EverQuest 2 allows you to do amazing things with interior decorating, one of the few, if not the only, MMO, that allows you so much freedom in designing your living space and that of others. Interior decorator is one of EQ2’s unofficial professions, but nonetheless, a lucrative one.
Characters also have a somewhat more limited way of customizing their own appearance, through appearance armor. All the visible armor slots have corresponding appearance slots. Armor bits placed in the appearance slots overwrite the appearance of the actual armor.
There are a couple of issues with that. First, you can only put in your appearance armor slots what you can wear in your main armor slots. So, plate wearers can look like they are wearing caster robes, but casters can’t look like they are wearing plate. Also, low level characters can’t appear to be wearing armor above their level.
Second, there are no appearance slots for weapons. While you might keep a favorite suit of armor in your appearance slot, once you’ve upgraded a weapon, you have to bag the old one, no matter how cool it looks.
Characters should have at least the level of customization they have for the place they live. So, my suggestions:
Let any character put any armor, regardless of whether they could equip it, in their appearance slot. There may be PvP implications, but the PvPers have managed with appearance armor thus far, this isn’t that much more.
Don’t force appearance armor to be attuned. If it’s not providing them any benefit, why stop it from being sold or given away if it wasn’t NO TRADE to begin with?
Add two appearance slot items for primary and secondary hand items, with the caveat that the appearance slot items must be of the same type (one hand slashing, two hand blunt, shield, etc) as the one they are masking; if there’s a conflict, the appearance slot items don’t show.
Fix the appearance of sheathed two-handed weapons so they show on your back even if you’re wearing a cloak.
Along with those, why not a new secondary profession of hairdresser? Similar to SWG’s Image Maker or whatever it was called. Hairdressers would craft little coupons for appearance changes, and as they leveled, would have more options available to them than are at the character creation screen. More hairstyles and so on. Using rare components, they could do skin color changes, racial changes, gender changes… To keep its place as the MMO with the most customization when Spellborn comes out, it needs to up the game just a little more.