Remember back as shortly as Legion we’d be given different raid sets depending on our class?
It felt -right- to be able to clad my paladin in something more akin to Uther’s drapes and plate than some forced theme.
It felt -cool- to throw my death knight in dark metal, steaming with frost magic.
And I remember the outcry when this was turned into one monotonous theme for each armour type in BFA. It wasn’t cool, and it certainly shows shortcomings on Blizzard’s side.
But I grumbled, hung my shoulder in defeat and at least took solace in the fact that some raid sets looked pretty decent in BFA. And credit where credit is due, we had different sources of armour designs. I’m speaking of course about the warfronts, and heritage too. These were nice! Emphasis on ‘were’. I’m not sure if I misread, but the last Con made no mention of upcoming heritage sets for the other races.
And yet I’m making this post, my first ever outside of my own server, because just before I was shown some screenshots of what awaits us in 9.1 and I’m shocked by Blizzard’s laziness, if I can be that brutally honest. Yes, you’re adding new weapons (as one could expect, it is a big content patch), you’re going to be giving one Covenant specific mog - which is nice. There are some new mounts too, okay it could be worse.
But you’re going to re-colour the legendaries for each armour type and put them into PvP/Raid as the 9.1 tier sets? Really? Are you hedging your bets, Blizzard?
“Let’s just make the base set unmoggable, that way we’ve got them by the curlies in 9.1!” ? Maybe I am overreacting, I’d love some feedback from the community - but I personally find this incredibly shoddy, and very poor from a company that can let go of staff and give its executives big bonuses whilst depriving its customer base on multiple fronts. Quality Assurance. Customer Support. Any sort of design now, too? What’s 9.2 going to be?
ICC but this time it’s on fire?
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I totaly agree! I dont know what has happend with Blizz nowdays when they cant even make new armorsets? Everuthing is mostley recolors of older set. It started during Legion and Tomb of Sargeras hade recolored T6-set with minor diffrences. And instead of class-set there become armor-set. So maybe Blizzard should put some money on designers instead giving there owners millions dollars in bonus.
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you mean fire even more staff? OK
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Armor type based sets is so lazy and I don’t understand why the players let it happen.
There wasn’t even a protest honestly. Occasionally we acknowledge it sucks and thats it.
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I suppose Blizzard just banks on people not making enough of an uproar about it sadly. I definitely do intend to try and keep this thread alive a little if only in the very, very off-chance that someone from the CoMa team sees it, just so they know there are people who don’t appreciate what Blizzard’s doing.
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Blizzard has for some time now, Always designed their armor around the themes of their expansions. BFA Being the execption and legion. I Agree tho… Really like it better when they design the armor around the class and or the faction identity compared to the theme of the expansion.
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Did you mean “taking the biscuit”, the English term for taking things to ridiculous levels that are beyond credibility?
EDIT:
Example:“Oh, no - “X” was terrible, but “Y” takes the biscuit…!”
But it’s sort of by intent. Some people may not like it because they just want cool, new-looking stuff and anything that is identical or a re-color is anathema to them.
But the idea is that the legendary items are the Runecarver’s design. Likewise, all the Domination items are also his design – thus the shared, identical appearance.
It’s a bit of a story hook that I personally appreciate. It’s sort of a hint or a clue to the ongoing mystery, so to speak.
I think it’s fair enough to say that you don’t like items sharing appearances, or sets being raid-themed rather than class-themed, or PvP sets being recolors rather than unique designs, or whatever it is.
I think it’s wrong to criticize Blizzard on the premise of being lazy when in fact there are fair reasons for the decisions.
And beyond that, the total volume of appearances (items, mounts, pets, Pepe costumes, etc.) just keeps increasing from patch to patch, expansion to expansion. Blizzard aren’t being lazy in the art department – it’s one area where they demonstratively produce more and more.
The problem with designs that are that level of quality/appeal is that you get to a stage where you exhaust artistic talent; the hardest part is coming up with designs that look good, but aren’t too taxing to ‘better’.
Then again with a player base the size of WoW’s, that gets to nightmare prospect level way too fast, never mind the scope of what is deemed acceptable.
It falls to the playerbase accepting that a game like WoW will have players that have played the game for 10 days or 10 years and a mass of variants in between & that any (player/s) that has/have difficulty comprehending that ought to before berating what’s made available.
I agree with Jito. Blizzard aren’t being lazy if the maw or the raid they design the armor after is the theme of reference they go for.
But in my perfect world. Blizzard would make armor with the raid/maw/theme designed with a faction and class template underneath : P …But that might be asking a bit much.
I don’t see it tbh, I only see laziness. They basically skipped an entire tier of design work with this decision.
They are skimping on mogs and we should criticize it.
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Considering that the game is sub based and has also microtransactions on top of it i don’t think its too much to ask for them to but more of that money into the game and less for the pockets of greedy management.
Nowadays they cut corners so much that it really starts to show in the quality of the game and the amount of stuff we get and how long they take to make that minimal effort.
