World of Warcraft Armor

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. Joe Blow with his horrid lime green chest plate and bright red berserker helmet is not giving the best impression, whereas that warrior 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? 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.
One upside is that generally the higher level armor sets, and thus higher armor/stat increase armor sets, generally fall into the category of classics, allowing for mix and match suitability and thus, simply look good, anyway. I am grateful to Outlands for giving us good-looking armor. A swarm of appallingly bad looking, yet good (stat-wise) armor would be so distressing to the eyes.
Many of the better or rarer armor pieces come from questing, so I advise you to invest in a good guide to find 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.