Full Analysis of WoW Season 8 Gear

Full Analysis of WoW Season 8 Gear By Allan Though a grizzled, old veteran donning war-torn robes and a gnarled staff in the MMOG scene, Allan is more like a level 5 squire in a simple tunic wielding a tin blade when it comes to the realm of writing articles. Nevertheless, he is here to train his typing fingers and bring you news and interesting perspectives on things you might not have known you even cared about.

Alright WoW players, it's that time of year: new content patch resulting in a new arena season. As usual, Blizzard bestows the newest corresponding gear array upon us. And as everyone is preoccupied scrambling to discover breakthroughs in the latest comps or "faceroll teams," I have decided to take a closer look at the new PvP gear we all hope to obtain. Will I be synopsizing the various stat differences while scrutinizing how they compare with their PvE counterparts? Nah. There are more important issues to address. Namely, how should one feel when donning their respective sets? Did Blizzard provide us sufficiently awesome-looking gear that makes us feel epic? Does it hold up to the roles of the races we play in the game?

I apologize if the title is misleading, but there will be no theory-crafting here! Instead, I'll break down the aesthetics for each set.

Class: Death Knight

Races: All of them

When looking at this set, you may be as confused as I am trying to decide whether this set was assembled from stripped parts of a ram's carcass, or if it transforms the wearer into an actual ram. Either way, there's no doubting the ram-like features about it. It's quite a cliché depiction of warriors to show them carrying around "mementos" of their fallen foes. So following this logic, it seems Death Knight's train for arena by slaughtering countless rams until they are deemed worthy of an Arena Master. Only the most skillful players in ram battering are allowed to wear this (along with a 2k rating!).

As far as the colors go, they seem rather befitting of a Death Knight. You see, black and death have long history together (hey, when you put the two together, it's actually the name of a disease!), and putting black on a character that does nothing but live death suits them well. I find the sparse light blue in contrast to all this black is intended to reveal the softer side of a Death Knight. Of course, there's not much of this color anyway, which means the soft side of a Death Knight is like encountering the reserved person playing Counter Strike.

Lastly, something needs to be said about those giant spikes on the shoulders! Death Knights are lucky in this respect; honestly, who needs to grind those extra points for a weapon when you can just ram people to death by simply dropping your arm down in front of you? Heh heh, he rams people.

Class: Druid

Races: Night Elf, Tauren

One thing I look forward to in the druid sets is that they often bring out the nature-loving side in us that we never realized we had respect for. Druids are always reminding us of how we should protect the earth we walk upon…wait, you're kidding me. This set doesn't have any leaves on it?

Alright, so enter in the first set in a while that doesn't give a shout-out to plants (yes, I can see there are vines sort of embroidered into the shoulders, but that doesn't count!). Besides the arena 7 set. Ok, so maybe this isn't exactly the first of a new non-plant trend, but it certainly appears to be the first of a non-druid themed trend. With arena 7 druids were bringing out the bear side in them, but with this one it ends up factoring in…dinosaurs?! While you can vaguely distinguish a bear-like claw protruding from the end of the shoulder, it appears withered and deteriorating meaning that bear is on its way out. So we're left looking at those yellowish scale things, which screams dinosaur to my ears.

Night Elves and Taurens are constantly in rivalry with one another in terms of druid superiority so we must also decide which race is more appropriately dressed with this set. Night Elves always show an affinity to dragons, and they're pretty good adding them to their own ranks – what with Faerie Dragons and Chimeras. Dragons might even be more dinosaur than dinosaurs themselves due to the fact that paleontologists keep reminding us of how related they are to bird-like creatures. Dragons fly, after all.

And then there are the Taurens who are quite large. I also assume they're fascinated by other large animals because of this, and dinosaurs usually have plenty large in them. Hey wait, Taurens are also animals! This makes the decision slightly more difficult.

Well, in the end, I'm going to have to give it to Taurens simply because the shoulders appear bigger on them in all its full-fledged glory. And that's commonly a tie breaker for most people.