If 100% of the effort is given into making an armor for a given expansion or tier. Why does it always feel like plate armor has 70% of the effort and then 30% is split between cloth and leather with the minimal going to mail.
I honestly would like an answer from Blizzard.
It feels like every time a new set of armor comes out, the effort is always :
Plate >>>>>>>>>>> Cloth >> Leather > Mail
Is there something I’m missing here or is just the nature of this armor sets?
Making cool plate is easy. You just make it big, spiky, throw bunch of 3d part and your knight in edgy armor is ready.
How do you make cloth interesting without making it look like a plate?
The Mythic Ep plate set wants a word
The BoD plate looked great, the leather was okay, everything else was a dumpster fire.
Tastes are subjective.
Yeah, plate is sort of low hanging fruit. Its not necessarily that more effort is put in so much as you can get better results with lower effort.
Mail has looked like trash in this game since day 1, especially for hunters. Wore nothing but shaman recolors and vanilla pre-plate warrior hand-me-downs until they loosened up transmog restrictions and added heritage armor because all Hunter mail sets are so. Duckling. Ugly.
T4 Demon Stalker set was the only good looking Hunter sets, IMO. I wore that transmog for the longest time.
I basically resorted to just wearing sensible clothing and relatively functional looking normal rifle.
Wow wow wow…my AQ40 set is beautiful…along with very few other sets…but the rest are complete garbage.
See, I’m kind of the opposite. I think it’s cloth > plate > leather > mail.
A lot of good design goes into cloth, and it has by far the most “skin showing” armors among males and females, lending to probably the greatest variety of discernible appearances among WoW’s armors. Plate is often cool by default. You can get away with large solid metal plates over mail, leather or cloth, and bulky bits everywhere and unless it’s an overly detailed mess, people can probably see it’s heavy armor.
And between these two types, class themed armors are strongly represented.
Leather and mail is where Blizzard’s design team seems to struggle, the latter especially. Leather they have to make not look like cloth, and mail they have to make not look like plate or leather. I think they pretty much got it right with BFA’s leveling/dungeon/warfront sets, but I don’t know if I trust that will keep happening. I think they really should just bite the bullet and collapse armor types down to 3 - light, medium, heavy (cloth, hide, metal if you prefer.) Divvy up the mail between medium and heavy as suitable.
And create more armors with exposed cleavage, waists, collar bones, etc across all armor types, not just cloth. Need more of that vanilla/TBC design philosophy. Wrath and beyond definitely feels like a new and different art direction for armor.
I guess in terms of difficulty, plate is easy to the imagination as well as cloth. Leather is a little more difficult and i just looking through the art Blizzard isnt sure what mail would look like as it always seems like a art mix of plate and leather in a blender.
Well they can start by:
Making many more non-robe cloth chest pieces…
Not making virtually every piece of cloth footwear “socks” that are just flat textures with no dimension or shape just because they might be hidden under a robe (because of course no one would ever want to eschew the robe part of a set right?). The laziness on cloth boots is also starting to creep into cloth pants as well. Many recent cloth pants have been nearly devoid of any design details, being plain solid colors with no patterns. I’ll say it because it needs to be said, just because some item slots might be covered by a robe does not mean its ok to take shortcuts on those item slot models!
Making more gloves with 3d bits and making sure the boots match and aren’t (again) flat “sock” textures. What happened to the Blood Elf heritage armor’s boots was a tragedy, especially since Blizzard actually made a non-robe chest option for the set. The boots really should have had similar 3d elements to the gloves.
More belts with subtle 3d bits like scrollcases, vials, runestones, etc.
More sexy robes for the ladies that have plunging necklines and/or off the shoulder looks like the crafted epic robes from MoP and the Black Embersilk Gown (which seriously needs to be flagged as a cosmetic green quality item so it can be used for transmog by any class because it’s gorgeous).
And speaking of black… how’s about more black? Black cloth items are so few and far between. We get tons of blues, purples and reds but hardly any deep dark black cloth that any cloth class can wear. I mean for an example of a black robe that looks amazing look no further than:
which is sadly unobtainable these days.
It’s really going to very from tier to tier.
Tier 1 (yes, I’m old) with the Banana Shoulders Paladin set, and Radio Antennae Warrior set was… Not good for plate. Tier 2 was good for paladins, but just… hilarious for warriors. Tier 3 that reversed, reversed again the next tier, and tier 5 was kinda middling for plate all around.
End of the day, long term, there’s no real one winner of the tier competition. There IS a loser (mail) but leather and cloth definitely get their time in the sun too.
I’m in total agreement. The number of cloth boots that are just ankle socks is insulting. The Traveler garb for pre-ordering SL suffers this same crime. Beautifully realized chest piece, gloves, shoulder helmet… pants and boots are bare minimum effort. Because mixing an matching mogs isn’t a thing in the Blizzard offices apparently.
As for white items… let us mog these too already. So many early game quest rewards have unique skins/models you’ll never find in green or better quality. Everything from the Valley of the Mists Pandaren starter zone? One and done forever, no mogging those items at all. The sets city vendors sell? Who touches those? Why are we drawing the line arbitrarily at greens and above? Include whites already!
And while we’re on the subject of mogs, why did we A: change the class starting shirts and B: change said starting shirts into chest pieces? So many dumb decisions when there was an obvious right choice. Why are MMO developers like this?
A simple black robe and black hood (no embroidery, no rank. just plain) I can’t find in game. Exactly like a Benedictine monk. And did they give up on vests?
As a mail-wearing main, I have to agree. The mail has always been phoned in and ugly with very few exceptions.
I’ve never played a plate class with any regularity, but as a female player, I was dismayed to find that–unlike my clothies and leather-wearers, I had tremendous trouble finding any mail I wanted to look at.
Hunters get the double-whammy:
Mail typically looks terrible.
There’s maybe 4 decent looking ranged weapons in the game.
I’m not very impressed with most melee weapons either. A lot of weapons in this game seem to be hastily duct taped together post-apocalypse implements, or something a caveman could pound into shape with a rock and some time.
No, seriously, I feel almost everything between the TBC and Legion expansions are a freaking mess design wise. A few gems, but mostly crap.
The reason why cloth isn’t more interesting is exactly that. Cloth needs MORE silhouettes that isn’t bulky plate-esque.
Basically the problem (imo) with the cloth and leather silhouettes that they deliver is that there are many elements that def. doesn’t read as light armor, and every time they stray away from that, we get cool gear.