Guild Wars 2

How important is it to us, that you can see someone’s armour in WvW (or PvE, I guess) and visually recognise roughly what class they are?

If it’s not important, then it seems like being able to transmute armour skins between armour classes is a good feature to add.

It would increase the look variety a lot, and also address some of the “medium armour only has trenchcoats!” complaints to a degree.

i would love that one, let’s hope that it’ll be implemented one day,but i’m a bit pessimistic about that.

I would love that. It should be possible since you can preview other armors on your character. I would also love being able to display your town clothes in combat.

Not that important as it’s fairly easy to recognize profession by the buffs they have active and the skills that are used.

A big reason why this wouldn’t work so well as you think right now, all medium classes are made to mix and match with medium, all light is made to mix and match with light, all heavy is made to mix and match with heavy. There are a few examples where the models clip, but try previewing heavy gear on a light geared character. Loads, and really.. loads of models will clip with eachother making it look really bad.

I would love this, as I don’t think it makes any difference in PvP.
But as said above there would be a lot of clipping and I’ve also noticed armour’s looked bugged in preview – such as skin textures projected on to pieces of armour. It would take a while to correct but I think the added value from the amount of new armours we could use would justify it.

Lethalvriend.1723:

A big reason why this wouldn’t work so well as you think right now, all medium classes are made to mix and match with medium, all light is made to mix and match with light, all heavy is made to mix and match with heavy. There are a few examples where the models clip, but try previewing heavy gear on a light geared character. Loads, and really.. loads of models will clip with eachother making it look really bad.

Except armor clips with other armor of it’s own type more often than not, so that doesn’t really work as an excuse not to do it.

About the clipping problem, I guess people are smart enough to choose armor pieces that goes well togheter.

I agree about this. As said, we can preview and mix every armors in the preview mode, and I would give more variety.

The only “risk” is that we maybe will see a lot of female characters almost naked with light armor.

An idea would be that the light armor give less protection but higher buffs (like healing power, precision, ect), and heavy armor the opposite, so it would also give the player a bigger range of stats on the armors, yet being able to transmute “light” stats on a heavy armor and vice versa.

I really like the idea. There are definitely medium pieces that look consistent with light armour and heavy that look consistent with medium.

I’m not sure I’d like seeing an Ele running around in full plate armour for example, but that would be worth it to have more variety for everyone.

Alternatively, ANet could use some of the models from light/med/heavy for skins made specifically to transmute to any armour class. That way, there is some control over who can look how but more freedom than now.

Ex. Pit fighter breastplate with leather pants and pauldrons makes a pretty nice looking “medium” set.

Yeah, if this could be done, i would be most grateful xD
I have a set of armour just sitting in my bank waiting for this hopeful feature to be included :P

EroticAndHeretic.7398:

About the clipping problem, I guess people are smart enough to choose armor pieces that goes well togheter.

I agree, but ANet obviously doesn’t think so – the only developer justifications I’ve heard for the removal of capes (a planned feature) during beta was “clipping issues,” so evidently it’s pretty high on their list of concerns. Plus, mixing pieces across tiers generally just doesn’t look good.

EroticAndHeretic.7398:

An idea would be that the light armor give less protection but higher buffs (like healing power, precision, ect), and heavy armor the opposite, so it would also give the player a bigger range of stats on the armors, yet being able to transmute “light” stats on a heavy armor and vice versa.

Currently the three armour tiers provide equal attribute bonuses but unequal defense. Changing anything statwise from the current scenario is going to get backlash, because it would be unnecessarily nerfing two-thirds of the users. This would also most likely result in the majority of stat-concerned players being “forced” into one armour class by the necessities of min/max statting – it would be a pretty boring game world if everyone in the game wore medium armour.

From an in-universe perspective, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for light armour to trump all statwise, either. There’s no possible explanation as to how a robe grants more Toughness than plate mail.

If this stands any chance of getting implemented (and I highly doubt it does) transmutation cross-armour classes would have to be cosmetic only.

This is a fun idea…

Especially since my main in Aion wore a plated breast plate, boots, and lower arm guards then had the shoulder guards and the dress of the Eylos costume skinned on the plated shoulder and legging armor.

The class of armor you can use is part of a profession’s identity, in the same way that weapons and skills are. Letting you mix and match armor appearences would remove that aspect from the equation (essentially, sure guardians / warriors would still have the most innate defense from armor but visually its a non-issue). I really don’t want to lose any defining features of the professions. If anything professions should become more unique from one another, not less.

And the idea of Warriors running around in skimpy light armor while mages run around in full platemail is just silly to me. I want the armor appearences to match the protection given, not have the two completely arbitrary and unrelated.

that would be absolutely awesome!

it would also be awesome, if i could transmute the look of my city-outfit glasses to my armor-helmet