Today’s new build of the Wrath of the Lich King beta contains barbers! Naturally, I had to go and try out this new feature.
You can find barbershops in a number of locations, signified by the barber pole outside them, as you can see above. I visited the one in Dalaran.
You use the barber by sitting down in one of the barbershop chairs; the barber interface opens up, and shows you selectors for making changes.
Just use the selectors to pick new hair styles, new hair colors or new facial accessories (piercings, beards, tattoos, horns, etc – depending on your race) and it displays the total cost for your changes.
There are, so far, a few new hairstyles to select, but nothing particularly radical or appealing. I do think they could stand to add a few more.
You can’t choose new faces or new skin colors – that’s a bit beyond the scope of a barber, after all, although perhaps we’ll see magical barbers in future with the ability to change everything about you. (Let’s face it, if NPCs can reliably disguise you as a a tree, an arakkoa or a packing crate, surely giving you a tan isn’t out of the question…)
Edit: The mighty Andrige, WoW community artist, has discovered a number of the new hairstyles coming in WotLK. They’re previewable at Resto4Life for the female hairstyles, and Big Bear Butt for the male hairstyles. Note that these hairstyles aren’t currently actually in the beta, though.
Interesting info, though as you mentioned, it would be nice if they added more styles. It can’t possibly be too time consuming to do.
On the up side, it’s something that is easy enough for them to add piecemeal, later.
That barber isn’t located on Fleet Street is it? The clamps on the arms of the chair would make me quite nervous.
What do you think of the pricing? Reasonable?
There is actually a nice nod to Sweeney Todd in the Stormwind barbers, though I won’t spoil it for you ;-)
The pricing is… well, you wouldn’t be doing it every week on a level 30 character, but it’s not a significant expense for an occasional change on a high level character with a good income.
I don’t plan on changing my style every other day or anything, but what sort of pricing are we looking at. Does it double every time you change it and have a price decay the longer you go without one, and more importantly does it hit a cap at a certain price?
Do the changes remain until the next time you visit the barber, or do they revert back to your original character design at a predetermined time?
I want pink hair. Or neon blue. And pigtails for my human paladin. Between gnomish inventors and alchemists they should be should be able to come up with interesting colors, no? After all, the gnomes already have those colors available to themselves.
And engineers should be able to craft a hair dryer. That malfunctions sometimes with random consequences that last for two hours.
How does the facial features work for Undead do you know? Since they dont have facial hair, do you instead change the things like no jaw, scars, etc
Ooh I’ve been curious about the barbershop. Thanks for the info!
Stig – I’m not sure; it hasn’t been implemented for long enough in beta to be sure. A simple hairstyle change on a level 70 character is around 7-8 gold, but I believe on a lower level character it’s cheaper. The price doesn’t seem to increment based on the number of previous changes, either.
Abundance – the changes are permanent until you next visit a barber.
Melanne – I agree, I want some funky hair :) The new hairstyles will go a way to solving some of my desire for variety, but I’d really like some new color choices as well.
Mark – I’m fairly sure you do, yes, although I don’t have an undead character so I can’t check, unfortunately.
Many of the blood elf hair styles and facial styles have not been implemented. I was able to get my BE-DK a nice set of hoop earrings however at a cost of about 4.5g. During the creation process, I was entirely focused on creating a DK that I forgot to customize my avatar. So I’m stuck with the default BE-female stylings.
Mark – I have read stories of undead that have played since release and were happy to finally get themselves a jaw. =P Draenei females can customize their horn style.
OMG I WANT A POO POO HAIR STYLE!!!
Cool thanks for the reply
So a night elf can’t take a dwarf hairstyle for instance?
Well, it’s not a case of all hairstyles being available to all races, but at least two of the new night elf female cuts were originally dwarven styles. Not sure about males.