Transmog Restrictions; Armor and Weapon Classes

Community WoW Community Council
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Something that has been brought up time and time again in the RP community is the desire for a revamped system of the armor classes. Now, this is mainly with transmog in mind, but I also wonder if it might be worth expanding it beyond aestethics and into gameplay. Could WoW benefit from removing the restrictions put in place for the different classes?

I suppose there are two main reasons why armour and weapons are restricted to different classes: class fantasy and loot balance. The former is self-explanatory. Death knights wield powerful runeblades, they don’t use wands. A warrior would want to wear plate instead of a thin layer of cloth when he’s tanking. For the latter, the “hunter weapon” meme of the past comes to mind, where hunters would roll need on all sorts of weapons just because they could use them in their main-hand slot as a stat stick, when actually using their ranged weapon to dish out damage. Loot competition is already often enough pretty contentious, imagine if everyone were able to use every piece of loot.

Personally, I think the class fantasy argument doesn’t hold as much water as it once did, especially now that you can just hide most of your armour, or wear cosmetic pieces that doesn’t fit too well with the rest of your armour class. A subsection of the class fantasy argument also states that the player silhouette matters, especially in PvP, but I’m honestly not sure if it does - I don’t PvP and don’t have a good answer for that, so I’d love to hear some input on that. These days you can play as a void elf and be virtually indistinguishable from a blood elf, aside from the colour of your portrait, and we’re still able to tell them apart by mouseovering pretty easily.

Class-agnostic armor and weapons are a bit tougher to swallow, suddenly you would quadruple the potential pool of rewards you could earn and everyone’s suddenly fighting over the same BiS items. But I think there’s an argument to making all gear equipable, but not necessarily practically usable by all classes, and I can sum it up in two words: primary stats. Primary stats feel pretty meaningless now that they can swap depending on your spec, and are generally only found on gear that only your armour class can equip anyway. All plate armour has strength on it already, and only plate classes want strength. Why not make plate armour equipable for everyone else as well, but they wouldn’t want the strength armour because they don’t need strength? Intellect and agility are admittedly a little harder to use - intellect is used by all four armour classes and agility by two - but that could be solved by making intellect a cloth stat and have the other classes use agility/strength instead of intellect, and… yes, it’s complicated and there are a lot of tweaks that would have to be made in order to do this sort of overhaul. Perhaps new stats would even have to be invented, so why is it even worth trying to do this?

I think it is worth at least considering this kind of change, if only for the sake of allowing players to do more collection, and get more creative with transmog. It’s going to be a big undertaking to change the system entirely, but I think it would be worth doing it - maybe it’s the roleplayer in me that’s salivating for more transmog options. I’m curious to hear what others have to say on this topic, I’m sure there’s a lot I haven’t even considered!

Edit: I changed the title to mainly focus on transmog restrictions. Still happy to discuss armor and weapon classes beyond that - even if it might mostly be hypothetical.

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Not quite true, as you need to consider also the classes that use different primary stats for their specs.

Monk, Druid, Shaman, & Paladin.

It’s not “fair” per say to make these classes carry around an extra set of gear if they want to offspec.

Yes, but intellect is used by these classes in different ways. The way a Holy Paladin and Holy Priest play are completely different, despite being both intellect users. Paladin gets up close and personal in the fray, while priest prefers to hang in the back and heal from afar.
One should have a tougher armor as a result.

Personally, I disagree.
As a DK player, while there are some pieces of other armor sets that are cool, I would normally default to wearing / transmogging to plate armor, because of the class fantasy I have.

Not an RP thing, as you mention, but this is the one area I could see this applying to.
There are 12 classes, 3 use cloth, 4 use leather, 2 use mail, and 3 use plate. Mail gear, as a result is statistically rarer with personal loot. My personal experience of having only 1 mail wearer in the group comes to mind and it feels bad to never get a drop and have no chance at a trade outside of a neck, ring, or trinket.

Speaking of, those three slots, neck, ring, and trinket, ARE usable by everyone because in their current design, they have stamina and secondary stats only.

What I would rather see, is allow people to collect appearances they can’t themselves use. For example, I have a Warglaive of Azzinoth on my Paladin. And I’m very sad about it. I would like to be able to use that appearance on my DH because I as a player have collected it. My druid can run through instances significantly faster than my DK and I would still be able to collect DK appearances. But my plate wearers would still be the only ones able to use them for transmog. What do you think of this?

