Metal Color Makes No Sense

Lore Story Forum
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I never really noticed this until now, but metal in WoW is weird. Metal color is somehow one of the most inconsistent things I think I have seen in the game.

Let’s start with consistent metal: Copper and Fel Iron are both the same color or a similar shade of a generalized color across their mining veins, the ore in your inventory, the smelted bars, and the items that are made with them. This makes sense, now it’s time for that to stop.

Mithril is immediately one of the most confusing metals on this list, the ore-section of the vein is orange with pink hints, the ore as an item is a very light green, the bar is the same as the ore item, and crafted items using the metal ranging from looking like regular iron/steel to being a darker metal that can additionally look black or purple.

why
how

Thorium is better, staying consistent all the way until it becomes armor and weapons. It doesn’t get much better with time though, with Saronite gear ranging anywhere from a swampy green, a dark red, or a dark blue. For the record, saronite remains the same shade of green whether its a vein, the icon for the ore and the bars, or physical bars located in the Pit of Saron dungeon.

If we skip even further to Legion, same issue, different expansion: Leystone. To give credit where its due, comparing the icon for the ore and the vein you mine it from, it basically confirms that we are in fact taking the non-rocky chunks when we mine. Kinda obvious, but it makes Mithril even weirder. Anyways, you know the drill, consistency until we’re making brownish armor out of a light blue metal.

In case you’re curious, the only other ingredient in the Laystone armor is a tiny amount of Foxflower Flux to, as the game puts it, “remove impurities”, which apparently means completely change the color.

I could list more and probably go on with more weird WoW metal facts beyond their colors being confusing, like how there are multiple iron/gold/silver/steel metals, elementium in general, eternium existing, etc. but this post is getting long enough as it is, just had this on my mind and wanted to point it out so I’m not the only person confused about fictional metals.

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Another metal issue is that only a couple types of metal seems to be found on each continent. Most of the metals, but not all, in vanilla were just common real-world metals put into the game, but Blizzard has made so many new ones each expansion and left the old ones out. You’re telling me there’s no iron in Kul Tiras? You’re also telling me nobody outside of Kul Tiras or Zandalar has Platinum? I guess this is an example of the opposite issue, putting a real-world, useful metal in only a few continents.

I know that’s not the topic, but you did mention other issues with metal in your last paragraph and I thought I’d chime in. These are my kind of threads!

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It’s a sense of progression I’d say. As you level up and gain power, you use more and more exotic metals to craft more powerful armor. So while there might be iron or copper in Outland, you wouldn’t care about it, as you’re looking for more powerful materials. :man_shrugging:

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I mean armor dyes and paint are a thing in WoW universe. :man_shrugging:

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Assets made by different people who didn’t talk to each other?

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I’m going to go with a handwave of ‘non-industrial blacksmithing leads to various strange impurities in the metal causing differences in color and capability’.

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It is somewhat hard to judge things on color when we do not really know the full extent of the metallurgical processes used to not only purify the ores, but also to make goods. Those could have profound effects on the physical properties of the end product.

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I was quite literately running around yesterday on my dwarf mining (been listening to just a little too much of Wind Rose lately, or not enough :man_shrugging:) and had a thought of what an expansion, especially if they did an old world revamp, crafting system would look like if they re-used minerals? Cause eventually were going to have ‘true, fake, plain, blue, green, hard, soft, ghost, physic, plant, electric, water, fairy, and dark silver’ and its like, whats the point? Are we going to explain what the differences are? In almost all certainty not.

How do you put that into the game from a systems standpoint? What does it do to an economy? What does it do to all leveling experiences for those 2 years? Do you differentiate classic iron from new expansion iron as refined and unrefined? ‘Finely smelted,’ ‘carbon smelted,’ choose a name, I don’t particularly care what.

Cause the metallurgy of WoW should be expanded upon to give us ideas about the world. What is hard and soft, what is magic resistant and what is not, what is a magical conduit and what is not, what can meaningfully alloy with each other and what cannot? The list will go on.

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Currently cataloguing all these Metals now that you all brought it up.

Funny how adding Volatile Fire, Air and Water to Fool’s Gold turns it into Truegold…

Starting to think that any Metal with the name True added to it is false.

I didn’t even know that Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth and Zereth Mortis had their own unique Metals! Truly a surprise to say the least.

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On the topic of the whole “True” metal situation, True Iron takes the cake on being confusing, as you would assume that True Iron is what would become Fel Iron in our Outland, however the blue color of True Iron is the closest thing to Adamantite than anything else (given that Blackrock metal is seemingly all gone and Khorium/Eternium are seemingly linked to the Twisting Nether more than anything.

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Makes me wonder what would happen if one ordered a Machine to synthesize these Metals into the Real World?

Of course it may be a possibility that the Metal’s composition would change with each use of the Machine due to it not knowing the operator wants consistency.

Either way it would be interesting to find all the potential molecular compositions that could create Storm Silver in the Real World if a Machine was ordered to make it multiple times!

Of course considering Storm Silver is never shown electrified the machine might look at the name and simply make Purple-colored Silver.