Well, the Cloth Set for Castle Nathria is a Plague Doctor's Outfit, so I Have to Get That

I don't know what it is, but I love it when WoW goes in for a gothic horror vibe. Some of my favorite zones to level up in tend to be places like Duskwood, Drustvar, the bit of Val'Sharah that leads up to Black Rook Hold, and the Undead and Worgen starting zones.

It's funny, because I actually enjoy it more than games like Diablo, that put the Gothic feel at the forefront. I guess it's that, with all the fantasy kitchen sink context, the gothic horror has something to stand out from.

Anyway, ever since visiting Venice when I was 8 years old, I've found the Venetian "bauta" masks extremely compelling. These masks, I later found out, were created so that senators in the Venetian senate (this was, of course, before Italy was unified in the 1800s) could wear them and vote anonymously but still be able to eat (how truly anonymous the masks made you, I don't know.) The plague-doctor mask wasn't actually made for performance, though. In fact, it was sort of an early attempt at a protective mask.

Of course, people didn't understand how disease spread at the time, and the germ theory was still far off. At the time, there was a notion that disease was caused by a "miasma" of foul air, and that you could avoid getting sick by making sure that you were breathing nice-smelling air. The "beak" of the doctor's mask was thus stuffed with nice-smelling herbs.

It probably remained popular because the mask inadvertently worked as a partially effective air filter, and I bet those herbs caught some bacteria or airborne viruses.

Still, the super-creepy look of the plague-doctor's mask makes it a great fit for gothic fantasy, and I'm very excited to get that transmog for my Warlock and Priest (less so for my Mage, who's probably the one who will actually collect it.) Of course, the "elite" Horde cloth set for the Darkshore Warfront already has a bit of that Plague-Doctor vibe (I have nearly the entire set and use it on my Shadow Priest) but this is a lot more explicit and also is available to Alliance characters.

EDIT:

So apparently the Leather set is a straight-up witch-hunter set, with the sort of pilgrim hat with a divot like you see Solomon Kane wearing. Damn, I'm looking forward to Revendreth. Rogue is almost certainly going with their covenant.