It has been some months since I last posted about this the Mage Tower skin for the druid class. That’s okay.
Since then many of us have completed a huge swaths of the game. As BFA comes to a close we can all recognize the major strides we’ve made as players and people.
Let me be genuine here, because I don’t want to beat around the bush. I have been playing druid for a very long time. There are precious few appearances for feral and guardian druid, and we have limited choices when it comes to what we see all day, every day.
The Mage Tower appearance, despite its inherent tendency to illicit angry response, has made a larger problem for my class. This is no longer about skill, or effort, or a feat of strength. One of maybe eight base appearances for my entire class since vanilla has been removed permanently from the game in a treatment that I think misunderstands the plight of my class. As a warrior, each new weapon is a new appearance. As a druid, each new weapon is a fee in transmog and the regret of not having grabbed that skin. You don’t get to enjoy new skins or weapons as a feral druid. For other classes time has moved on, but for my class, exempting allied races, nothing has changed since 7.2. For the night elves and trolls among us, nothing has changed for our racial since 6.1.
After almost three years, this specific skin is clearly a larger loss than that of a mount or a weapon skin. These two base-skins could be seen by the player using it four or five times more often, and perhaps an entire patch of game time longer, in game, than any weapon or mount would be seen by our more go-with-the-flow comrades. We druids perform almost every task transformed. To have grouped it with other weapons is concerning at best. We don’t swing our skin. We ARE our skin. We do pretty much EVERYTHING as that skin.
Here’s the real kicker, though. The feral and guardian druid mage tower skins were actually some of the easiest to obtain. It would be comparable to state that the time and effort required would be that of a short grind and some sort of Mythic at most. Then why, Blizzard, can you not lock it behind another un-timed achievement like every single other artifact skin? Say, a time-walking achievement? A reputation grind, maybe.
I see the effort as comparable. A modern reputation grind is actually more difficult, which may be what would be necessary to appease those of us who would see it unfair. Besides, this can’t be compared to a cloak or mount. This is our user experience for this class… I don’t know what else to say.
Please discuss.
