play it, but not doing so will hurt my relationship. Yes, I'm that kind of a wuss. And one of the many reasons for me to hate this game is how WoW takes most of the coolest features from every MMORPG out there and uses, sometimes even improves upon them, yet there is no cosmetic armor. And that's something you find in even the cheapest Asian F2P grindfests out there.

But lo and behold, several years, hundreds of threads (some of them weighing in at over 400 pages!) and a whole lot of begging later, they have now announced transmogrifying. What a difference a little pressure and competition makes.

Oh yeah, there's also gonna be a new raid and dungeons or some shit, but let's ignore that for now. Transmogrifying - transfer an armor piece's appearance on to another bit of armor, i.e. make your fugly current-tier paladin gear look like the pretty T6 raid set. Neato!

Right now they're still being a bit hush-hush about it. What's known so far is that you can only transfer the looks of gear if it's the same kind of armor, meaning cloth will always look like cloth, plate will look like plate and so on. Also, the whole thing will be restricted to stuff you can actually use, so don't expect to make your warrior look like a death knight anytime soon.

Most importantly, they haven't actually decided whether or not you must obtain an item, before you can put its looks on your gear. In other words: It might be possible that you can put the looks of just about any raid or dungeon set on your current stuff, even if you have never actually collected these items in the first place. That would be a little too generous in my opinion - making people go collect the coolest-looking stuff in the game rather than just offering it to absolutely everybody with zero effort might be convenient and it might suit Blizzard's new "everything for everyone" approach, but I could see myself going back to some old dungeons and raids, just to loot some old raid sets for their cool looks alone. So please - make us fight, search and farm for our stuff and only make items available for transmogrifying, if we have actually managed to find them in the first place, mkay?

Of course there is always some potential to fuck this up. Am I gonna be one of the select few on my realm to don the looks of the good old season 1 arena set? What about the tier 3 dungeon set or the T0.5 stuff? These items can no longer be obtained and being able to use their looks would make their proud owners stand out from the crowd. I'd love that - however, I can see Blizzard bringing back those items for everyone, be it for tiny amounts of honour/justice points or even real cash in their online store. And while that would be great for everyone who want to use the looks of these items, it would feel like a kick in the nuts to me, having collected that stuff when it was still "hard to get".

Also - why use a transmogrifying feature in the first place? Is the convenient appearance/cosmetic/vanity item tab they use in just about every other MMORPG out there not good enough? Having to physically change the appearance of each item instead of just putting your favourite cool-looking stuff in a separate tab seems rather awkward and unnecessary.

Some of the coolest pets and mounts are cash shop only right now. I'm not sure I'd like to see special offers on cosmetic armor on there now, too: "Unlock all dungeon, raid and pvp tier items at the transmogrifier for only $XX!" Don't even think about it!

But let's remain perfectly realistic here: No matter how limited or even overly generous this whole thing may turn out to be when patch 4.3 goes live - it's a huge step in the right direction! Sure, I can already see legions of paladins running around exclusively in T2 and T6 stuff, but is that so much worse than what we have now? I don't know what your realm currently looks like, but people all look exactly the same where I'm playing. I could really use some variety.

-Cat

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