World of Warcraft armor is serious business, seriously. Your armor is the entire image of your character; it represents personality, skill, and how much hardcore gamer you have inside. It also represents your sense of style and whether you come across as a Leader or as kodo droppings.

Joe Blow with his horrid lime green chest plate and bright red berserker helmet is not going to give the best impression, whereas that warrior "Og the Mighty," in full black plate with the blood red cape, is a much preferable candidate for party tank.

As silly as it sounds, your sense of style can directly affect how many teams and guilds offer you spots or accept you. Horrible fashion sense often reveals a lack of sensibility in other categories, as well. How can you trust someone to watch your back when they are unable even to pick a good set of armor? Will they be able to follow instructions? Will their lack of fashion sense indicate a skill at going AFK at inopportune times?

On the other hand, those who display sophisticated taste in armor selection can often find themselves establishing a bond of trust, the alliance between gamers with sartorial taste and elegance arrayed against the growing swarm of rainbow-colored barbarians camping out in Stormwind.

Now obviously, if you happen to be Horde, some natural level of disability may present itself in the area of armor selection. You cannot exactly expect to present yourself in elegant, tasteful fashion when half the city runs about in a distressing state of near-naked barbaric undress, (especially the guards,) but I digress.

Despite being a member of the *Horde,* the laws of fashion still apply to increasing your desirability as a teammate, as well as simply providing yourself with a better screen image to view while playing. Of course, if you don't want to stand out as a superior being, you can always that set the color blind orc tailor picked out for you...

One upside is that generally the higher level armor sets, and thus higher armor/stat increase armor sets, generally fall into the category of fashion classics, allowing for mix and match suitability and they simply look good, anyway. I am grateful to Outlands for giving us good-looking armor, and not more of the "ax in helmet" look. A swarm of appallingly bad looking, high level armor would be so distressing to the eyes.

Take the Gladiator set. Right now it's all the rage, but will it look right on you? Before you blow those 75,000 honor points for a full set check ouit the 3d model viewer at WowModelViewer.org and you can see what your character will look like in any armor combination.

While the really good stuff comes from raiding and PvP many nice armor pieces come from questing, as drops. If you're not finding them on the mobs you kill then you can look in the auction house. Can't afford those? Then I strongly recommend a gold making guide and you'll be able to buy these attractive and effective items as quickly as possible.

Keeping up to date on your armor can make a world of difference in your killing speed, as well as help you avoid the frustration that results from being killed by the same quest mob again and again.

Now go get yourself some decent armor.