So this is a post I have been wanting to make for a while as I have some strong opinions but am also curious what the community’s opinions are. I do want to start out by saying that I think the WoW Art Team does amazing work! Seriously, the two sections of the WoW team that I never really see anyone complain about, and rightly so, would have to be the Art and Sound teams. I personally love the work those teams do, seriously good stuff. With that said though, I have a few thoughts I wanted to express feedback on when it comes to armor.
Dressing for Success
Armor in World of Warcraft is one of the most visually stunning parts of the game because it directly affects how you represent your character thanks to systems like Transmog. Out of every other fantasy MMO that I am aware of, WoW puts out some of the most beautiful and impressive armor sets in the market! Each set continues to be very stylistic and unique with rarely ever, not counting recolors, having two sets that look alike. Even when remaking old sets in HD, such as the “Tomb of Sargeras” sets, it’s impressive to see how those old sets could be expanded upon to feel original in their own sense!
Comparing WoW’s armor design to some competitors, ESO for Example, where the styles remain fairly grounded and more “realistic” in design and you end up with a lot of sets at a glance being very similar and hard to distinguish. This is something that WoW has never really struggled with, even in the earlier years of the game and in fact many of the armor designs still hold up to this day! “Judgement”, Paladin Teir 2, is a perfect example as that Vanilla set continues to be used in a lot of Paladin promotional material even now because it has such a vivid, stylized, look to it that has held up over the years very well. The fact that a set from over 15 years ago has aged so well is truly a testament to how well done World of Warcraft’s Armor sets are.
With that stated, there is something that has personally bothered me for quite some time and that would have to be Mail Armor.
The Mail in Mail Armor
When I think of the word “Mail” the first thing that comes to my mind is Chain Mail and Scale Mail though there are also other forms of Mail armor such as Ring Mail and Banded Mail (In a surprising number of different iterations from Yushman to Lamellar to Cataphract there are a lot of different types, Cataphract is the shown example below)
There are honestly quite a few different varieties of mail armor and all of them have their own distinct visual aesthetics and yet so little of it is actually used in Mail Armor outside of Scale Mail. Surprisingly I always notice a much stronger presence of what I would consider “Mail” in the Plate category. Just cycling through several Plate sets (One of them mismatched different colors because there is no complete set in just one of the two colors available for transmog) I decided to compile a few examples of “Mail” being used in plate as displayed below.
I have noticed that, and again I wish to reinforce that this is purely my personal and very subjective opinion on a rather subjective topic, a lot of Mail Armor does not actually look like Mail but instead has very strong “Leather” vibes! Or… you know… leaves?
Again, that is not to say that “Mail” doesn’t exist in Mail Armor however I often feel like the armor designs we get feel more like leftover Leather that didn’t fit in with the Leather Armor sets. It sometimes feels as if Mail gets the Leather and Plate scraps. As I said there is quite a lot of “Scale Mail” in Mail armor when looking through the catalogue of Mail Armor but outside of that you almost never see Ring Mail or Chain Mail in Mail Armor which, if I am being very honest, is a huge shame.
Take for example the two most left hand plate sets in the earlier referenced picture. The above sets have some pretty legitimately good looking Chain Mail textures and yet outside of Vanilla WoW armor, much of which is available for both Mail AND Plate transmog, you don’t really see much in the way of Chain or even Ring Mail in the Mail Armor category. There are plenty of examples of Scale Mail in the Mail category but where are all the Chain Mail and Ring Mail designs?
I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am a bit envious of some of the armor designs for Plate when playing on a Mail Character, though I also don’t think they should lose anything either. Plate is one of the best looking armor types in WoW, again I say this as purely my opinion, and I think its the strong combination of Mail and Plate which looks really good. There are plenty of instances of Plate Armor, historically, that also utilized segments of chain in the open, more unprotected, areas so it makes sense for some of the Plate sets to have those segments of chain.
With that said I often feel like Mail loses out on a lot because of Plate 
More Links Please
I don’t want to take away from Plate’s thunder, it’s got some awesome aesthetics going for it but I do want to say this much. I would really love to get some more Mail Sets that have stronger tones of Chain and Ring Mail and less tones of leftover Leather?
Variety is nice, and Mail certainly has its stand out sets in terms of visuals, but I would really love to see more variety in the type of Mail we get instead of being so dominated by Scale. I would honestly KILL to get some of the amazing chain textures used on Plate for Mail sets. For Mail to have a stronger “presence” in Mail Armor instead of feeling so Leather heavy.
These are just my thoughts and honest, personal, opinion on Mail Armor. Again, I know it’s a subjective point but it’s something I felt worth bringing up. I am curious what the opinion is of other posters here when it comes to Mail, if my opinion is shared or not and honestly it may just be me but I have been wanting to get this off my chest for a while now.
Again, I am curious if anyone else feels the same way when it comes to Mail Armor but personally I would love to get some more Mail Armor that feels like “Mail”!