How transmog saved the World of Warcraft

by Matthew Rossi

I hated the idea of transmog when I heard about it.

I have been, over the thirteen year course of my involvement with World of Warcraft, always something of a curmudgeon. Nowhere was I more curmudgeonly than when the idea of anything even remotely like what the current transmog system is now was brought up. I didn't see the point, I objected. What kind of player was going to hunt down all these old armor pieces and weapons just for vanity?

If you're chuckling at my folly reading that then you've kept up with what I've been doing since transmog came into the game.

Transmog didn't merely give me a cosmetic customization option I'd never had before. It actually spurred me on to play alts I hadn't in years. It made me roll new alts in classes I never thought I would. I have a level 104 Hunter making her way to 110 right now purely because I want the transmog options -- the mail armor, the bows and guns and crossbows -- available in my wardrobe. Transmog has kept old raids meaningful for me. I've hunted my way through them all, scouring them for that one last piece I need to complete a set or weapon that will match well with a set I'm making out of random pieces.

I've done PvP for transmog. I've done raids for transmog. I've crafted pieces for transmog. The only thing in WoW haven't yet done for transmog is fishing. I simply don't care about fishing and I never will -- but if there ever was a sufficiently attractive piece of gear or weapon available through fishing, I would likely start fishing for transmog.

Moreover, transmog itself has become a kind of minigame for me. There's the collection aspect, of course -- I always had a bit of a weapon collection but it's exploded as transmog became a thing, and now that item appearances are stored in the wardrobe I spent time plotting out which appearances I don't have that I want. There's a selection aspect to this -- if I find an appearance ugly, I won't get it, even if it's cheap on the AH or easy to farm. I have left items I don't want in my collection to rot on bosses rather than see them added because I looted them. (I have later repented this at times, but I still do it.) But collection is only part of the fun of transmog to me. The other part is deciding what looks I want to wear at a given moment.

I have literally zoned out of a raid so that I could change my transmog because I felt it was more thematically appropriate for killing a specific boss. Sometimes I like wearing a set, whether it's an official set or merely a bunch of greens that matched and had a shared name (like the Exalted Plate, which I love except for the breastplate) and sometimes I like cobbling a set together. Mixing and matching, or even recreating the old raid gear clownsuits from vanilla days.

Transmog can be a vector for nostalgia indulged on a personal level, a means to personalize your character, a way to engage with old content or wear gear that matches or looks cool to you. Above all else, however, what it's done for me is give me something to do in game that isn't on anyone else's schedule and isn't gated, capped or controlled in order to throttle back my ability to proceed in it. I can do as much or as little transmog farming as I want. I can hit the auction house to look for bargains, unload my own unneeded green drops to see if they sell, complete that one set I haven't gotten finished yet and test out just how far I can solo into Warlords raids and dungeons. (Turns out pretty far.) And all of this is self-determined play, just as much as spending half an hour deciding that these pants absolutely do not go with this chestplate is.

Transmog has probably kept me playing WoW even while I'm having personal reasons to play less. I can't make a raid schedule reliably anymore, I neither have the time nor the ability. But I can transmog whenever I want, however I want. And that kind of flexibility is something that the game has always desperately needed.