Blizzard slashes World of Warcraft Midnight's transmog costs, and it's finally a step in the right direction

World of Warcraft Midnight is shaping up to be one of the most monumental expansions in the MMORPG's long history - for better or worse. With many of the best WoW addons getting the chop as Blizzard improves the game's UI, and the long-awaited addition of player housing finally out in the wild, The War Within kicked off the Worldsoul saga, but Midnight feels like the true gamechanger. With the beta live, players have been able to test out the new transmog system, which does away with individual costs and consolidates them into one big, overarching fee. The problem is, players haven't been happy - until now.

If you haven't taken World of Warcraft's latest installment for a spin yet, you're probably still having to re-transmog every single piece of gear whenever you change it out (and, by proxy, are losing vast swathes of gold to the aether). Coming into Midnight, transmogs are now applied to a slot, so if you acquire a new set of gloves and replace your old set, the transmog sticks. No more running to the vendor to splash swathes of cash; while your gear improves, your outfit remains the same.

This is, in theory, a great change, but things were still pretty pricey even with the new system. While you got two outfit slots for free, then three and four for 100 and 500 gold respectively, things quickly begin to scale, with 18 slots costing the maximum 100k. The team over at Wowhead did the math and worked out that a level 80 character would spend just over 4k gold for a full set, while at level 90 the price rises to 5,700. They conclude that the new system is largely in-line with the game's original costs, and is a little more expensive in some unique cases.

As you likely expect, players have bemoaned the cost of transmogs since the beta launched, with many complaining that it's still a colossal gold-sink. Blizzard, however, has heard this feedback, and has confirmed that it's slashing costs by a significant amount.

"We're planning to reduce the cost to save a full outfit by about 60%," community manager Randy 'Kaivax' Jordan writes on the WoW forums. When it comes to the aforementioned slots, "as in the current public beta, the unlock cost of outfit slots will increase depending on how many you have already unlocked. The overall cost to unlock outfit slots will be reduced by about 80%." It's also "increasing the total number of outfit slots available, from 20 to 50," giving players the "extra flexibility" they've asked for.

It's also looking into expanding outfit slots to be Warband-wide, so if you buy all 50 slots, each character is given those 50 slots. This means you won't be sinking gold into buying them over and over again.

"We expect most or all of the pricing updates to come with the next beta build, currently expected to arrive on [Wednesday] December 3," he continues. "The warband-wide update will hit the beta at a later date."

These are some pretty significant cost cuts, and, in my opinion, will solve a lot of the issues that we're currently seeing. There are still some concerns about flexibility, but generally the response is largely positive, so we'll have to see what December 3 brings.