In WoW, transmog (the equivalent of glamour) was my jam.  Putting together outfits and locating the pieces I required occupied far too many of my hours.  So now that I have bard, black mage and summoner to 60 (and white mage to 55), I thought that it was high time I began to look into fancying up my looks.  True, I don’t have much in the way of fancypants gear collected just yet, but I’ve been getting a bit tired of looking at the same ol’ outfits.

 

 

 

I originally used the black mage AF pants (stripes!!), but then realized that wasn’t going to work very well, since the outfit needed to do double-duty for summoner too (glamour is class-specific).  Unfortunately, the only workable thing in the right color scheme that I could afford was a pair of stockings and garters.  Sadface.  But worst of all was my inability to acquire the hat I really really really wanted:

 

 

GOGGLES!  A+, #1, would wear constantly.  (And talk about an upgrade!)  But alas, the MB doesn’t let you set up an installment payment plan, so I was forced to compromise.

 

 

No, I don’t know the purpose of that gigantic gold leaf thing on my hip.

Generally speaking, I find myself unimpressed with FFXIV’s glamour system.  You’d think involving crafters by giving them yet another in-demand product to create would be great, but holy crap, this has a number of what I consider to be unfortunate side effects.

Problem 1: Glamour is stupid complex.
Hold up, I need how many of what level of what type of glamour crystal for this again?

Problem 1a: No way to preview what kind of crystals you need.
Basically, I have to open the glamour interface and select the items to see what kind of crystal I need to purchase (the game will helpfully tell you that you can’t proceed without it).  This is irritating when glamouring multiple pieces at once – I literally have to make a damn list of crystals to buy.

Problem 2: Glamour is stupid expensive.
You’ll need a crystal for each piece you intend to glamour, and these can run up to 7 to 8k a pop on my server for some types.  Since I get most of my spare gil by running dungeons, this is not chump change for me.  It also makes it foolish to pursue glamour until I’m nearly done leveling a particular class (otherwise, I change gear too often).  Ugh, I want to go around punching things in the kidneys.

Suffice it to say I much preferred WoW’s method – hey, talk to this NPC, pay him a bit of gold depending on the armor you’re using, and ta-da!  You’re done.  No muss, no fuss, and no wondering why the hell alchemists can make glamour crystals for books.

Problem 3: No good way to design outfits.
In WoW, addons are common, and MogIt enables you to create and save multiple outfits.  You can zoom in and out.  In FFXIV, addons are suspect, MogIt doesn’t exist, and you get one itty-bitty little preview window that you can save one outfit in.  One.

Problem 4: Lack of community resources.
For WoW, there are multiple sites where I can go to see the appearance of every single piece of equipment a particular class can use.  Want to see what kind of hats a shaman can put on?  No problem.  Want to look at gloves sorted by level, or by length?  Done.  Hell, I can preview armor in 3D on a model of the same race and gender as my character.

For FFXIV, not so much.  It seems that once upon a time there was a site that served this purpose, but it has long since gone down and all that remains are sites where people can show off their glamour sets.  That’s nice and all, but I’m not looking for inspiration – I’m looking for information.  Without it, I’m stuck Googling the names of individual pieces, and that only works if I know what I’m looking for – there are a whole host of options in terms of gear that I simply remain ignorant of.