To me its just crazy that some of the F2P mmos start to look better and better than wow and on some cases more generous of what they give free on top of that the game is already free to play.
And some F2P mmos have seasonal events that are actually fun to do and change from year to year unlike wow where seasonal events are the same every year and completely forgotten.
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I appreciate that Blizzard wanted to move away from Tier sets for the reasons that they did so.
But they did it at the cost of Class identification, which I don’t appreciate.
I think being able to look at an armour set and say “that’s a Priest” is really important in the game. Now it’s just “Well that’s a Clothie!”… not so cool.
Having said that I do welcome additional Armour designs to the game. BFA 8.0-8.2 had good looking Dungeon, raid , Quest and Warfront gear, which was fun to collect. SL has all the covenant Armour sets AND the raid set (without matching weapons GRRRRRRRR!)… but the questing and dungeon sets are lack luster. Even Argus had some awesome Quest/Dungeon transmog to collect!.
I will say though: Throughout all of the Raid Tiers, I cannot find a single Armor set, that I think looks good for my Mage. This is a big disappointment.
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It’s disappointing when there aren’t any decent sets coming out, yeah. And not having class spesific sets are also annoying. Thankfully at this point in the game’s life there’s a lot of decent sets in previous expansions we can go back and get, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of good new ones.
Probably. In Norwegian and I suspect some other languages, it’s “takes the cake” though.
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Looking at blizzards armor design most cases you cant even see what armor type the person has in front of you.
Most cloth gear always looks too bulky and mail sets especially the hunter ones look like a complete mess and i really wish they would go and buy some hunting magazines and draw some ideas from stuff that real life hunters wear.
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In Legion you had legendaries that re-used random old appearances.
In Shadowlands you have legendaries that re-use future new appearances.
There’s something to be said for all legendaries being unique and special, like Warglaives of Azzinoth or Dragonwrath or Shadowmourne.
But again, the whole point of the legendaries in Shadowlands is to emphasize the point that the Runecarver is the guy who is responsible for crafting these super powerful items in the first place, and that this runeforged stuff you bring him and see all around in The Maw and Torghast, it’s all his design.
It’s a cool story hook, because it answers the question of where all those crazy powerful items come from. And likewise when you put up 50 belts on the Auction House you’ve crafted, then the identicality of the items is indicative of the design pattern you’ve used. The Runecarver is that in a story setting. If you have the materials, he makes stuff.
Not everyone may appreciate it because they just want more cool appearances to transmogrify, but I don’t think one should fault Blizzard for trying out something new. If it doesn’t work, then they can always go back to how it used to be again. And they’ve already said that class tier sets will come back, so the QQ hysteria seems a bit melodramatic to me.
Nah man I just prefer cake. 
Also I thought it sounded a bit less vitriolic. For the most part, I just want this to become a discussion where people can say they’re content/not content with the way things are going. It’s nice to see that there are people who agree with me but I respect the points made. i.e that the Maw set does fit the 9.1 raid over say, the Venthyr-themed raid.
It’s a decent point but I think that re-using things that are currently ingame is a little poor. Especially with us waiting on things like heritage, of which we have no further information, whilst Blizzard condones re-using assets they -just- used in a patch previously and throwing tints on them.
it will cost you a raid tier haha.
didnt they say there were going to add tier sets back in SL, wonder what happened to that
I think the question one should pose is whether those cloth, leather, mail, and plate labels are necessary to have at all?
Why not just restrict items to the classes that Blizzard thinks they’re fitting for and then drop the material label?
I mean, that material label seems more like a creative restriction than a meaningful RPG choice.
If Blizzard had the freedom to create a Paladin set that weaved cloth and plate together with a bit of leather to form a Warcraft spin on a cool templar knight, then that’d be pretty cool – if players wouldn’t QQ about it because it wasn’t pure plate!
It’s so dumb that people have this weird and completely arbitrary mindset that a caster should only wear cloth and nothing else but cloth-looking armor, because seemingly it would break the immersion if some Mage wore a robe with a plate chest piece? Jesus Christ…
It’s completely fine if Blizzard stretches their creative imagination and envisions a cloth set in a new stylistic way that isn’t yet another 100% cotton bathrobe.
I feel really bad for hunters. They really don’t have any good armor sets! They’re worse off than Mages.
Luckily my Undead hunter runs around in the Darkshore Warfront Elite Mail set, which suits it pretty well, but isn’t class specific.
I have noticed alot of players (especially leather users), ditching the shoulders recently. Which does look kinda cool, I suppose.
But back in the olden days of WOW, I remember seeing the level 60’s with big bulky armour, and at that point you knew that they had good gear! Because it looked big and bulky. I guess that aesthetic has become part of the games identification. No saying that it couldn’t change.
I do like the Covenant sets which are coming with 9.1, some of them do look different to typical designs. I do think it lacks variation. There should definitely be 1 per covenant, per armour type. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like that.