I'm deeply troubled

[CoolDad]

Went overboard trying to edit the original design onto the model. Take this with a grain of salt, as a lot of details in the image are blurry or obscured by lighting so it's hard to tell all of what was changed, so I might have unnecessarily edited things that haven't actually been changed or ignored things that have.

Overall I definitely prefer the allagan(?) features on the original design. I feel like the additions and changes to the new one make it look too similar thematically to a lot of other sets (the mask reminds me of a gold version of the fox mask that sits on your head, hood similar to poncho, etc) and variety is a nice thing to have.

I've absolutely loved the original design since the contest results were revealed and I'm pretty sad to see all the liberties taken on it. To make it ANOTHER design that is modeled to look less suggestive on male characters than female despite the designer's intentions would make it worse.

[Mikki]

Honestly I don't even think the open thigh area is all that suggestive, not sure why everyone is arguing that point...It isn't like you could see anything. It just looked aesthetically pleasing. I'm sad to see it go. But probably it just looked weird from different angles maybe? Who knows. I'd be sad if I were the original artist though. :/

[Lukha]

What I really want to know, though is why this outfit was chosen in the first place if it couldn't be made as-is for whatever reason. There was no community voting on the sets, all winners were chosen by SE reps, so there's really no excuse to pick something that they can't or won't render faithfully to the original design.

[Cidel]

What I really want to know, though is why this outfit was chosen in the first place if it couldn't be made as-is for whatever reason. There was no community voting on the sets, all winners were chosen by SE reps, so there's really no excuse to pick something that they can't or won't render faithfully to the original design.

Ooo! Reading this made me go back to check their comment on the winning entry on the lodestone:

We received a wider variety of designs in this category of the gear design contest when compared to the Tank edition. This lead to quite a bit of trouble when it came to selecting a grand prize winner, but in the end, we chose this design based on the fact that it was something we’d never done before. The design will really force the dev. team to answer questions about how they would replicate aspects of this design into the game. It seems the team took up this challenge, and the character designers and animation designers are already racking their brains trying to think how to replicate the cloak and flames. We’re expecting to feature a ranged magic DPS outfit that has never existed before, so please look forward to it!

Suppressing my inclination to break this comment down sentence-by-sentence and make snide remarks, I will say that it's almost like the outfit was chosen just to experiment some things; faithfulness to the original be damned.

[Ayer2015]

Suppressing my inclination to break this comment down sentence-by-sentence and make snide remarks, I will say that it's almost like the outfit was chosen just to experiment some things; faithfulness to the original be damned.

I mean, hasn't that been stated before regarding these contest winner designs? I'm not sure when people expect exact implementation into the game.

Regarding all the people decrying SE for not implementing the pants as per the design due to male sexualization.... do you not remember the Shisui set exists. I'm sure the devs have their reasons. I swear, this community complains more and more every year....

[Hestzhyen]

I'm sure the devs have their reasons. I swear, this community complains more and more every year....

Not to be a smart ass, but they keep giving us reasons to.

Companies -efficient ones at least- don't want to waste their employees' time at any level, so there was certainly a reason behind this. It's almost impossible for things to get pushed to production because something happened by chance and everyone rolled with it.

SE explains pretty much nothing about what they do or why they do it. Why were the pants changed? It's not like we don't have exact copies of the bland generic pair shown in the preview in abundance already. The Shisui set proves they can do that style. I was willing to let that awesome hood go if the bottom half remained mostly unchanged at least, but...

I'm staying my pitchfork based on what the female design is. If they have the holes and we don't then it's pretty obvious someone thought that man legs were icky and they needed to cover them... again. I'm tired of that more than I'm dead set on having a 1-1 adaptation of the original design.

[Lukha]

I'm staying my pitchfork based on what the female design is. If they have the holes and we don't then it's pretty obvious someone thought that man legs were icky and they needed to cover them... again. I'm tired of that more than I'm dead set on having a 1-1 adaptation of the original design.

This. I'm pretty upset about the change, but what the female set looks like is going to make all the difference between 'annoyed' and 'livid' at this point.

I don't know why I bother getting my hopes up over pants designs anymore, really. Every time I think we're getting something interesting, they pull this sort of bait and switch on us and I just end up angry and disappointed.

I'm sure the devs have their reasons. I swear, this community complains more and more every year....

And those reasons are getting more and more transparent every single time something like this happens - which is practically every patch these days. We're not complaining about nothing, here; there's a long-standing pattern of poor quality when it comes to the male side designs.

[Ordoric]

I dont care for the look of this gear and i dont get how its "mage"gear. thats why we have the glamour wardrobe. tho i would like the plague doctors set to be dyable