A scant few months back I’d had a revelation about why I so dearly enjoy MMORPGs, and kept wrestling with the idea of making a blog post. I see plenty of people discuss lore, and roleplay, and raiding and PvP and their friends as compelling reasons to play, but me? At the end of the day, I want to look awesome. Pretty much all of my flailing about WoW over the years has been underwritten by my desire to Find Some Matching Gear, Dangit. The realization was liberating, as some of the slightly more bewildering things I have done and try to do finally made sense. And I’d never even seen it discussed in the blog sphere: passing references to enjoying this look or that, maybe, or fondly remembering some times of looking especially pretty in one’s purples, but never anyone admitting up front that they just want to look good. I thought it might be an interesting awareness-building exercise to discuss it.
Then Blizzard announced that just kidding guys, we realized your howls for an “appearance” slot were serious so next patch we’ll let you reforge your items’ looks. (Because they’re Blizzard, they of course borrowed a term from Calvin and Hobbes to name this system.)
Judging by the quantity of discussion and old-dungeon farming I’m seeing, this is going to be the most-anticipated new thing since, I don’t know, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game set in the beloved universe of Warcraft. I’ve been both amused and disturbed to find out how many of the people on my friends list want to play dress-up with their characters: all of them. I freely admit my perception is a bit skewed– I’m an old hat on a role-playing realm, with a firm insistence that jerks and trolls can stay out of my life– but I’ve been repeatedly sacking every old raid I can think of once a week with the friend who’s a raider in a top 10 US raiding guild, as well as discussing how absurd “shoulder armor” in this game is with my casual friend. (Final Fantasy has swords. Warcraft has shoulder armor.) It took some reading to find anyone at all who wasn’t at least seeing some pleasing possibilities in the new transmogrification option, and while they managed to make a good point about how tying experiences to specific armor looks can enhance your enjoyment of said armor, most of the rest of the objections smelled like cranky “I don’t think this is neat so you should stop being excited about it.”
Anyways. Suffice it to say that WoW is filled with sounds of old content getting farmed, and every blog and their mother drafting up yet another gear list– although these, at least, try to focus on telling you where to go to find matching sets, which I can permit on the grounds that not everybody has been playing since dungeon sets were the mark of a champion, so raising awareness that old sets exist isn’t a total waste of time. If you’re lucky, you might even find people putting up information about something besides tier/season sets! Grateful shout-out at this point to Orcish Army Knife for doing just that for some simple plate sets: I can’t use them, but Thank Baby Tomato That They’re Not Another Tier Compilation (And They Look Nice To Boot).
Okay, yes, I’m going somewhere with this. I’m much too excited about ‘mogging to completely ignore it as a topic, but frankly I’d rather stab myself than do a post that’s just Wowhead screenshot after WoW Model Viewer pic of items with captions about where to get them. If you want that, please go check any other blog. Any of them. Yes, even that one. Bored yet? Alright. So we don’t need more of that, between how boring they are to read and how tedious they are to format. So let me tell you about Eiyola.
Wait, did I mention that (A)Eolian went and got herself turned into a Tauren? No? Well, huh. I mean, it was a pretty big deal… her family had to formally declare her dead, and her mom may never forgive her about the grandkids, and she lost half her pets in the process. Well, never you mind. She goes by Eiyola now.
My first reaction, upon hearing the ‘mogging news, was to stare contemplatively at the various mail armors, mentally running down the list of hunter tier sets. Eiyola has become my designated PvE monkey: need an old instance soloed? Ridiculous reps farmed? Both at once? Call the hunter! In any event there’s plenty of interesting mail armor looks to consider. Slightly more tricky is getting my hands on good weapons that would match said interesting mail armors. My first plan, built around the rare dungeon agility mail of Cataclysm, was scrapped when I figured out that the only ranged weapon I wanted to go with it drops off of a heroic 10man Icecrown Citadel boss. I’m willing to do some pretty absurd things in the name of looking good, but the prospect of talking my friends into doing heroic ICC 10 made my soul shiver. There’s asking my friends to go along with my ridiculous plans, and then there’s “farming old heroic raids.”
Okay. So maybe, possibly, if it looks like I could pull it off without TOO much hassle, I might try to do that in the future, but for now I’d rather aim for something that doesn’t require selling my soul to my friends. In the middle of halfheartedly poking at Demon Stalker a little light goes off. “Wait, weren’t there those shoulders I got for my dwarf hunter? That I just loved?” Armory up my dwarf, yup she still has them– item name get, and off to Wowhead to check the availability of that model. It took some finagling from there, costing me about an entire afternoon of flipping through Wowhead and dancing around WMV, but I scraped together just what I wanted: a good-looking, reasonably well-matching “set” that doesn’t require any insane farming to acquire. Also just up my alley: I’m pretty sure that you won’t be able to sneeze in Orgrimmar without whacking into two Barneys and maybe a few skyscrapers after ‘mogging goes in. But me? I’ll be rather astonished if I see more than one or two other people sporting a “set” quite like this. (Rule #1 of Looking Awesome: look awesome. Rule #1.5: but ideally not like EVERYONE ELSE AND THEIR MOTHER.) Double extra bonus points: I’ll get to use one of my favorite bows in the game… that I already had! Sweet, sweet bow animations.
