Transmogrification and Void Storage: Making Your Old Epics Worth Keeping

I figured I would condense these two into a single article, because I don't have a huge amount to say about Void Storage.

Transmogrification has changed the visual look of the game in a very significant way. Back during Wrath, particularly since the latter two tier armor sets were purchasable entirely with the contemporary equivalent of Valor Points, pretty much anyone of a particular class was wearing armor that looked the same. In much of 2010, if you saw a Paladin, chances are they had burning skulls on their shoulders (I think it was a serious missed opportunity that "Lightsworn," Paladin tier 10, wasn't called "Ashbringer.")

Ultimately, especially with the way that gear is designed to match these days, you don't really go through a lot of different looks. There's the standard dungeon blue armor, and then the various tiers (and occasional non-tier looks, like the 5.0 VP gear/MSV gear.)

Transmog opens up the entire history of usable gear for your character to wear, and also decouples the appearance of your gear from the quality. My standard look for Jarsus is a mix of Paladin tier 8 off-set pieces (with pants, rather than a skirt/kilt) and Mists-era engineering goggles, along with Vagaries of Time off Morchok in Dragon Soul (my favorite weapon model ever) and Force Reactive Disk, which comes from a schematic out of Molten Core and looks like a giant spinning gear. Thus, I'm pushing an engineering/Titan/magitek vibe with my look, and it looks awesome.

Here's the downside:

One of the fun appeals to an RPG, particularly one that places such a high value on gear, is the fact that our characters change in appearance as we make our journey. Sure, we must have hit an "epic plateau" at some point, where they couldn't really make any tier armor sets that look inherently more powerful (I'd say probably tier 6 was that moment for most classes,) but we still see how we change, and how our gear reflects the environments in which we are doing our heroics.

Transmog provides us an out to that, though. We don't ever have to have that scavenged, thrown-together look again. It's a temptation that may be hard to resist.

Thus, ironically, while you may no longer look like other players (though sometimes you will, like if you go for Paladin tier 2) you'll pretty much just look like your past self forever, which may not be much of an improvement.

However, my verdict?

Transmog is absolutely a positive for the game.

All those drawbacks can easily be negated by simply not using it. There's nothing whatsoever power-wise that makes transmog necessary. It's purely a cosmetic thing.

And giving us an out if we don't like the look of the latest tier is absolutely a good thing.

Ok, so now Void Storage:

What's there really to say? It's basically just more bank space, but for long-term deposits. Void Storage was vastly improved by the new changes to allow you to Transmog without actually taking the pieces out (a technology that apparently was in-game before, but not possible within the default UI.)

Really, Void Storage is just a place to put gear that you never intend to actually wear or use again, except for transmog. It frees up bank space.

So yeah. Good, I guess.