This edition of the Scrying Pool takes a quick look at Town Clothing in Guild Wars 2.

The problem I see with town clothes, however, is their length of exposure. With other systems players can buy the cool costumes in a cash shop and they will always be visible to other players to show off. Town clothing in GW2 however is more of a hidden gem. Players rarely see a character’s town clothes in part due to players having to manually switch to them while the automatic switch back to armor can happen frequently.

What I would like to see is an option in the options menu where players can select “Defaults to Town Clothes when entering towns” and “Switches to Town Clothes when leaving combat.” Having these be toggles allows players to select whether they want to auto toggle to town clothes or not since there are likely many players who would just want to remain in armor all the time like it is now.

With adding this system into the game I would have the entering town option default to on and leaving combat to off. In this way after the patch all players would become almost instantly aware of the additional two toggles and keep the possibility of these features remaining undiscovered to a minimum. This also makes town clothes live up to their name. By default characters would be wearing town clothes while in town.

I wouldn’t think that adding the automatic switch at the end of combat would be much work (I have no clue how much adding a toggle option would add to this) since there appears to be a trigger at the end of combat for things like the start of the health regeneration and unlocking the ability to change skills, traits, weapons and use waypoints. The town clothes switch would just be another thing added to the pool of when combat ends do this.

With the addition of this feature, however, attention would need to be paid to how armor works when wearing town clothes. While in town clothes the player does not benefit from any stats gained from gear. While many stats, such as power and healing, are completely unneeded in town clothes, players also lack the defense their armor provides. In my limited testing this lack of defense ended up doubling the damage taken from that first hit that an enemy lands at the start of combat before the auto armor switch takes effect. This isn’t a big problem now, as mobs getting first hit while a player is in town clothes is a rare enough thing. But if running through Orr or Southsun every mob that aggros the player first gets a double damage opening strike it could become a little more of an issue.

Another thing that town clothes need is a wider variety. This is something that will only improve with time as ArenaNet continues to release more town clothes into the gem store. As the popular saying goes: wardrobes are like Rome; they weren’t built in a day.

There are a few changes I’d like to see ArenaNet make to how they release new town clothes. I think that some of the starting town clothes are good (while others are, well interesting), but they almost seem like throwaways. I’d like to see the starting town clothes be added as a recipe to crafting disciplines, like tailor and leatherworker makes all of them except for the Sylvari starting clothes which would be made by a Cook (because, you know...salad).

These shouldn’t just be race restricted but expanded to all the races. I think this would help bolster the town clothes, allowing players to mix and match them. Once they are more accustomed to changing into town clothes they can be pointed to the super spiffy clothes in the gem store. Having them craftable also makes them available to anyone who accidently threw them out (or like me forged them thinking they were just noob armor) and would like to have a way to acquire them for certain characters again.

What about new Town Clothes added in the Gem Store? -->