Your thoughts on Northrend Armor?

Most of us read WoWInsider, and if you don’t, you should. It’s a good source of community thoughts, game updates, and tips for professions and the like. It even has an RSS feed that works great with Firefox, and if you haven’t been there I suggest you do so with this link. I bring up WoWInsider because yesterday’s post involving the styling, design, and overall feelings towards Wrath of the Lich King’s armor design struck an interesting thought to me. I love this expansion so far, and I don’t regret renewing my account to be a silly cow on a raptor again. I just recently got to 80, ran through a good chunk of Naxxramas for the first time (and wish I did it pre-Wrath) and had a great time. Even the heroics aren’t as painful as they were in Outland, but that may just be because Half a Stock is awesome.

However, there is that intermittent whining from the general public that I feel I must join in.

Armor

Clown suits.  Costumes. Whatever terms you have for them, they stuck as we first ventured through the Dark Portal and witnessed our awesome Tier 2 being replaced by..well, bright green stitch pants with gaping holes down the legs, a sky-blue turban,  putrid yellow sweatervests loaded with spirit, faux Felhound hide bracers, lavender skirts for our pretty skeletons..you get the idea. Everything was colorful, and way too colorful in some cases. Many players accepted it at first, focusing first on getting to 70 through the 8-day PvP truce that almost made Deathwing into a full-fledged PvE server for its duration.  Days and nights without horribly specced rogues spamming /spit on you after missing a cheap shot and having to use 6 cooldowns and lag abuse. Not one time where a lack of mage water was your downfall in a heated battle for a Fel Iron node.

The fact that we all looked like rainbows sunk in shortly after, and the playerbase complained of borrowed armor models (we’ll get to that) from all tiers save for 3.  Clown suits do not appeal to the populace when we expected a neat space-oriented trip through the broken lands of Draenor.

 As players starting into Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair heard about the first Arena season in early 2007, they had blissful thoughts of finally getting out of these purple pantaloons and into some br00tal spiked trousers of fiery death. Unfortunately, as they discovered from leaked screenshots, Blizzard had cheaped out on raid gear from the very first months. What Arena gear was for Season 1 was simply Tier 4 gear, taken in a different color. Not even a spike of fiery death present.

Sure enough, hundreds of BAWWW threads soon surfaced as players expected the well-known fantastic art team of Blizzard to be working with the designers in making good looking equipment. There are many viewpoints on this issue, one most frequent being that Blizzard likes to devote its art to primarily endgame content that, at the time this was occuring, less than 5% of the total playerbase (which consists of 60% Chinese/Korean players) would experience. That other 95% was left in the dust with recycled models and disappointing pixels that would no longer help stroke the epeen, but make it fall like a suspended Eat-More in the microwave.

That’s all past now. We’re in the expansion, and clown suits are no more. There’s more to it, however…

As WoWInsider explains, Blizzard was extremely influenced by Norse mythology in this expansion. Valkyries, Utgard, Thor’s Hammer, and other such things make a considerable appearance throughout Northrend, and with them comes armor seemingly taken straight from the Viking days. My hunter went from having two angry dogs as shoulders to having this uh, gigantic chunk of metal adorned with swirling grooves and motifs. Warriors are walking around with spiked maces, priests are walking around with those same spiked maces, and I believe I have a spiked mace in my alt’s bank. Female characters are no longer scantily-clad when the male characters in the same armor are walking fortresses. It’s all good to be more badass,  but can we please get some originality? I will let you read this compiled excerpt from an article I found:

Almost every armor [piece] I’ve seen looks almost exactly the same, with maybe a palette swap of all equally bland colors and designs.

This is a fantasy game, we should be able to fight evil undead stuff and still look good. Sure, Northrend is a cold place, but even a winter coat can be made to look good with a little effort. Just because something is made to be worn in cold weather doesn’t mean it has to be colored brown or some ugly shade of green.

Just seems like Blizzard laid off their character design team or something. So now, we have characters who wear armor that looks about as good as brown paper bags.

I can agree with this. Most of the armor I’ve seen from the new arena stuff, as well as most instance drops all the way from 71 to 80, is the exact same. My spiked-mace problem is existent with every person. I’ve heard from healers complaining that in heated battles, they simply cannot tell (without the help of Grid/Healbot) who is who because the tank looks like the dps, and the healer looks like the dps covered in shit.  The thread goes on to say: