Transmog Hands, Wrists, and Feet Separately
The ability to transmogrify shoulders independently of each other has been a great addition to the transmogrification system, allowing for a high degree of added customization options without having to add a single new piece of gear. This feature should be expanded to the other paired armor slots: hands, wrists, and boots.
Multiple Head Slots
As someone who wears glasses in real life, I would like to pleasantly inform Blizzard that it is, through diligent practice and determination, actually possible to wear glasses and a hat at the same time.
There are numerous head pieces like eyeglasses, headbands, and face masks which could easily be stacked at the same time without any clipping issues. Having two head slots we could mog simultaneously would open up a ton of options along these lines.
I can see two basic ways of setting this up: either with one “head” slot and one “face” slot, or simply adding a second universal head slot.
The Head/Face Slot setup would allow Blizzard to curate which items could be mogged to which slot to reduce potential clipping conflicts, but would come at the cost of dev time to make those reviews and decisions, and would inevitably result in fewer combination options.
I would favor the second option of simply adding a second universal head slot and leaving it to players to avoid clipping conflicts on their own.
Shoulder Scaling
We all know WoW loves its oil tanker-sized shoulderpads, but sometimes it can go too far even for us. Poor gnomes are especially at the mercy of this, with their shoulders being scaled to the size of their heads rather than their bodies, so that many shoulder pieces seemingly devour their entire arms. A way for the player to change the scale down the size of their shoulder armor to their own preference would be incredibly nice, whether taking the form of a slider or even just a couple preset options.
Hide Robe
A toggle on robe-style Chest mogs to remove or show the lower half from the waist down would open up a huge degree of customization options, especially for cloth classes, who have the highest ratio of robes-to-chests of any armor type.
Layered Chest & Leg Slots
Ever since Legion, the chest and leg armor slots in particular have been experimenting beyond what older armor pieces were capable of in only applying a texture to our existing character models. Many newer pieces of equipment for these slots have incorporated additional modelwork on top of the texture applied directly to the character model, which creates an interesting opportunity for transmogging.
Something not immediately apparent about the additional modeling on these gear pieces is that they are actually to some degree independent of the character model texture. This can be seen most readily with tabards, which overlay chest armor body textures, but are then overlayed themselves by the same chest armor’s additional modeling, but it can also be seen in the leg slot with the Classic-era Winter’s Veil cosmetic Santa suits. These suits are chest-equipped/mogged gear pieces which also overwrite any leg armor texture with the Santa suit’s leggings. But, when mogged with a modern piece of leg equipment with additional modelling like long coattails or an armor skirt, the body texture of the Santa suit still overwrites the body texture of the leg slot, but the additional model sections of the leg slot remain.
Making separate Chest and Leg mog slots for these additional model details would allow mixing and matching of the body textures and additional modelling sections for a whole new aspect of mog design currently only possible through the above niches.
Caster Weapon Restrictions
Casters, particularly cloth casters, are often severely limited by their weapon mogging options beyond what other classes and specs deal with, and it’s pretty much entirely due to Daggers being unmoggable with any other weapon type. This isn’t a huge restriction for non-casters, as the only non-caster characters who will ever be using daggers in the first place are Assa/Sub Rogues whose specs are built solely around wielding daggers, but becomes a major stumbling block for casters who may find themselves needing to save multiple mogs just to cover the spectrum of weapons they may want to equip even in the same spec.
Cloth casters have this to the absolutely most extreme, with none of their allowed weapon types being crossmoggable with any others. All cloth casters have the same weapon proficiencies: Daggers, Wands, Staves, and either 1h Swords or 1h Maces. None of these weapons are crossmoggable (well, Wands can actually be mogged into 1h Melee weapons for some reason, but not the other way, and Blizzard seems to have been largely phasing Wands out of the game for ages now).
Consider allowing Cloth classes at least, if not all caster specs, to crossmog their allowed 2h over their 1h weapons, and vice-versa. We already know this is possible to some degree due to Legion artifacts, and the preference for a 1h/OH combo or staff has huge aesthetic impact for a caster while having virtually nil for mechanical impact.
Sheathing Options
Add toggles to the transmog UI allowing us to choose whether our weapons sheathe on our backs or hips, and another to Hide or Show while sheathed. The back/hip option adds a lot of aesthetic vibes while having no gameplay impact whatsoever, and any clipping issues with Back slot mogs should be up to the player whether they are acceptable or not.
Underwear Mogging
Please, for the love of all, let us change our underwear. My character has been to entire other dimensions, slain gods, and is on apparently every world leader’s speed dial. Surely I’ve earned the right to something a little more comfortable and stylish than a burlap two-piece. And pour one out for all our troll sisters, whose could probably re-irrigate the entire Barrens with all the sweat they collectively store up in a full day’s adventuring in fur bikinis.
This could be a barbershop option instead the way it is for dracthyr if you’d rather take that route, but even just making the full variety of already existing PC undies available to every race would be a massive improvement.
