It’s not quite free transmog, but the price to change looks has been cut in half — plus players get one free transmog, coming soon

We knew transmog changes were coming with World of Warcraft Midnight on the horizon, but we didn’t expect it to be quite so traumatic. When the transmog 2.0 system went live with patch 12.0, suddenly every character was without their fancy customized appearance. Friends, it was bad. Our pristine login screens looked like something out of The Burning Crusade, and we had to pay to return our characters to their previous dapper dress… at a higher price than it had been in patch 11.2.7. Ouch. What led us to this retina-searing change, and how is Blizzard making it up to the player base?

The reset was an “intentional change” as part of the move from a gear-based to slot-based system. Fortunately despite the fact that our hard work creating transmogs, as our hard work in devising the perfect outfit was not lost — your previously saved looks were all retained in the “Custom Sets” tab of the new transmog interface… but everyone had to pay to re-apply those old transmogs across all of their characters. That’s right, even if you were simply setting your appearance back to the way it was before, you were paying full price for transmog when you set the appearance of your first outfit. And after that initial transmog, you would pay to set the look of your second outfit slot, and potentially buy more outfit slots (at an increasing cost per slot) and then set more transmogs. The up-front costs of setting up this system have been staggering, even though it could save us a lot of gold in the long run since we will no longer have to update our transmog when we equip a new piece of gear.

But Blizzard hadn’t intended for players to have the added cost of re-applying their pre-12.0 look, and at least they were honest about the mix-up, stating clearly that this was an oversight on their part. So how did Blizzard initially offer to make this up to the community? One. Free. Transmog. Granted to all player characters via hotfix, before the 12.0.1 update at the launch of Midnight (originally it was going to be with the patch). No one here is going to say no to a free transmog, but it wasn’t exactly generous in comparison to aforementioned staggering costs.

In fairness, this freebie is for every character, effectively letting you reset your whole cast of characters back to their previous mog (unless you’ve paid to do it already, in which case your next transmog is simply going to be free).

But after that, Blizzard gave transmog a quite generous price cut: transmog 2.0 has had its prices cut by 50%, “to bring them more in line with what the prices were prior to the Transmog update.” This update is live now, so all future transmogs will have a much smaller price tag, thank goodness. The cost to buy outfit slots remains the same, but you can buy quite a few slots at reasonable prices before the costs start to add up, but once you’ve bought the outfit slot and set an appearance for it, you can swap to it as much as you desire.

It’s a great change, but as always one question springs to mind: why can’t transmog be free, as was accidentally teased at Gamescom? We know it’s possible, as Blizzard has always set transmog costs to zero during Trial of Style weeks — something that will remain via a special Trial of Style outfit slot available during the event, which you can modify for free. Why not just make it free all the time? We have a brand new gold sink in the game, in the form of player housing. We don’t need to burn thousands upon thousands (upon thousands) of gold for our character aesthetics. We have all this beautiful armor, not to mention our heritage sets. The barber is free; now let me wear what I want to wear without additional cost.

Look, transmog is ostensibly the true endgame of World of Warcraft. This response from Blizzard is a fair attempt to make up for transmog 2.0’s rough first impression, but is the 50% price cut (and one freebie) enough? Ever since the miscommunication about “free transmog,” we have yearned for a future in which transmog is completely free.

But in the meanwhile, we’ll take what we can get.