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Yes, I suppose I didn’t word this too well: what I meant was that all specs would be using the same stat, so that they wouldn’t suddenly start wearing a whole new armor class. Paladins would still wear plate, so a holy paladin would now be using strength instead of intellect, and intellect, et cetera, so that they wouldn’t have to actually keep two separate sets of gear. Changing stats to work like that might need trinkets that give primary stats to be changed in how they are approached too, however…

I suppose a lot of this is up to personal preference; which is also sort of my point. We used to be in a state where if you played a DK, you had to look a certain way while you were doing endgame content, and now you could theoretically be almost completely naked and freeze your enemies to death while wielding two mighty fish as weapons. If we can do that, why can’t we transmog across the armor classes?

Secondly; I do think class fantasy has been very lacking for the past two expansions, largely due to the removal of tier sets (at least we’re getting those back, yay!). I think class fantasies could easily be retained despite having access to armor class-agnostic transmog if we got more class-specific armor sets, weapons, glyphs, et cetera.

Allowing everyone to equip every piece of armor (even if it isn’t any good for them) would make this a reality anyway, but yes it is a fairly good compromise, at least for the collection part of the argument for such a wide change.

Another point of view that came up in a conversation I had today was simply to allow everyone to wear all sorts of gear, have their stats greyed out and be ineffective, while still allowing you to transmog these pieces into other types of armor of the same class. So a mage could wear a plate helm, get 0 stats out of it, but can transmog it to look like the Thunder King’s crown if they really wanted it. That would at least make it possible for roleplayers to get crazy with transmogs without actually having to affect any other side of the game.

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Ive always been surprised we dont have a slider to scale shoulder pads and belts and helm just for some customization to not look like every other person who decides they like the same transmog as you

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Personally, I wouldn’t be a fan of this. But I may be alone in that stance. I feel like the primary stats that each spec use currently do not need to be changed (I could see an argument for guardian druid to use strength, but I digress).

I mean, you’re not wrong. I’m sure there are people who would love this change. I’m just not one of them. I don’t think that mages should be able to wear plate (I didn’t even like them getting the Stormwind Guard mog in WoD because of the plate look). Again, my opinion. I could easily see a hunter wanting to wear leather for example.

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A couple of other random ideas I had last night before I went to sleep:

  • Instead of changing primary stats, gear could be designed so that you can only unlock primary stats of the armor class you are designed to wear, much like how we used to have spells like “plate specialisation” (which was added to streamline classes into wearing only one type of armor, incentivising you to wear that type by giving you a 5% buff to your stats when you did). You can wear anything, but you only get the stats from your armor class, no stats need to change name or location.
  • Make a system that allows you to collect and transmog gear of other armor classes, even if you are not able to wear them yourself. This is what most people I’ve discussed this with have been asking for, and it would effectively solve most of the pain points the current system has for transmog and collection. But I am still curious about the possibilities of unlocking armor class in actual gameplay, and primary stats will continue to feel like the same stat but with a different name for the sake of flavour.
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Yes please. Yes please. Yes please.

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Another primary characteristic of armor is to provide damage reduction which fits into the fantasy of that spec.

If everyone could wear Plate, well then you’d all wear plate. That’s 20% damage reduction for free.

From a transmog collection perspective, I’m on board with the current philosophy that you need to be able to use it to unlock it. Else you’d just have a Warrior as a transmog farming alt as they can use basically everything.

Just seems like you want convenience over fantasy. An alternate suggestion could be introduction of more Ensembles for older content to allow slightly easier acquisition of loot. This has been trialed out in other games with currencies you get from otherwise redundant content to purchase cosmetics from that era.

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This is exactly what I have. I run stuff on my DK for the tier gear then do it on a warrior to get all the weapons. But I still have so few mail/leather/cloth appearances because I don’t run on those characters.

If any character can collect all appearances I’m making a speed set for my druid and never looking back

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You wouldn’t all wear plate for the 20% damage reduction if you don’t get the stats that lets you deal damage/heal on it – unless you really need that damage reduction, and wouldn’t it be great to have the option to make that choice? I’m not suggesting we’d make all armor classes wearable to everyone without any form of item design that makes some options better for you than others.

