I get flame for this so much in my guild and whenever I talk about it. But I will never relent. Besides LFR, I think transmog was one of the worst changes made to the game ever.
Why?
An MMO is an environment, a place where how much you spend time reflects on your gear and in the hierarchy of players. Being able to look like a god with full tier from an expansion 8 years ago when all you have is the blues and greens of a new expansion sion is just flat out dumb in my honest opinion.
Had transmog been limited to a special area or a zone, that would’ve been one thing. But I used to actually INSPECT people to see “oh my god what is that weapon or cloak they have” now I never inspect players because I know it’s not what they are really wearing, its probably a crappy item that has been transmogged from an old piece of content.
personally i don’t, but i can see where you’re coming from.
for me transmog is just a luxury I would not want to be without these days because I actually care about how my character ends up looking (since, ya’ know, i’m staring at it for hours per day). And in that sense, I would not want to be looking like a homeless person or a plate wearer wearing dresses and other badly looking items just because it’s BiS.
in a world where gear actually looks good across the board I could agree with you, but in blizzards world where every other tier is a complete hit or miss, and 95% of all greens/blues/welfare epics look like they’ve been designed by someones kid at “Bring your child to work day”, I’ll take the transmog feature and use something I like.
In original Vanilla your gear progress showed on your character and per the devs this was how it was intended to be. I agree with the Vanilla design and think transmog hurt more than it helps.
Transmog let people hide when they were clueless. In Vanilla and BC you could tell if someone was running AQ40 or if they had just hit 60/70 and needed to gear up. It was nice. Transmog removed this ability. Yes, Wrath brought in gearscore and that wasn’t good, but at least in Wrath you still had to be wearing proper gear. You couldn’t hide behind a transmog. And I know not everyone in retail is hiding behind them. I know not all of them like the look of the gear they have to wear.
They should have made it to where you could turn off transmogs and see people in their actual gear. The real reason for transmog is personal. People like how their characters look in specific sets. So they should have allowed others to in essence turn off the transmog. I mean in retail WoW the amount of information available to you on your class negates the ignorance excuse people rightfully had in Vanilla and BC.
The real problem is you can’t truly “reset to 0” in every expansion. In Vanilla or Classic when you roll a new character it’s at “zero”. In BC we’ll walk in with AQ/Naxx gear. The only way to stop that is to go completely fresh, but that would lose Blizzard a lot of subs. Mine included.
As you stated it’s personal. Simple solution. Make it optional and allow people to turn it off an on in the options. If it’s turned on you see everyone in their transmogs. If it’s turned off you only see your character in their transmog. Seems so simple tbh.
yea that would be a fair compromise. very easy one too since a lot of people already use morphing software (which for obvious reasons i wont say the name of) to make their characters use whatever transmog and weapon enchant they like only client side.
I don’t really like transmog. I spent some time to get some decent transmog gear for a couple of my characters, and it’s so much something I do not want to do for other characters, that I’d rather just not play.
I have a friend who is an artist. Majored in art in college and got her masters in art appraisal. She sees things I just don’t see. If she points it out I can see it but until then I never noticed it was there. My focus has always been on other things, mostly music and botany. I move through the game and barely notice what people are wearing, just as I move through the real world and barely notice people’s fashion choices. I understand where you’re coming from but don’t expect others to. Some people are visually focused, other people have other things they focus on, and most people don’t focus on anything at all ever. Just be glad you’re not like them.
I don’t transmog any of my characters. If I want to look better, I push to do harder content.
I miss what you see is what you get in PvP, as well. Being able to eyeball a power level in pvp. Can’t do that with transmog (or rather, you look at an hp bar instead).
I miss thinking “oh poop, I know those shoulders, they take high rating to get”.
problem with this approach is that “If I want to look better, I do harder content” doesn’t really translate since for one its a subjective thing and second blizzard has been doing such a hit or miss job with the actual gear design in most expansions that you go from looking sick in 1 tier to an absolute clown the next
If transmog didn’t exist I’d have left for an MMO that had it long ago. Everyone in town standing around in exactly the same tier outfit, and not having any reason at all to run old content, is beyond boring.
You’re entitled to your opinion, no matter how wrong it may be.
You’re threatened by the old looks of a character from an age past?
Also note that I’m a Druid, I get to look like I do until late Wrath when we get mildly customizable forms that only change the color of our fur. Then I get to look like that until Legion where we get artifact based looks to our forms. Meanwhile, special costumes and looks from holidays and quests alike end up just not working at all until much later.
Finally, being one of the hybrid classes, it wasn’t until late Cataclysm that I could actually have a cohesive set. No more skulking dark leather and poison/skull themed gear mixed together with roots and leaves and sparkly crescent moons, I could finally actually be entirely a Druid, from top to bottom, and not look ridiculous.
As a final note of disagreement: by the time transmogrification was introduced, the population as a whole was no longer looking only at our gear as a point of reference. GearScore had already come and gone and checking a combination of spec/ilvl/achievements was the norm for success and showing off, with the truly unique show-off achievements being end-tier boss kill titles and special mounts.
