For the most part you can quickly tell how far a person has gotten just at a glance they are very read able by the art alone. This goes for much of the game until they started to really recolor things in Wrath (more so than the TBC PVP recolors). When you get to that point i think it starts to break down the gear profile cause now its more about the color of the gear than the gear itself.
I would say Post wrath would be T-Mog time overall but thats me.
âŚwhere?
Mocking the horrid designs of Vanilla (of which there are plenty) and noting the absurdity to tying your place among the community based on your looks isnât calling for Classic to be changed. Iâd be fine with xmog added but I also know it didnât get officially added until Cataclysm, so Iâm not really hard pressed either way.
This is hilarious. No really, what ârespectâ are people supposed to have? You can have your opinions about Vanilla all you like, but no one has to respect them, and Vanilla itself isnât a thing I have to respect in the slightest because it isnât the kind of thing that gets respect. Vanilla simply is.
Except now when you see an orc warrior in full tier 2 with ashkandi the only thought that passes through my mind is âlolnoobâ.
The tier/raid gear was colour coded, see someone in the normal mode gear? Theyâre normal mode raiders. See someone in heroic gear? you were still inspecting them.
Your parents should have raised you better then. I wouldnât barge into a comic book convention and trash comic books. Similarly, I donât go onto the retail forums and trash their game, even though I do, in fact, believe that their game is trash.
Which undermines the point entirely when reversed. My DK is still in end-gear, BiS Mythic WoD itemization and she looks completely awesome. I didnât bother to transmog it at all because it simply looks great on a female Orc. The moment I take her forward the first random NPC to give me a quest to go collect poop or clear out a rat infestation will hand me some goofy hand-stitched belt that has the same or better stats than my hard earned and notably cooler looking belt that I pried off the corpse of some fantastically powerful fel lord.
Weâve been doing this absurdist cycle for years now. All the hard crafted Tier 3 gear from Classic Naxxramas will be invariable chunked for questing blues and sub-70 5man drops. Bracers of literal execution crafted by one of the most powerful and ancient empires will be discarded for some random throw-away Goblin engineering pun item.
As early as TBC, the look and feel of gear was quickly diminished.
This is a nonsensical analogy. No one is âbarging intoâ Classic and trashing MMOs and WoW writ-large, theyâre critiquing something that was notably disliked at the time Vanilla was current and pointing to the fact that it was later changed. People with immense love for comics absolutely get into full scale arguments about the stupidities of ye olde plot lines and retcons all the damned time.
These things arenât sacrosanct, theyâre just a hobby.
This thread began as an open discussion about the pros/cons of transmogrification. It is by no means âdisrespectfulâ to point to the sea of Wild Growth Spaulders and Lion Heart Helms running around SW and note that âman everyone looks goofy as hell and the exact sameâ as a point against hating on transmogrification.
My parents werenât foolish enough to demand I treat every possible discussion like a sacred cow. These arenât your forums.
My point is that people who want transmog and other retail features have another option. Classic enthusiasts donât. This is all we have, and we waited many years to get it.
If you ruin this game or ruin TBC (by convincing Blizzard to cave into your selfish, greedy demands), like you ruined retail, then our only option is to quit playing WoW altogether again. Thatâs what retail players should respect.
Again, there was a reason people asked for Classic and prefer its lack of retail features. Itâs not because weâre stuck in nostalgia or that weâre ignorant to the many benefits of modern retail WoWâs features and âimprovements.â We think retail sucks! Many of those âimprovementsâ were not improvements.
Again⌠where? Where are people asking for Classic, right here, right now, to be changed?
Thatâs pathetic.
This is exceedingly pathetic.
Blizzard has already deviated on a number of things with Classic compared to Vanilla. TBC will be a continuation of that no doubts, and may even press a non-TBC feature as a âcool new feature! experience Shadowlands barbershop and xmog in TBC!!â That is entirely the prerogative of Blizzard.
If that irks you so much that you leave, well, bye. I didnât play Classic for a step-by-step replay of my Vanilla experience. Your demands for whatever it is in your head that makes Vanilla, Vanilla, are yours and yours alone. Given your responses in this thread, there is zero reason for anyone to ârespectâ such demands in the slightest.
I donât care how they roll out TBC, or if they roll it out at all. But if they do, and we get a perfect recreation or a TBC Reforged with xmog and pet/mount tabs and so forth, I still wonât really care.
From a gaming perspective Transmog is just another step down the road of turning wow into a cash shop to sell skins rather than focusing on the game play.
There were always people who made up sets to wear (the full twill set Jedi for example). The ability to change outfits and put on various costumes was always there it just took up bag space.
They needed to find a smarter solution to these costume sets taking up all your bag slots.
These arenât mutually exclusive things, notably when Mythics continue to be rather daunting challenges.
I think you can hide everything but weapons and legs now.
Which explains why you have no respect for Classic or Classic TBC or anyone who does care about them.
You know, itâs never too late for you to turn your life around and become a good person who shows respect for others. Think about it.
Which makes sense within the context of the gameâs story, such that it is, given our charactersâ place in the world. Malfurion hasnât changed his gear in ages and heâs fantastically powerful, and weâre supposed to be basically at or near folks like him now with all our achievements and deeds.
If I want to march around shirtless to show off my cool tattoos and scars with only fantastic looking shoulders and an eyepatch⌠damnit Iâm going to do exactly that! I turned into a frigginâ BEAR and nommed Ragâs ankles til he died OK? I wear whatever I want!