Interface Updates
Improved Preview Window
The preview window on the transmog interface is absolutely tiny, and would benefit greatly from a toggle for a bigger preview. Additionally, please, please allow us to zoom out further. 2h weapons are often difficult to fit entirely into the window for many characters, and small races like gnomes and goblins are often just SOL to be able to actually see their larger weapon options at all without dragging themselves all over the window to view it one section at a time.
Wardrobe Filters
11 expansions deep on this game, our wardrobes are absolutely massive. While it is currently possible to filter gear by Source, this is fairly useless to how people actually engage with outfit building. When designing a new outfit, the most important concerns are usually themes, colors, and definition quality, none of which are particularly well sorted by the Source filter.
To that end, consider the following filter options:
- Expansion: This is both the simplest filter to implement as all it has to account for is item ID ranges for each expansion, and one of the most impactful. Definition quality is clearly tied to expansion progression, making this the easiest way to filter it, and gear themes can be easily associated to the matching themes of their expansions. If I want some good fiery items, I can pretty confidently check out Dragonflight for Amirdrassil and Cataclysm for Firelands gear, for example.
- Race: Beyond heritage sets, there are hoards of gear in this game that are clearly based on the aesthetics of one race or another, from the mountain of troll-themed gear that’s their silver lining for being used as raid fodder from Zul’gurub to the Dazar’alor, to the draenic troves of Argus and Outland, and the current Derelicte runway show of Undermine world armor and raid weapons. For the extra mile, there could even be options to filter for non-player races with significant presence in the loot table, such as dragons and nerubians. Granted, this is a more involved filter, as it would require going through the game’s entire wardrobe and applying tags to each piece of gear, but the payoff would be great.
- Class: Tier sets, class hall sets, class-exclusive quest rewards, and the like.
- Color: Perhaps the single most helpful, if also the most involved, filter. The benefits are obvious, even if this would require the most work from the devs to once again go through every piece of loot in the game and apply tags to them.
- Variations: Somewhere between 90 and 99% of all gear in this game exists in multiple color variations, and while these often appear next to each other in the wardrobe anyway due to being released at the same time, this is not always true, as recolors sometimes get released at later dates, sometimes even multiple expansions later. A way to select a particular item in the wardrobe and view only its recolor variations (or maybe even its HD remake/LD original, ala T2 and its Anniversary remakes) would be very helpful. Think wowhead’s “Same Model As” tab on gear pages.
Add Uncollected Toggle
While we can currently check boxes for Collected and Uncollected in our wardrobe filters, we do not have the ability to browse Uncollected gear in the transmog interface. This is likely in order to avoid confusion over players not being able to mog uncollected appearances, but is very annoying when trying to design a new outfit in the mog interface only to not be able to find the right piece to finish it off, and needing to browse your Uncollecteds. Currently this necessitates closing the mog UI, opening the Wardrobe UI, and rebuilding the set you were working on in the Dressing Room. Being able to hit a check box to show Uncollected mogs in the transmog UI would be much more convenient, while still creating a clear delineation that you can’t mog appearances you haven’t collected.
Remove Armor Restrictions
Alright, the big one for last.
Armor type restrictions are a relic of the past. Even before the absolute deluge of Cosmetic sets released to the playerbase over the last few expansions, the actual aesthetic lines between different armor types were frequently blurry, or outright non-existent as numerous appearances got directly reused over multiple armor types.
The eternal refrain against this is that players should look like the class they’re playing, and it’s bunk. Not only has it been easily possible for players to look like a completely different class from the first day transmog was introduced thanks to Blizzard directly reusing tier appearances as generic raid loot ever since Wrath of the Lich King, but it’s been routinely ignored by Blizzard themselves when crafting NPCs representing player classes from the most generic to the definitive. Thrall is the shaman, but has worn nearly everything but mail over the long course of his character design. Tauren NPCs are frequently dressed up in leathers regardless of their class, and who can even tell what armor class half the elves in the game are supposed to be wearing?
The lore and character designers frequently think characters in this game look more like their class while violating these rigid armor type classifications than if they did, and players should be allowed that same latitude. To this day I remember a hopeful player back in Warlords of Draenor who came to the forums asking for advice on replicating one of her garrison followers’ outfits on her own character of the same listed class and spec as the follower, a rogue. She had to be turned away disappointed because that NPC rogue’s outfit was entirely composed of cloth. Y’know… like a sneaky rogue trying to blend in without rousing suspicion.
Because that’s the final nail in the “classes should look like their classes” argument: most of the people who would jump at the chance to break out of their rigid armor type restrictions want exactly that. They want to look like their class, just in an interpretation that isn’t served by the restrictions. Streetwise rogues in understated civvie clothes, barbaric warriors in leather harnesses, battle mages with a protective plate gauntlet to shore up the defenses of their mystic robes. Players can already look nothing like their class with the options currently available, and have since the start. The reason we don’t see it that often isn’t because we need to cling desperately to these artificial barricades against a flood of lore-breaking clownshows, but because players by and large want to look like their class. Dropping these restrictions just give them more range to express their class fantasy their way.
Updated with additions.