With a couple days of peeking into the AH, poking old Justice Point vendors and making wheedling noises at my friends (stupid un-soloable jousting) I’ve just about finished off the set. I’m missing a chestpiece and a tabard yet, but my second tabard option works just fine as a placeholder and I have a backup chestpiece that will do in a pinch. Eiyola is pretty much ready to greet the ‘mogging highway robbers purveyors with open arms and a deep, deep coinpurse.
(No, I’m not going to show you what it looks like. I reserve the right to be a brat about this, because some tiny paranoid corner of my mind hisses that if I tell other people where I got my common-but-obscure awesomeness from, they may well stampede out and ruin the “obscure” part. The rest of my mind is lookin’ at that bit funny, but whatever. Brattiness engage!)
So, with Eiyola pretty much out of the way, and an upswing in the amount of playtime Lacustrine is getting because LION EATS ALLIANCE FACE, I figured I should give her the same treatment.
It’s hard to convey the exact mix of despair and exasperation in this groan via text.
The short version of the problem is that Lacustrine focuses less on the “nature” part of druid and more on the “ruthlessly upholding the balance of life via rage and beatings” part. My old druid, the one whose bank is CRAMMED with every nice druid set I have ever gotten my hands on, can wear any of them. Birds, shrubs, antlers, whatever: if it’s natural, she looks good in it. She’s very in tune with the natural world, etc etc. Lacustrine… is not. When she turns into a bear, it is not to channel the essence of a protector spirit, it’s because it’s easier to maul your face off with claws the size of icepicks. When she shoots celestial snowcones at you, it’s not some delicate manifestation of nature’s raw power, it’s DIE MOTHERF***ER. She heals people by screaming at them to stop dying and wasting her mana, thereby convincing them that if they get better Right Now she’ll at least turn her screaming rage on someone else. I’m not even sure why someone decided she was fit to be a druid– I suspect drunken blackouts and/or incompetence to be responsible. Maybe some really, really good herbs. In any event, a lot of druid sets do a better job of channeling the wise protector of nature who seeks balance in all things than, uh, screaming rage. Also, dresses and kilts are right out. A sissy-robe finger-wiggler Lacustrine is not.
So let’s see. Tiers 1-3, 5-11, dungeon set 1, and seasons 2-10 all feature dresses or kilts. Tier 4 has pants, but looks like it’s made out of confectioner’s chocolate– not to mention the massive antlers-hat isn’t visually balanced by Lacustrine’s tiny little pigtail tufts. Season 1, which is just tier 4 recolored red and black, is much more my speed color/texture/not-looking-like-candy-wise, but has no offset support (the belt/gloves that went with that set, if they ever existed, having now gone into hiding or been removed) and makes me question my ability to put together a look that doesn’t run the black-brown-red gamut. Rogue set recolors don’t offer much more hope: easily-obtained BC-era recolors are of sets whose predominant theme was “see how many low-resolution skulls you can shove into a single texture”; while she can appreciate parading around the trophies of slain enemies, Lacustrine is simply not that into bones. For one thing, they’re mostly good for getting in the way. Wrath-era leather would treat me better, except all the tier sets are absurdly caster-y and all the greens and blues below that are too visually busy: straps here, bone highlights there, on and over and under and across and EVERYWHERE. I get dizzy just looking at them.
If I had any sense I’d turn everything into the Trollroics green leather “set” and be done with it: it matches! It doesn’t have a million skulls! It’s even easy to get: what I haven’t picked up yet can be snagged from a vendor for pennies! But it’s bright green. Bright, bright, BRIGHT green. And if I’m going to bother with anything from the trollroics, I am going to keep my stupid gigantic comedy of a hat, because it’s SO PERFECT. Besides being one of the few hats that looks better on a tauren than a normal biped– yes, that feathery bit down the back extends all the way along Lacustrine’s hump– the combination of the flat glare, the massive tusks, and Lac’s horns poking through combines the whole affair into a menacing yet slightly absurd look. I don’t think a single item could capture Lacustrine more perfectly.
Of course it’d combine medium brown, fluorescent green, and magenta. WoW armor manages to cover a lot of color palates– but I cannot, for the life of me, come up with one that even begins to match THAT.
So I’m a bit stuck there. I may have a few leads to poke at, or I may just abuse ‘mogging to keep the exact look Lacustrine’s PvE healing gear is sporting now. And that doesn’t even begin to grapple with her PvP gear. Or weaponry options. Augh! I’ll just keep telling myself that a gear set I haven’t figure out yet is another challenge to keep me entertained. After all, the pursuit of the perfect look has to be at least half the fun.
No matter what happens, I can rest easy known that soon Vorrozja will be back in her beloved tier 10. Is there anything so sweet as perfect hair-armor color matching? (Answer: no. No, there is not.)