For the first time since transmog was announced, I'm not excited for it

Community General Discussion
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Playing a Dracthyr is wearing thin.

Aesthetic customization has always been the true endgame, especially since the transmog feature was added, but while Dracthyr have the strongest early game, only Druids rank lower than them in the aesthetic endgame.

More than anything else, farming old content for new outfit ideas has been a major part of my WoW routine. It is now entirely absent. The only themes that can be realized with a Dracthyr are “draconic regal” and “draconic nude.” Shoulders and belt buckles aren’t enough to establish a strong tone that truly diverges or truly feels personal. With other classes, I would have an idea, do the research, and start a routine of farming for months on end. When I have a good idea, now? It’s just demotivating as Dracthyr can’t realize that idea.

“But dragons are supposed to be nude!” you say.

Dracthyr aren’t proper dragons. They’re draconic humanoids that exist as a compromise because they chose not to give us proper dragons outright. And why then did they add a (singular) set of armour that you can cover up with? They gave us that full armour set already. And it’s not like you’re going to mistake the horns, wings, tail, or scales for anything other than a Dracthyr…

“The tech isn’t there!” you say.

The existence of multiple races with tails, digitigrade legs, claws, abnormal hands and feet, and so on says otherwise. If they can figure out how to cram a plate helmet onto a Tauren or Worgen, you better believe they can figure it out on a Dracthyr. Additionally, Morgan Day outright stated that more transmog options were possible - they chose not to give us those options due to philosophical reasons that contradict themselves as, as already mentioned, they gave Dracthyr the option to cover up with a single set.

It feels bad to get drops in raid, see that I’ve “unlocked the appearance,” but can’t display it while I’m actually playing with my guild. I don’t play for the numerical pixels - I play for the pretty pixels. Especially given that, when asked about the lack of transmog options for Dracthyr, Ion overtly stated that they’d be able to “do more” with Evoker sets that are explicitly made for Dracthyr. “Do more” never materialized.

Honestly, I just feel like there could be so much more wind in my sails. Dragonflight does so much right that this miss feels worse by comparison.

Character customization matters, post-creation. If you think Dracthyr would look bad with armour on (while simultaneously given them a tailor-made set), leave it up to the players to decide.

If something clips on my Tauren’s horns in a weird way… I don’t wear it.
If my Orc stretches out a chestpiece in a weird way? I don’t wear it.
If something just plain looks bad? I don’t wear it.

But I appreciate that the decision to not wear a thing is mine.

Especially when it means I am also empowered to wear things I do like.

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This is a big part of why I won’t play a dracthyr but I guess it’s just one of those things you sign on for when you decide to. Overall an underwhelming new race/class as far as appearance goes in my opinion. Wish there was a way to be in their visage at all times (I know it wouldn’t make sense with their abilities) because playing the winged lizard just isn’t something that is ever going to appeal to me even if they made mogs an option.

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I’m persuaded Blizzard just didn’t want to go through the work of adjusting every existing piece in the game and going forward for another brand new rig. IMO Dracthyr should have been able to display as much gear as every other race, but Blizzard chose not to deliver that.

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  1. They said it wasn’t a tech issue.
  2. That’s not how that works. By and large, you’re just fitting each slot once, then whatever you add to the slot is molded to the dimensions of the race. There are a few pieces that require individual adjustment, I’m sure, but it’s a rarity.

That’s not solely your opinion. It was overtly stated.

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At this point I just want visage and dragon mogs independent of each other… I hate not being able to wear shoulders or a belt on my visage because it will look stupid on the dragon.

Seperate them… Start with that.

Then open up more mogs over time… I get it, they’re lazy. But the mog situation for Dracthyr is incredibly bad.

Good post OP.

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(Shhhh. You’re cramping my outrage based revisionism) :shushing_face:

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Direct quote:

Moving on to a quick question about Evoker, are there any plans to include more armor pieces showing while in dragon form?

This is a really fun topic, you know our art team knocked it out of the park with Evokers in particular. There’s such an incredible amount of customization with them. I’m gonna butcher the number but I’ve heard the trivia item thrown around at the team where there is more Evoker customization options available in terms of combinations they can create, than there are grains of sand on the planet. And I’m like, I don’t know who’s gonna verify that, I’m not going to, but I believe you when you tell me that. Someone did the math I’m sure. So yeah, that’s something that is really important to us, is having all these customization options available to you and being able to really show them off and see them. And with the Evoker in particular, something that we focused on was the question of is what is the most iconic and most visible pieces of armor? Shoulders immediately come to mind, it’s that major silhouette changing, Warcraft has a beloved history of shoulder armor in particular and their scale and size and how big or small they are over time. So that was one we knew we wanted to add there, but we also wanted to make sure that the Evoker’s customization options and their identity of that dragon class, that dragon race was still very noticeable. Certainly something that we could change, but ultimately we’re really happy with where we landed on that one, and we feel like especially with sets coming back and that awesome class fantasy there we wanted to see that represented on the Evokers, but not kind of completely covering up all those awesome dragon aesthetics.

