Improving EQ2’s Appearance slots

EverQuest 2 allows you to do amazing things with interior decorating, one of the few, if not the only, MMO, that allows you so much freedom in designing your living space and that of others. Interior decorator is one of EQ2’s unofficial professions, but nonetheless, a lucrative one.
Characters also have a somewhat more limited way of customizing their own appearance, through appearance armor. All the visible armor slots have corresponding appearance slots. Armor bits placed in the appearance slots overwrite the appearance of the actual armor.
There are a couple of issues with that. First, you can only put in your appearance armor slots what you can wear in your main armor slots. So, plate wearers can look like they are wearing caster robes, but casters can’t look like they are wearing plate. Also, low level characters can’t appear to be wearing armor above their level.
Second, there are no appearance slots for weapons. While you might keep a favorite suit of armor in your appearance slot, once you’ve upgraded a weapon, you have to bag the old one, no matter how cool it looks.
Characters should have at least the level of customization they have for the place they live. So, my suggestions:
Let any character put any armor, regardless of whether they could equip it, in their appearance slot. There may be PvP implications, but the PvPers have managed with appearance armor thus far, this isn’t that much more.
Don’t force appearance armor to be attuned. If it’s not providing them any benefit, why stop it from being sold or given away if it wasn’t NO TRADE to begin with?
Add two appearance slot items for primary and secondary hand items, with the caveat that the appearance slot items must be of the same type (one hand slashing, two hand blunt, shield, etc) as the one they are masking; if there’s a conflict, the appearance slot items don’t show.
Fix the appearance of sheathed two-handed weapons so they show on your back even if you’re wearing a cloak.

Along with those, why not a new secondary profession of hairdresser? Similar to SWG’s Image Maker or whatever it was called. Hairdressers would craft little coupons for appearance changes, and as they leveled, would have more options available to them than are at the character creation screen. More hairstyles and so on. Using rare components, they could do skin color changes, racial changes, gender changes… To keep its place as the MMO with the most customization when Spellborn comes out, it needs to up the game just a little more.

7 thoughts on “Improving EQ2’s Appearance slots”

  1. I would love to have weapon/shield appearance slots. I have my big spoon from RoK that I would love to have Karic ‘wield.” And if we are imagining big – why not have weapons/armor with ‘skins’ where crafters would create a ‘core’ then be able to create a ‘skin’ to the user’s wishes.

  2. Well, now we’re really talking about Spellborn, well, maybe the opposite of what it does. In Spellborn, you take any weapon design, and then add stats to it. So you can be wielding whatever, the stats are what you get from adventuring and stuff.
    You can keep the same gear you chose at character creation and just keep making it more uber, if that’s what you want to do.
    I don’t think there’s any possible way EQ2 could retrofit THAT, though. Though I’d love it if they could.
    This is one of the reasons I am looking forward to playing Spellborn.

  3. I would include mounts in appearance slots. 1) That the mount may or may not scale with the user. I’d love to have my gnome riding a large charger or how hilarious would it be to see an ogre on a pony? 2) Ride whichever mount but keep the runspeed of what you’re actually using. I’m using nothing now because I can’t beat the 55% from my j-boots and the earring of the Solstice. I’d use my tinkered cloud mount if it was fast enough. Or just use whatever struck my fancy.

  4. I agree with appearance slots for weapons (even if it forces you to match the type of weapon equipped, so the animations line up).
    However, I think appearance slots should attune. One of the nice things about appearance armor is that it created a market for old armor (especially lower tier armor) that people wanted for the unique looks alone. Keeping it sellable after its used (even for looks) kind of kills the demand for the armorers. And if anything armorers need more stuff they can viably sell, not less.

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