So Vanity Weapon Slots.

[Sumii]

What is this transmog and transmutation exactly?

Transmogrification is the 'vanity system' from WoW. You have an ugly weapon with awesome stats. You have a nice looking weapon with crappy stats. Put the ugly weapon as the base, and then drop the pretty weapon to the right. Hit a button and the pretty weapon's skin is applied to the ugly weapon. You can always reset the ugly weapon back to its normal skin.

[Riviere]

Transmogrification is the 'vanity system' from WoW. You have an ugly weapon with awesome stats. You have a nice looking weapon with crappy stats. Put the ugly weapon as the base, and then drop the pretty weapon to the right. Hit a button and the pretty weapon is destroyed, but its skin is applied to the ugly weapon. You can always reset the ugly weapon back to its normal skin, but you have to get another pretty weapon to re-apply.

WoW's transmog doesn't destroy any items in the process, so you don't have to get a piece of gear every time you want to apply it to something else.

[Sumii]

WoW's transmog doesn't destroy any items in the process, so you don't have to get a piece of gear every time you want to apply it to something else.

I could have sworn when I last played that it did destroy. But it's been a very long time. Thanks for the correction!

[Dark-Saviour]

GW2's transmutation destroys.

[Sumii]

GW2's transmutation destroys.

Derp. I probably got the two confused.

[Duelle]

I could have sworn when I last played that it did destroy. But it's been a very long time. Thanks for the correction!

WoW's system doesn't destroy the item.

@Jinrya: Here's a vid. He blabs a bit but demonstrates how it works at around 1:00.

[indira]

open vanity slots by killing titan super duper ouch mode

vanity slot = slots that take graphic priority, not changing the actual items graphic permanently.

[Jinrya-Geki]

WoW's system doesn't destroy the item.

@Jinrya: Here's a vid. He blabs a bit but demonstrates how it works at around 1:00.

Oh god, I hope they don't do that with vanity. I don't want to pay gil even if it is cheap.

[Duelle]

Oh god, I hope they don't do that with vanity. I don't want to pay gil even if it is cheap.

Well, seeing the supposed billions of gil floating around that need to be removed from the economy, I wouldn't put it past them to charge money per item. Granted, WoW benefited more from that sort of thing due to the tons upon tons of gold introduced into the economy from daily quests, it is something to think about.

What I wanted you to focus on more is the mechanics of it rather than the cost, though.

[Malamasala]

As I understand it from a programming level, they want things to be kind of "static" for faster memory access. Which means they do not want a system that every single time it pings your character for information have to say "I'm wearing item C, but let me check if you should use another model from the vanity screen". Instead you've previously re-created your item C with a different model link so that the calculations on which model to use have been set once and for all earlier. This means saving time on all the computations for sending character information.

However from user perspective it is kind of annoying that we can't just change things when we feel like it, but we need to use an item or action or npc to do this every time.