#1 - July 26, 2016, 5:52 p.m.
In order to unlock an item’s appearance, it must:
- Be permanently bound to your character
- Be equippable by the character that looted it
- Be of that character’s primary armor type (e.g. Cloth, Leather, Mail, Plate)
Additionally, if a piece of gear drops while you are in a raid or dungeon, the item’s appearance will be removed from your collection if you trade it to another party member (in the brief period where that’s allowed).
We require items to be bound to your character because we want only one player to unlock an appearance per item. We don’t want to create situations where, say, a group of players passes a BoE item around to everyone, or a raid group has everyone pick up the shiny new sword before the Warrior can have it.
The restrictions by class, level, and armor type are in place for several reasons, the biggest of which is to make sure that all classes are on a relatively even playing field when it comes to collecting appearances. We don’t want everyone who’s interested in collecting appearances to feel like they need to roll a Warrior, for example, because they can technically equip all four armor types. If you want to unlock appearances for your Priest, you should always feel like your Priest is the best character to do it on.
In the end, our goal with this system is to make it easier to fill out your transmog collection without incentivizing unusual or disruptive play habits. As with any system we add to the game, we’re planning to keep iterating on this as time goes on, so thanks as always for your feedback.