The Taboo of the Color Pink

This is going to be a relatively short topic, which isn’t normal for me as I’m sure y’all know by now. Simply put, why is it we’re over 17 years into this game, and there’s barely any pink in this game?

I understand that in the start, it was because of the stereotype that pink is “girly” and WoW was targeted at men.

It’s now 2022 and WoW has an incredibly diverse playerbase. So much so that Blizzard actively has been diversifying the game in many aspects so that all people can find a character they relate with. But yet we still lack a single color in this game and it’s a very common favorite color. Pink.

There’s a few pink things in this game, but in general, there’s less than you can count on one hand of armor that are true pink.



Those are honestly the only 3 pieces of gear that are actually pink that I can think of off the top of my head.

Every other pink thing in this game is some shade of purple as well, for example, the thing most people point out when we say we want more pink:

We know the devs understand we want pink, because every expansion, they listen to hunters asking for pink pets and make sure to add at least one each expansion, and most recently added the pink elekk as a secret for people.

So why do we still not have pink armor being made? When there’s 4 recolors of gear in every raid, and 4 recolors of every set of questing gear, surely there’s room for a pink recolor every now and then.


And this is off topic, but just because a lot of people use excuse like other franchises still avoid masculinizing the color pink, most recently, one of the longest hold out on “Pink is a female color” changed that. This being Super Sentai in Japan, the source show for Power Rangers.

(Ignore how he looks, lmao. Black and Pink are CGI for reasons unkown, as the show doesn’t premiere til next month. It’s still a massive step towards helping kids look past stereotypes though)


So, in short, why do we still have no pink armor actively being added to the game? The fact there isn’t a pink recolor of the Kyrian sets in particular surprises me, because one of the weapons colors are doing the same purplish pink colors mentioned above, but lack a matching armor set.

19 Likes

I’d love more pink in WoW, and more of any colour, really. We’re usually limited down to a small handful of recolours of most armour sets, so I understand that not every armour set needs a pink recolour, but it’d be nice to have on occasion - like the Kyrian set as was brought up.

Perhaps if the long-requested ‘dye’ system was implemented, we could have more pink in general. I understand that might be challenging to implement, though. Perhaps future armour sets could be created with more tints in mind?

6 Likes

I’m all for more colours / tints for armour, makes for a nice variety when transmogging. And as mentioned by Halite, adding the long asked for dye system would be a great addition as a lot of other MMORPGs have similar systems and it does help with customising your character even more

3 Likes

Yep. More pink would be great.

I’m not on the art team and I can’t stress enough how much I’m not promising anything here, but I think this is a really good point and good reminder. We could certainly stand to have more pink gear appearances in the game for the folks who want it.

14 Likes

And the pink mageweave shirt

We can also do pink in the tabard maker if I remember.

Really though, it is true we lack a lot of the pastel colors overall. Blizz has fantastic art work and coming up with coordinating outfits is part of the fun and celebrates the artist’s hard work and the player creativity.

Want to match your gloves to the glacial blue glowing stones in your shoulders and belt? Want to have a white mog with pink accents? Want to play a power ranger? Priest or mage gear?

Blizz does a great job with purple and red variants. Some others, or dyes, would be nice to have. I am sure alchemists, inscriptionists, or tailors would love to make sellable dyes.

4 Likes

Dreadflame best transmog enchant cause its Pink

Oh, there’s a few other pink items, I just couldn’t remember them off the top of my head. :smiley:

I appreciate the pink-adjacent options for sure, like these are my mage mogs:

But I’d still like actual pink as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

As for dyes, I’m torn, only because Blizzard’s said that it would take a tremendous amount of development time to go back and map out every armor piece to be eligible for dyes.

But like, maybe when they add dyes, only make it affect armor that is added at the same time or after dyes? And like, slowly go back and map out old tier sets and release them slowly over time?

3 Likes

I have a lot of questions about that. Part of it is the old game design, for certain! Part of it seems to be philosophy.

Diablo 3 has a transmog system that they brought to WoW. It also has a dye system. So once you get an armor style, you can change the color all you want. WoW tends to make the same armor style but make you do diff content to get each color tint. Same goes for pets, mounts, etc.

D3 does not have a sub where as WoW does.

I have zero proof that making people do diff content to get diff colors increases engagement/subs and is a win. It is something that people do speculate on though. Is making people do extended content for tint rewards rewarding for the player or it is it frustrating?

Back in the day we did not have transmog so hopping around in IF showing off your end game raid gear was kind of a thing. With Transmog most people don’t even notice the latest raid gear and with LFG/LFR it is not the status symbol it once was. I feel that may change some of the original concepts about the tints for various levels having meaning. Intro of transmog really really lessened the value of the high level armor tint having some sort of status - and people don’t just hang out in town like they used to.

I hope they do some thinking about the whole thing. Make amazing armor models then let us dye them.

3 Likes