The Pros / What I love about the new system
I absolutely love Situations. I hope that these are expanded to include some of the pre-alpha options showcased (profession-based situations, for example), but I’m extremely happy just with what made it into beta and presumably live. I had so much fun setting up niche outfits for things like swimming and for flying mounts.
The ability to have both two handed and one handed items all included in the same single transmog outfit is a huge win. This lessens the amount of overall sets that we’ll need, and we will no longer have to make two separate sets just to account for weapon differences between sets.
Being able to have a random equipped set via Situations is amazing. I may simply use Situations for this purpose instead, to have a random set from among my favorites worn at all times.
The Cons / Feedback on what would make this system even better
The outfit cap needs to be significantly increased beyond the existing 20 maximum currently available. In order to make full use of Situations, 20 will barely be to cover what’s available–let alone taking advantage of the randomize feature to the fullest. For example, let’s say I want to have separate outfits for delves, raids, and the city. In addition, I want to have separate outfits between holy, protection, and retribution in each of those environments. Just those two combinations alone will take up over half my outfit slots. I wouldn’t begin to touch on the random feature or take advantage of a majority of the Situation parameters.
With Trading Post introducing so many high-quality outfits as of late, the low outfit cap also makes it quite difficult to choose. Being able to include more would help motivate players toward more collection in-game.
The outfit edit costs in my opinion are too high. On retail, it’s pretty common for me to go back and forth on transmogs, simply because you better see how things clip, how different lighting works on an outfit, how that outfit looks in various combat scenarios, and so on. I understand we’re saving substantial money from transmog auto-applying to ever new item we obtain, but that initial setup period might be too punitively expensive right now. If an outfit you’re designing doesn’t end up working at all, and you want to scrap it entirely, that becomes incredibly expensive. When first setting up an outfit, I think a 24 hour grace period would be best to edit/apply changes at no cost. I also feel that editing might be better done with those same 24 hour periods (i.e., if you edit an outfit you can freely make any additional changes you want for that time before it locks back in).
Edit costs might lead to things where people for example will only editing outfits during Anniversary events or Trial of Style. It also leads to a weird situation where outfit edits are significantly cheaper when your character is low level v. high–so someone playing alts might have to make a decision to buy and setup a ton of outfits early on a character they may not play long term.
If a grace period type option isn’t possible or too complicated, I’d recommend having transmog costs at no more than 200% of what it is on live. The ~500% cost on beta is too much.
For the outfit costs themselves, I think the cap should happen well before the 100k gold mark, and/or the ramp-up costs should be a little bit slower. Maybe outfits should cap somewhere around the 10-30k mark, with the option to purchase significantly more. (I think it’s OK if the total gold sink ends up at the 1-2 million mark, as long as we get a lot more out of said sink). At current oufit costs, I might only make a small handful of outfits on my alts, or may choose to opt out of the new transmog features entirely beyond the first included set.
Outfits v. Warbands
Speaking of alts, this system is very unfriendly to players who change their main characters. Most character-specific costs up until now have been pretty low, while warbound features are higher. We’ve had cheap profession learning costs, cheap bank slots, etc., but things like warbound bank slots, pets, and mounts can be quite expensive. I feel this system would be significantly better at current outfit costs if it were account-wide. WoW has made significant strides toward being able to swap mains with little/no drawback, and I hope that the new transmog system keeps that in mind.
I hope that each character can create their own separate outfits if account-bound outfit purchasing becomes available, of course.
Keep in mind that being alt-friendly with cosmetics is important for player longevity. If a player no longer enjoys their primary character, they may quit if they face a huge 1-2 million gold wall just to enjoy Situations like they did on their old main character. Cosmetics are a major driving force for most casual players in this game, so don’t add friction for cosmetics after you’ve spent all that time progressing towards unlocks on your main character.
Misc. Feedback
I think it might be important to force the “help” mode, or a quick little tutorial, to activate the first time someone opens up transmog after Midnight launches. The Custom Sets option needs to be pointed out so that a less informed player doesn’t think all their sets got erased during the launch.
When selecting an outfit icon, allow us to drag an item’s appearance from the right to auto-select the icon. We can do that for spells and equipment in our bags, but being able to do that for collected appearances would be a nice quality of life improvement.
Overall, I’m incredibly excited about the foundation this system lays down for transmog going forward. With a few friction points addressed I feel it will be extremely solid for all players, and will feel good to progress toward unlocking slots / options to leverage Situations.