I think I’m missing something here, you’re saying that the current system is good because you wouldn’t need to play a warrior because they can equip everything, when what I have been proposing specifically eliminates that need, because now you can play whichever class you want in order to get whatever you are looking for?

Which would be a perfectly valid way to do this, much like how warriors are used now. But you could also play any other class if playing it super-effectively isn’t your jam, and you don’t want to have to make another class in order to do that.

Yes, the fantasy of having a cool weapon drop for you that you then can’t physically pick up because you are a mage, and have to sell it to a vendor is pretty great, isn’t it :>. I’m joking. Again: I’m not saying that everyone should wear everything, I’m saying they could wear everything. Class fantasy won’t break just because a mage can equip plate armour and a two-handed axe, because they wouldn’t be able to use that effectively. If anything, that strengthens class fantasy because now you know that you’d want to stick with cloth and wands because those make you better at what you do, instead of the game telling you that you actually can’t.

This is a pretty good solution to the issue of collection, both partially a bad-luck protection system and a system that allows you to target appearances, and purchase appearances for other classes. It’s also another system on top of it all - and the existence of this sort of system doesn’t necessarily rule out the option of allowing anyone to wear anything.

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Then what is the idea here? You want it to be looser but also restrictive? Quite the antithesis.

To look purely from a gameplay perspective, if you even just let everyone use Shields then that’s a huge amount of damage reduction for not much loss. But then you’d impose further gameplay systems to prevent that from being used (which are already relatively hidden such as Cloth Specialisation to increase intellect by 5%).

Ultimately the game becomes more complex for no real reason. Fantasy and Immersion are broken. How do you identify with the class you have chosen on the character selection screen.

You chose to be a mage because of the fantasy roots embedded within that. It clearly states on the character creation page what you can and cant do.

Idk, just seems like you’re bored of Transmog Farming…

This system is pretty well-founded in all forms of fantasy. Even if you go as far to D&D. If you get an item your party cannot use you would sell it.

I don’t really see the issue here.

In other games, you’d have the same limitations in other forms whether this be by minimum stat requirements to use items or by having class-specific gear.

The way that WoW has done it is quite fair by having it apply to multiple classes for each type of armor.

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It’s more about removing one restrictive system and replace it with another one that might be more complex, achieves the same result, and allows you to do things you couldn’t do before if you really want to - plus it also makes transmog/collecting more diverse.

A mage would still carry a staff and wear cloth, just as the character creation screen says that they do. But they would do that because that’s what they’re good at, not because they actually can’t put on a leather hat, plate boots or hold an axe. You would know that there’s a reason you don’t do that, you don’t hit enemies with an axe because you’re bad at hitting them with axes. I’m actually glad you brought up D&D:

… because in D&D, you can still equip anything and use it, you’ll just have penalties by doing so. You would probably sell those items because you wouldn’t be able to make good use of them, but you can muck about with it if you really want to, anyway. And it’s fun to be able to “play the game wrong”, instead of being told you can’t do that. This is kind of where my argument starts moving into roleplaying territory. You can’t roleplay as a mage that wields a battleaxe if your class is mage. Now you have to start getting creative to get around that limitation, perhaps you play a warrior and just pretend to have your mage spells, or you get a staff transmog that looks a little axe-y. Ultimately, your ability to express yourself is limited by these hard restrictions, whereas softer restrictions would allow for more creativity without actually breaking the established game.

To an extent, I dislike the general idea of having clothes or weapons be unequipable if you don’t have enough stats, or play the right class, in any game. The main exceptions to things like that would be armor that is so heavy that you would be physically unable to move without a high enough strength stat, but that simply adds to the roleplay of it. I can’t pick up this knife because my dexterity is 24 and it requires 25? That’s silly. I prefer: I can’t use this knife effectively because my dexterity is 24, if it was 25 I would be dextrous enough to know how it is best used. That’s fantasy.

