Alright… I think it has to be said again, and hopefully this time some developer will take notice. The armor design in this game has gone to hell, and I am begging that the developers let us use some of the old NPC assets. Kul Tiras for example, is filled with fantastic cloth, leather, and plate sets that we just don’t have access to and are relegated to rot on NPC’s that are no longer relevant.
Would be really easy to make them usable.
They could also go for more simplistic designs and not these Cyclops divers helmets
Mail was on the uptick design wise early in the expansion, then we got the tier sets and lazy designs again in 9.2…
Yeah, I don’t understand why so many streamers/youtubers have been praising the art team this expansion. Everything has looked uninspired and clearly lifted from games like Hob, Torchlight, Allods, and Wildstar.
The SL aesthetic is just bad but I’ll hold out on judging Blizz until we see the new Dragonflight tier sets.
If those are also garbage then all hope is lost.
They need to improve and update the textures of ALL the old sets like they did with tier 6 in Legion. Blizz is clearly out of ideas…
I mean, that’s what happens when you systemically replace people who are passionate about the craft, with whatever the politically correct term is for the people who systemically took over Blizzard for social reasons.
They seem to lack imagination & inspiration.
Which is a shame, because the worlds of WoW has so much to offer in terms of imagining concepts of inspiring concepts that could be poured into gear.
You only just noticing this? All amours can look bad but most also quite a few good pieces
This is besides mail. The number of good looking mail pieces i can count on one of my troll hands (note, that’s 3 fingers). Most dont look like mail (more leather or just leather with plate slapped on it) or dosnt work for hunters/shamans (way to clunky and bulky). Its why alot of people say mail should of been removed. Hunters to leather, shaman to plate. But with the dragons we can see blizz is doubling down on it
Somehow the concept art team makes a great set, and then the modeling team seems to go out of their way to ruin it.
I’m kinda tired of spandex armor as well, if its not 3d its basically dead to the world
I’m confident that the devs are not scanning our forums.
And if they were, they’d stop after being insulted and called lazy.
As much as I hate to sound like a nostalgia drunk Classic-monger, but once Transmogrification became a thing, they really should have dropped back to the TBC model of gearing.
Flood the game with diverse models and don’t be afraid of sprinkling in color-variants of pre-existing models. Sure, color-swaps are low-effort, but changing a color scheme can completely revamp an old favorite. Sure, inflating the loot tables might make them difficult to manage, but we have the built in tools to keep that straight. Sure, back in the day the result was a neon clown fever dream, but we can dress ourselves now!
Not only lazy, but dang stingy as well, I’ve played and played, yet every rep reward seems to give me the same dang pair of gloves, I think I’ve gotten them like 200 times. you used to be able to get nice transmog gear, with some grinding yes… but now it feels like an unrewarding… just keep grinding and hoping useless cause. Heck I went and did a solo on Spires in Bastion the other day… I got NO drops of any gear, just a runecarvers memory… it was sad!
because the work done by “the art team” encompasses far more than just a few gear sets that you think are ugly
I’m not talking about just the gear sets.
Go run around Zerith Mortis, then go play Hob.
i think zereth mortis looks great. all of the zones look great honestly, even though i’m not a fan of the aesthetic of some of them - notably the maw and maldraxxus. ardenweald is up there as one of my favorite zones in the game
bummer if you don’t like them i guess. no reason to 
on the art team who are undeniably carrying this game on their shoulders
If you think Zerith Mortis looks great, then you’ll absolutely love Hob. Seriously, go play it. You’ll understand exactly what I mean then.
my only issue is I hope we return to more diverse armors. all of m+ is just one helmet with a few recolors, all of leveling greens is just one armor with recolors etc.
itd like diversity, even if its wacky.
Absolutely the worst plate set in the history of this game.
I strongly suspect that they feel because Transmog is a thing they can be lazy with items that aren’t tier sets, thus you get the abomination that is Shadowlands dungeon plate.
The amount of recolors is more noticeable too but I think this is more because they aren’t using models from earlier content as they used to in TBC and Wotlk so it feels more bare bones but they’ve always liked using recolors.
The general design aesthetic is a personal opinion sort of thing I guess, ZM is kinda meh, not bad but it’s just a weird zone and Bastion is so damn bright it hurt my eyes when SL came out, I couldn’t wait until I could get my callings done and retreat to Maldraxxus.
I do feel that to an extent some areas feel unreal and that makes it on a subconscious level, uncomfortable for some people.