Nostalgia is a powerful thing. What would you keep looking old and busted in World of Warcraft?

When would you prefer to keep an older appearance for an item or mount or pet in World of Warcraft? When do you want to see an updated look to make, say, an Elekk mount more visually appealing to you, or are there things that you’d prefer to keep an older, objectively less complex appearance? When is that classic five polygons look worth keeping?

In the header image above, I am wielding two Sulfuras maces. One is the Firelands redesign, a more complicated version that I would admit is a more visually distinct and higher resolution model. And the other one is the original Sulfuras, the one I got back in vanilla and used up until level 70 when I finally got an unquestionable upgrade from a Burning Crusade raid. As you might expect, while I admit the Firelands model is better, I prefer the original mace.

I have history with that mace. I got that thing on a raid with my very first raiding group, and crafting the Sulfuron Hammer and finally infusing it with the Eye of Sulfuras involved a party of five players running through Blackrock Depths, getting to the huge anvil at its center and cleverly avoiding or murdering anything that got in our way. I used that mace in a 2h Slam build that was bursty to the point of madness and often loved the ridiculously high damage fireballs it would hurl around Battlegrounds. If they’d decided to remove the original appearance in Cataclysm for the redesigned Firelands one, I would have been upset.

I’ve seen people state that they didn’t like the character model updates because the character’s new face didn’t feel like them anymore, an opinion I respect even if I don’t agree with it. My Human’s face was like someone grew up with a glass bottle around their head that squashed all of their features together and I was thrilled to get a new one, but I do understand feeling like you have a lot of memories tied up in your character.

So now I ask y’all — is there anything in WoW — any piece of gear, mount, character model, battle pet, you name it — that you prefer be left the way it was, even if that means it’s almost two decades old and objectively just not as good as the game looks today? What would you leave at a “five polygons” level rather than give it a visual update, and why?