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I’ve had a conversation on this with a friend, and it was pointed out to me that I missed some pretty glaringly obvious points:

  • Plate classes can equip any armor. Mail classes can equip any armor except plate. Leather classes can also equip cloth. Cloth can only equip cloth. Yet, despite the fact that all the ‘higher’ armor classes can equip the ‘lower’ armor classes, they don’t, because of how itemisation (and armor skills) work. Why, then, would it be an issue to also let this work in reverse, to have clothies wear plate, if they gain no benefits from doing so because of the 5% armor skills bonus? Sure, they can get more armor by doing so - at the cost of reduced throughput. And even if that was an issue, all it would take to fix that would be to add a simple rule that would make them unable to gain primary stats from gear that isn’t part of their armor specialisation.
  • If transmog restrictions were to be lifted - why can’t you equip the gear you’re transmogging into? A mage can use a plate helmet as transmog, but they sure as heck won’t be allowed to wear it. That seems counterintuitive. Plus, if only transmog restrictions were lifted, you would still only be able to collect those other transmogs on other characters. It seems counterintuitive to be forced to play other classes to earn something that you can use on your main class, because you literally can’t earn it on your main class. Why not lift the equipment restriction?
  • Weapons are slightly different, but I also don’t know if that is a bad thing. All weapons already have primary stats on them to decide whether or not you want to equip it. A mage doesn’t want an agility dagger just because they are able to equip it, just like a warrior doesn’t want an intellect staff. Transmog rules, as they exist today, also wouldn’t really break class fantasy all that much. 2h weapons can only be transmogged into other 2h weapons. Which might mean you can now have monks with 2h swords, death knights with staves, and rogues with warglaives… but doesn’t that just mean you get access to more transmog?
  • On actually implementing a wider change to itemisation: I do realise that might be a bit much for WoW, even if I do really like the idea. A sweeping change like that would reverberate through the entirety of the game, it would be the kind of feature you would expect in “WoW 2”. I have some ideas I think that would be cool, though, separating the different armor classes into having different functions, but let them be usable by anyone. Plate is melee defense, cloth is magic throughput, leather is melee throughput, mail is… a hybrid defense/throughput? I don’t know, but it would be interesting to approach armor classes that way. But again, this is probably too much for WoW, and is probably best left for other games :>
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Personally I believe lifting these sort of restrictions on classes, whether it’s actually equipping/wearing gear or implementing transmog completely destroys the class fantasy.

One of my favorite things about World of Warcraft is how each class and specialization can feel completely unique. One of the ways this is accomplished is built off of the armor and weapon system currently in place in the game; by removing many of those restrictions in place you also remove the system that promotes that unique class feel.

It would also make most gear completely redundant in terms of style. If everyone is able to wear the same armor type - what would even be the point of breaking it down by cloth/leather/mail/plate? It would just be simpler to have one armor set for each raid.

I can understand from an RP perspective why this may be wanted, but implementing a mechanic into the game simply for the purposes of RP seems awfully destructive and counterintuitive.

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I’ve been meaning to revisit this topic for almost two months now, as I reached out to my RP community to hear what they had to say on this topic. I posed a couple of different questions to all the players that wanted to give their feedback on the topic, in the three discord channels I primarily use for roleplay, and I got a lot of responses. Over eighty people weighed in with their thoughts and the responses were quite varied and insightful. I learned a lot and it was overall a very positive experience.

Keep in mind that these responses comes from a limited selection of players from within my own circles, and do not reflect the whole community’s ideas! I wanted to ask my fellow RPers first, but I’d be happy to read everyone else’s comments on this as well. If there’s already a thread for this, perhaps someone could link it to me so I can post it here?

I was mainly focused on transmog for this particular inquiry, and I have sort of moved on from the idea of changing up the entire system of itemisation by changing the gameplay functions of armor classes (although I would love to pick some devs’ brains on that, even just for a hypothetical scenario), but I included some questions that revolve around the ability to equip gear outside of your armor class. These are the questions I asked, and a summary of their responses.

  1. Is Class Fantasy through transmog important to you, and why?

These answers were probably the most interesting ones to me. Class fantasy means very different things to a lot of people, and the general consensus on the topic was very split. What exactly is class fantasy? To some, it’s a definition set in stone by the devs that players should adhere to. To others, it was more of a guideline you could follow to achieve one specific fantasy, but ultimately completely optional (this is where I land as well). Others yet thought it to be completely unimportant or even damaging to their ability to play their characters as they wanted to. Put a pin in that.

TL;DR: Overall, the majority likes class fantasy, but largely disagree on exactly how important it is.

Would the ability to transmog or equip items of other armor classes ruin class fantasy?

