maybe this is the wrong place to do this given the tone of this thread, but in case it changes even one person's mind.

to be clear up front, since im sure i'll lose a few of you before the end of this post, i'm not saying they did this on purpose to hurt people! but the lack of care *is* hurtful, and so is their refusal to take our criticisms seriously. they said "we're doing cultural sensitivity this time!" and refuse to actually do it. and this comes after quite a few missteps, so this frustration has been building up and is coming to a boil. it's about the armor, but it's not *just* about the armor. on the armor specifically:

truthfully, on its own, each individual armor set would be nothing particularly offensive. i think certain parts of it are more egregious than others, but if it had come out in any other expac, quite a few of the sets would even make it onto my "to farm" list. you're *right* that other groups used such armor, and it might not have even pinged as conquistador armor to me in, say, endwalker.

but the context *does* matter. this expac was marketed as "the new world," (a phrase popularized *by the conquistadors* as they did unspeakable violence), and written very explicitly to be inspired by the pre-colonization americas and its indigenous peoples. they call it the new world over and over and over. that matters. you can not remove the relationship that "the new world" and "conquistadors" have to each other in an expansion so deeply rooted in that history. you can not ignore the fact that there are basically christian crosses on the tabard. you can not put armor that looks like that next to the conveniently caster-only "mystic native" looking armor and pretend that history isn't relevant.