The revamped zone gear is... awkward, to say the least

volfangx

To elaborate it:

1. Here's a handful of, and I stress, bard and warlock armor pieces under the name "mender's"... can someone point out what's weird about these bard and warlock armor pieces? Maybe the first one that looks exactly like a cleric/paladin armor that I used prior to the update? Maybe the second one in default black and gold with a sun-like symbol in the middle? Maybe the red, gold and black chainmail armor on the third? What to say of the hat that has a chain coif and a sun symbol? Do bards wear armor dangerously resembling cleric armor? Do warlocks, the pact-with-the-devil class wear holy man pantaloons? My cleric was actually getting plate armor when leveling too, so it's not just an issue specific to mender's.
   
2. Certain items are literally useless. I don't mean just kinda bad or underpowered, but actually genuinely worse than the items the player would be getting before in the same zone, such as this vigilant ring (blue, Ebon Downs) that is actually worse than the green ring I got also from Ebon Downs and guaranteed on the questline. Why is the blue gear that is a random drop sometimes much worse than the green gear from the same zone? I can understand wanting to safeguard a player's minimum IL, but at the same time why put these items that aren't even worth using for transmog because they have no appearance? Hell, they give single-digit refinement points in zones where I sometimes stop halfway through to refine dropped gems and get 1K+ RP.
   
3. Both green and purple items in the zones are character-bound, but some of them actually have a pretty dope appearance and I personally like to complete the blue sets from stuff in the AH whenever I can. I can kiiiiinda see a point in making the green ones character-bound, but here's the issue with the purple ones: I've only ever seen them drop from mimics, which I have not found anywhere but inside quest instances. You see where I'm going with this? They're character-bound and painful to farm if the player values their leveling, not to mention it not helping with getting people together for loot anyway because they barely ask for help on all but the last dungeon-like instance, which sometimes doesn't even have a mimic.
   

What I propose for each:

1. Tweak the class requirements for these items a little bit to make them consistent with the class the appearances were taken from, such as mender's being also tied to clerics and maybe paladins. Doing it 1:1 with the appearance would obviously and unfortunately result in the same set having items for varied classes, such as the mender's timeworn set having a cleric chest and wizard-looking boots, but at least a little bit extra something could be done to increase the transmog potential.
   
2. Just remove the bloody things, honestly. I mean the ones that can't be used as appearance items, obviously, since shroudcloth bindings are a thing.
   
3. Just make it all bind-on-equip and maybe add mimics to the open world, or, if you're feeling like it, give people repeatable quests in those zones to go to the quests instances to get a bag with the purple items at the end as well as killing the mimics there again. This way, players don't have to cap their leveling while farming for a mimic in a specific zone and people can still join for these instances with new players while having something to gain from completing them.
   

also fix the bard being locked from wearing leatherwork items pls n ty bye