False piety is disgusting.
In a way, yes, but that argument loses value as soon as you get out of vanilla, and even loses value during vanilla. You canât say the BC raid tier looks objectively cooler than vanilla tiers. Some may even say theyâre inferior(I hate the crystal garbage on the pally sets), so if you see cool gear on someone, it doesnât always mean that gear is better or hard to get.
A lot of people agree that pally T2 is a lot more visually appealing than T2.5, but T2.5 is objectively better in the roles T2 tries to fill(melee dps/tank oriented.) So how does T2.5 reflect the quality of the player over T2, when T2 is generally considered to look better?
So the argument against transmog really just boils down to forcing people into looking a certain way, to bite the bullet and look like crap, because mismatched crap is what good performance often looks like.
The real issue of items losing their memorable status isnât their appearance, but the lack of functional diversity. In retail, itâs always armor and stam+primary stat, with a random 2 secondary stats. Never any radical shifts in item budget, unique procs, or functionality. You donât have armor pieces that just have huge amounts of armor and nothing else, for example, hence them all feeling so very same-y. Only trinkets really break this mold, but even then, itâs almost always âon proc/on use increase X stat or apply Y debuff.â
The âlossâ of this is why later iterations stopped seeing people trying to clear ALL raids all the time. It also corrected the issue of new tiers dropping new things and those things being objectively worse due to stat allocation. There are many ranged weapons between BWL and Naxx, and yet Hunters will only use the BWL xbow until the very end when they kill KT for the next xbow. 2-Handers galore are largely for fun or PvP only since no 2H spec is really all that worthwhile.
I suppose it is fun that Peacekeeper Gauntlets last forever, but that also means that every Plate (or otherwise) option between ZG and Naxx are just⌠passed over⌠People arenât even going to want their full Tier 3 for crying out loud.
Iâm glad to be rid of random and junky itemization with TBCâs arrival.
Honestly, i like to think of Transmogs as unlockable costumes in other video games. A cosmetic reward for your efforts essentially. (Well i say effort very loosely)
I honestly donât understand why transmog rids the ability for people or makes it pointless to inspect people now. Heck, i also donât understand how it takes away the impressiveness the gear gives, if anything, seeing somebody wear something cool, makes me want to go and get it.
Iâm actually quite fond of the weird itemization, as it makes the game world feel more organic in the sense that not all items of that armor type and slot are built in the same purpose. I never really agreed with the decision to make every new item objectively better than the previous, as it pushed the game away from an RPG in the sense of building your character, which may not necessarily be the most efficient character.
It goes back to an argument held to this day in DnD, why many new players of it often find themselves dissatisfied when they keep powergaming, missing the point of it entirely. Yeah theyâll stomp through campaigns, but that never was the goal.
These weird items in WoW were designed not around being efficient for the best builds, but for the players who build their characters in unique and thematic ways. There never was an emphasis for players to clear, as you say, all the raids all the time - that is purely a player-made issue. Itâs a desire to powergame that fuels that, well exceeding any actual threshold set by encounters, much in the same way powergaming cheeses mechanics in DnD. You can do that, and no one will tell you that itâs wrong, but you may not necessarily derive long term appreciation for the game as a result as you are playing it for a very short term reason.
BC takes a different direction, especially in its latter half, and in doing so starts to tailor all items around specs, and further capitalizing on it in wrath by bloating the trees with so many talents that itâs impractical to build your own spec, until finally in cata and MoP the door is slammed shut on build creativity entirely.
There was no longer room for the players who like to be experimental; the game was instead designed for the players who wish to be competitive, and in that they lost audience while gaining a new one. These weird items, just like weird builds, bring character into the game independent of visual customization. The two work beautifully together, but by the time transmog came along, such design philosophy of the former was gone so it never manifested.
⌠Why not just ask them then? 
Pot meet kettle.
Which is why MMORPGs canât really be D&D simulators, because our campaigns arenât shifting and responsive to our bizarro choices. I want to make an obnoxious Goblin Mage with a predilection for thievery despite having zero ability to pull it off, I can do that in D&D and probably have a LOAD of fun if Iâm playing with my usual crew of misfits, but at no point am I going to be challenged in any way that a properly equipped and designed character would struggle with.
This only holds water when those themes actually come into play. No one cares about how muscle-bound and brutish a Warlock can become if that strength and power never come into play. Thatâs why metas and unstated end-goals develop: because there are clear paths to victory and a helluva lot of paths to defeat. Blizzard couldnât make raids that saw that this team had people all rocking full T2 and that team had all people using a mish-mash of whatever was best and most powerful and this other team where you had melee oriented Priests and Mages, and have the raid appropriately cater to all of these things. Thatâs why Vanilla raids are so, meh, because Blizzard had to account for a wide variety of choices which meant that encounters couldnât (by necessity) overtax anyone too much.
Experimentation without a tangible goal, not some fantasy theme in your head only, is largely worthless. NPCs donât get gobsmacked that a Warlock walked up to them, Firestone in hand, and sliced into their flesh with a fire-proc. They take X points of physical damage, Y points of fire damage, and proceed to do what they do to everyone else: smack you back.
For a small minority of people, maybe. For everyone else, they see someone goofing off that isnât all that serious and who really canât be relied upon to complete more difficult tasks. MMORPGs have to have some kind of difficulty tuning in order to remain interesting, otherwise theyâre just barely reskinned dress-up simulator sand box games, which means junky made itemization only serves a single purpose: disenchant fodder.