In Mists of Pandaria mounts, pets, titles and achievements are going to the account level. What you have on one character you will have on all characters. There are some exceptions most notably a large amount of pvp associated items. However, for the most part these features are going account wide.

Transmog is a purely cosmetic feature which allows further customization of our characters. We have to choose what gear we wear because of stats and sometimes our personal tastes mean we hate the tier set. In the past we’d wear it as we had no choice, now we can wear it for the stats and transmog into something we do like the look of.

A transmog button
My friend invited me to run Sunwell Plateau for a shot at the legendary bow. I was on my paladin at the time and would need to swap to my death knight for us to duo up to Kil’jaeden. I’d been putting together a transmog set which included three pieces from Sunwell. I’d ran AQ40 with him that morning on my paladin for three transmog pieces, none of which had dropped. I jokingly laughed and said that “sure I’d come Sunwell but I’d kill someone if my transmog pieces dropped as I’d be on the wrong character”. Well what happened? RNG happened and all three of the pieces that I wanted merrily dropped for my death knight.

This is when it occurred to me. On the current looting system we have need, greed and disenchant. What if we had a transmog button? This would have the same priority as disenchant. It would strip the item of it’s stats, make it non-disenchantable and bind it to the account. Therefore whether I’m on my death knight, hunter or paladin, if a piece drops I can roll on it for whatever character I like. As it’s purely cosmetic this wouldn’t break the game, it wouldn’t hurt anything except make rng a little less painful.

For those who are very dedicated to making sets I guess they could cut down the amount of time it takes to make one. However, what does it matter whether someone puts together their dream set in a week or in two months? I guess having to run a raid every week for several months (like I did Blackwing Lair for my Judgement chest) keeps them subscribed and logging in. On the other hand if something consistently doesn’t drop it gets very frustrating, most people would just stop trying for it. Besides there’s always more sets to make, people get bored with just one and so they change the look. Also, not everyone has multiple characters that can run raids/dungeons, and few would bother for the look.

All it would mean is that if you have to be on a different character, say the raid needed a healer or a tank, rng couldn’t mess with you in the same way. How many times have you run for that one item that refuses to drop, and then gone on another character and it drop several times in a row? For gear that’s just frustrating but if they changed it that would upset the game balance. For transmog it seems frustrating without purpose.

The next logical step for transmogrification
In Mists they’ll be a number of items that are transmog only. These are available at certain reputations for factions, as a reward for completing challenge mode dungeons and as drops I think from rare mobs. Darkmoon Faire started the trend for pure transmog items, without stats, with the replica pieces it offers. So the technology exists for them to be around, perhaps using the same technology as void storage.

The only problem with having all this transmog gear is having a place to store it. Mists is going to further add to this pain with all the fun vanity items. Void storage really didn’t go far enough, something has to give.

What I’d like to see is like a wardrobe area. You’re transmog rolled gear would go here automatically and you could designate gear as transmog by putting in here. It’d then strip the stats and become transmog only much like void storage strips enchants and gems. This would be like a new storage area just for transmog items. It would have it’s own interface like the new mount and pet interface. Your character would appear on half the screen like it does in the current character window. The on the other half you’d have a dropdown at the top, where you could select chest, legs etc. and then below that like with glyphs it would list the items you have. You could click on these items and see them on your character and build your outfit. The existing functionality of shift clicking on an item to see it in the wardrobe could be incorporated. That way if you have an item in your inventory you can use it to build an outfit, but not put it in storage, say if you want pvp hands for your tank transmog set. Then you can save the set and go to the transmogrifier and click which set you want to transmog into.

I’d also like to see tabards get their own stored interface, as opposed to taking up bank space. When you buy a tabard or get awarded one, rather than going in your regular inventory it would go into this new wardrobe area. You’d have to be able to equip the tabard though different from the transmog gear as you can’t transmog tabards. However, it would be stored in the same way.

This way your precious bank space and void storage space would be taken up with current gear, vanity items, reputation grind items, archaeology rares, fun things you can’t bear to get rid of, mats and consumables and anything else I’ve missed. A lot of people’s banks would still be full even with this change, all it does is stop them from bursting at the seams, and allow people to properly enjoy transmogrification without having to sacrifice something else.

I’m not suggesting that MogIt gets incorporated, although that would be cool to be able to build an outfit and then see where all the pieces drop from, and then go and collect them. No I’m thinking more like mounts are shown in the interface. With pets you can see which ones you don’t have and they are greyed out, that isn’t the same with mounts where you can just see the ones you have. Although if they did incorporate MogIt, and perhaps Rarity to count how many times you had to run something before it dropped, that would be really kinda cool. There are addons though that do that and so the game doesn’t have to offer that as default.

Conclusion
I’d love to see this sort of expansion on transmogrification. It’s already a big reason why people are running old content, it’s keeping a lot of the game fresh for people, rather than just running the latest released stuff over and over. Particularly given how burnt out people got with patch 4.3 lasting for as long as it did, adding in more mini-games and more ways to enjoy the game, can only be a good thing. Plus people are crying out for more bank space. Void storage did not go anyway near far enough as people were hurting for space before transmogrification was introduced. As they were introduced in the same patch void storage really didn’t solve anything.

These two additions would make transmogrification amazing. A transmog button like disenchant when rolling on loot, and a new wardrobe storage area. They can even charge for putting stuff in there like they do with void storage. I can’t put into words how much I’d love both of these to be implemented.