I feel like we’ve all been there, where there’s a really cool weapon or armor piece that drops when you’re running through an old dungeon or raid, but the character you’re currently playing isn’t the right class to be able to actually add it to your transmogrification wardrobe. It just sucks, having this awesome looking gear piece get condemned to the fate of just being sold to the next vendor because you can’t trade it and you can’t transmog it. So here’s my idea for a way transmog could be collected on characters who don’t match the gear type: have a new NPC in the transmogrification building for each major city who’s sole purpose is to help you collect appearances for other classes. Speaking with this NPC will allow you to give them a piece of gear and add it to your collection with the only requirement being that you do not already own the appearance. There would be a small fee for using this service (maybe ~50-100 gold) and the item would be destroyed in the process, but it would be permanently added to your collection without the requirement of equipping it. I believe this would be a fair way to allow players to unlock the appearances for items they already have, and it falls in line with the recent, alt-friendly changes that have been making the game more enjoyable overall.
Honestly, since all you are doing is changing the appearance of a piece of gear in the transmog, I don’t know why you can’t collect the appearance with ANY character. Especially since, the scenario you quoted happens SO often. You run an instance with a warrior, you’ll get a BOP cloth drop. Run the same instance with a wizard, you’ll get a BOP leather drop, run it with a rogue, you’ll get a BOP mail drop. It’s Blizzard’s own design flaw of not having a smart enough AI to match the loot drops to the class running the instance. Why not allow the appearance to be collected by any character that the item drops for.
It isn’t like transmogging the cloth robe of a level 10 wizard changes the stats of a cloth robe. It you choose to make it appear like a suit of plate mail armor, it’s still just a low level, + 4 armor cloth robe.
Older players will remember when warcraft first started, and raids on the Crossroads was a daily occurrence. I always loved seeing the Tauern guard NPC’s rush the field. It looked like the cavalry had arrived. I was very disappointed to find that those, obviously warrior class NPC’s were wearing leather armor from the Sentinel gear set, and cutthroat shoulders. (You “could” obtain that appearance as a plate piece from the big bad pauldrons, but the rest of the Barren’s Guard appearance is leather) so YOU can’t make your Tauren looks as bad @ss. Why not? Transmog should have allowed to to change your plate armor’s appearance, without actually changing the stats of your gear…
Been farming “Thori’dal, the Stars’ Fury” bow from Sunwell, for forever, had it drop once, but was on my DH, who of course, can’t use it, Banked it just in case this ever becomes a reality. Still Farming for it, but still only seen just the one drop.
Folks have been complaining about this ever since transmog first became a thing. It’s always possible that they’ll open it up, but after 10+ years I’m not holding my breath. For whatever reason, they just don’t want it to be that easy.
Its quite funny, that we can unlock all transmog appearances when we hand in a quest, but not when we loot the items.
Equally weird that we can buy all items from vendors, but not unlock their appearances while doing so.
As for the idea of the OP,
do you truly want to carry all drops from a raid (100 items +) to SW to unlock their transmogs? This is way too complicated.
It may be better to hire an NPC, that comes with us into a dungeon and then unlocks them on the fly. Then again, its additional work for the Devs, as that NPC would need to be added to the game, which again would require voice lines, graphics…
It seems much more reasonable to just make the 0 into a 1 and let us collect transmogs on all chars.