Emphasis mine. He says that this was a choice, not a limitation, and his provided reasoning is contradicted by the fact that they already gave us a set to cover up with.

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As for Ion’s comments, source:

Evokers in draconic form don’t display all of their armor; how does the Evoker specifically interact with visual gear and transmog?

Certain key pieces show in your draconic form: shoulders, large geometric pieces like belt buckles. When we make things like tier sets, we know that this armor is custom-made for the Evoker, and so we can do more things than we could do elsewhere. The big challenge is with such a unique body shape and horns and wings, fitting regular armor was a mix of logistically impossible but also undermining a bit of the core fantasy of being a scaled draconic being with wings. And if you cover it all up, that undermines a piece of it. But yes, in your visage form, it’s all visible all the time. We want to make sure people are seeing their visage form more than say a Worgen sees their humanoid form, depending on personal preference.

Bolding mine. Repeating for emphasis:

When we make things like tier sets, we know that this armor is custom-made for the Evoker, and so we can do more things than we could do elsewhere.

Evoker tier looks like this on the dragon form:


That’s the same as any other gear, as far as I can tell. What does he make that they can “do more” with Evoker tier?

Transmog is my true endgame. As much as I am enjoying the race and class, every moment of enjoyment is muted by this constantly nagging knowledge that I cannot express myself to the same degree as any other race. The creation options are fantastic, but post-creation? This quote was the one thing I was holding onto in hopes that the pithy transmog options could expand.

I assumed that “do more” simply meant that more items could display on the dragon form. But it clearly didn’t. Shame on me for assuming, I suppose.

But what did he mean?

What am I missing?

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That is the dumbest thing I ever heard…

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I started over with WoW and am not chasing transmogs or mounts this time around. I’m delving into the story and ambiance to escape difficult work days. To hell with the real end game — I’m here for the journey now.

My alt will be a Dracthyr for this reason. :dragon_face:

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I agree with this statement, but understand blizzards side. It would be a waste of resources to model out every piece of gear when players probably aren’t gonna use 90% of it. even crazier would be modelling out cloth and leather gear for a mail wearing class, but you’d probably hear the same arguments from RPers that want to wear a certain cloth or leather piece.

I think that if the dracthyr race is opened up for more classes, it’ll warrant adding full transmog to dracthyr, but who knows.

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Someone did a mock up of Evoker tier, too:

Imgur

Absolutely fantastic. And you certainly don’t lose the dragon behind the gear.

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That’s not how armour modeling works in WoW. By and large, you do a single map for each slot for each race, and armour is contorted and size to fit the racial template for each slot. There’s a reason that everything looks “normal” with Human proportions, but can get really silly with other races.

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Math sounds dumb sometimes, but that’s because our monkey brains have trouble comprehending large numbers.

20x15x10x6x4x14x18x5x5x4x3x3x15x12x11x5x5x4x4x2x2x12x6x4x4x3x10x7x5x4x3x3x3x2x8x6x4x4x4x3x3x2= 7.47x10^20

7.47x10^20 > 7.5x10^17 (estimated number of grains of sand on earth.

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IMO, any “floaty bits,” like breastplates, belt buckles, shoulders, helmets and so on should fully display on Dracthyr. Hide all the painted on junk. That’ll work fine for me.

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You realize, that if it were this simple, it would be a single button and a computer would model/texture all the armor in seconds. It would take an artist maybe a week to make an armor map. When WoWs art team is probably 150+ and every day there’s a dozen “reee dracthyr transmog!!!” Posts a day, they would do it in a heartbeat.

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They already said they can, as quoted above. It’s a philosophical stance. Not a technical issue. As quoted above.

And the technical blog on the topic is likely lost to history, but you can compare and contrast how the armour contorts and stretches and squishes for the races yourself. It all fits the same way, regardless of which piece is on. Do you think we would have any race added if they had to do everything individually?

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I agree! Get these dragons some pants!

I’m sick of them all looking mostly the same in the armor department.

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I made a couple one ali one horde one was healer the other dps, after realising healer couldent look after itself i change it do dps, both i think i played a day then came back to my old toons, they felt weak and as a solo player i dont wanna keep dying over and over, :stuck_out_tongue: however am pretty sure am the queen of dying :smiley:

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If Dracthyr “aren’t supposed to wear armor”, then A) they wouldn’t have made them humanoid to begin with (small dragons would’ve made just as much sense), and B) they wouldn’t offer “barbershop-armor”.

While I fully acknowledge they have an impressive amount of customization – and getting all those options is probably a technical marvel in itself – it doesn’t detract from the simple fact that we only got one model (when every other race gets two, one for each gender), and that model is “incomplete” without the ability to wear armor.

I personally think Blizzard’s best bet would be to announce “transmog is coming in a future Dragonflight patch”. If it were my personal choice, I would still LOVE to have an actual, player-sized Dragon model as an option, but that’s just me.

Either way, the existing Dracthyr are a big ol’ bummer, because I actually LIKE how they PLAY. But without cool new transmogs to work towards collecting (or again, the sheer badassery of “playing a DRAGON”), I just can’t muster the enthusiasm to continue playing.

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