No more split consensus here, the absolute overwhelming majority were adamant that this was not going to be an issue to them, and their reasoning was pretty clear. To revisit the pin from the former question: character fantasy mattered much more to them than class fantasy. Even those who were clearly in favour of class fantasy were much more invested in the fantasy of their character rather than that of their class; to quote one response, “class fantasy is always secondary to character fantasy”. They wanted to be able to choose what fantasy fits their character, rather than selecting one from a pre-selected template.

Many players also noted that existing class fantasy in transmog is heavily limited with the restrictions put in place right now; a warrior is limited to be a plate-wearing warrior, but there are warriors who tend to be less armoured out there. The classic berserker comes to mind, a lightly armoured warrior with brutal weapons, which is technically transmoggable within the current limitations of the transmog system, but is also heavily limited. There were some concerns that class fantasy could become blurred out by this system, but even those that raised this concern were largely in favour of going through with it regardless.

TL;DR: Character fantasy and player choice > class fantasy

Do you think classes should be able to transmog armor not currently part of their armor class?

Again, the majority seemed to be in agreement here; they would prefer seeing transmog restrictions lifted. Generally, some limitations were still accepted among the respondents, while others were willing to throw it all out.

Some thought it was better to let us transmog gear of an armor class onto any gear of a similar armor class (i.e. plate to plate, but not plate to leather), but not make more types of gear equippable. That would let warriors transmog leather armour, as they can equip that, but mages would still be stuck with cloth - and they would still be wearing their respective armor class during endgame content, thus meaning their class silhouettes and transmog still matters during gameplay. It was still important to some that players looked like the class they were playing during gameplay, but then also wanted the chance to go and play dress-up for RP later.

Others thought the only restrictions set in place should be class sets such as tier and PvP sets and heritage armour, while everything not covered by these categories should be available for everyone to transmog. This would retain some class fantasy while also not limiting everything else in that armor class; only a paladin can wear the Judgement set, but anyone can wear for example the broker-themed sets from Zereth Mortis, regardless of class. In fact, many expressed a desire for more class sets and weapons unique to their class, while also opening up for armor classes to be wearable by anyone else. As an example, it was less important that a paladin wore plate, than that only paladins could wear the Judgement tier 2 set.

Do you think classes should be able to equip armor not currently part of their armor class?

This one was much more split, and this is more understandable, as it has gameplay implications. The players that thought this was a good idea were largely focused around the same principles behind being able to transmog it, so I won’t repeat their points too much. Those who were concerned with the gameplay interactions raise good points; it would likely be a nightmare to balance it out; the armor classes serve a purpose in gameplay. That being said, they weren’t all in agreement that there weren’t solutions to this; as long as they would not get stats out of it, they were largely okay with being able to equip the other gear - but many of them then wondered why these items should be equippable in that sense, and preferred that they could instead transmog other armor classes even if they could not equip them.

Should you be able to collect transmog that is not currently part of your armor class?

According to my data, the answer is… yes. Even those who don’t want you to be able to equip or transmog that armour, were positive to the idea of being able to collect it for their other alts that could equip it. How, exactly, one would go about turning this into a gameplay system remains a little unsure. Personal loot only lets you loot items that are usable. Perhaps the ability to ‘disenchant’ items to turn them into cosmetic versions of the same item would make this more reasonable? There’s a solution out there.

Do you have anything else to add?

Now, most of the replies I got here have since been represented elsewhere (particularly in the RP wishlist), but there were a couple of other points raised that I thought I’d feature.

  • There was a general desire for having more NPC-exclusive items become available to players.
  • The same goes for white and grey items!
  • I didn’t really talk too much about weapons, but it was brought up, and some players expressed the desire to be able to wield weapons more freely too!

I wanted to end this off by saying that I realise this is a topic not everyone agrees on, and some are more invested in it than others - whichever side they’re on. I’m very invested in this topic, as it has been tied for being the #1 item on a lot of roleplayers wishlist (tied with customisations!). I hope a civil discussion can keep going on, as I’m interested in hearing everyone’s take on it, and I hope we can actually get something out of it without stomping on anyone’s toes on our way to it :>

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I wanted to bring this back up as a conversation about this sparked up in my guild today. This would be an amazing QoL change that could be added to the game to make old transmog items easier to farm .

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I would like to see it eased too. Yes, yes, I’m blind but still want to look good plus mog is 88.23% of dps anyway.
As a sin rogue I’ve always wanted many 1h mogs, I also don’t think it’s a mega stretch for leather wearers to wear mail as it falls under leatherworking anyway.

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