18 tiers. What if I like the first ones best?

[:1]It's been stated before that we'll see 18 armor tiers as we make our way through the game, meaning that we'll continue to feel visual progress as we move through the game's different difficulties. This is seen as an improvement over D2, where the armor looks in Nightmare and Hell were the same ones as those you'd find in normal difficulty.
But the thing I've been asking myself is, what if I like some of the earlier armor looks better than those I can find in late Hell or Inferno difficulty? Is there a way I can get high-end armor that looks like the stuff I found in Normal and Nightmare? For example, out of the three wizard armor sets presented at GamesCom, I happened to like the nightmare one best (see http://www.diablowiki.net/File:Gamescomwizardgear.jpg). From my current understanding, it would make no sense for me to use that tier of armor when playing in Inferno difficulty, though, since it would be vastly inferior to the armor I can find there.
One thing I liked about Diablo 2 runewords was that for an armor you could freely choose its appearance by picking one out of 15 different Elite base items, each featuring (slightly) different looks, yet each viable for Hell difficulty in terms of armor rating.
It would be awesome if there were ways, for instance in the crafting system, to obtain armor that looks like any of the 18 tiers found within the game yet isn't inferior in power (affixes, armor rating) to the sort of armor you'll usually find in Inferno difficulty.

|||Something I've been thinking about as well. I've also wondered how it will work with a forth difficulty added in to the mix. It could be that you can only find say tier 1-6 on normal and once you get to nightmare you can then find 1-10(with adjusted armor rating) and so on. That would be fine with me, it would be a lot of different combinations that way. It'd be sad if you can only find say 4 tiers of armor in inferno, then everyone would look really similar.|||

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Q u o t e:
It would be awesome if there were ways, for instance in the crafting system, to obtain armor that looks like any of the 18 tiers found within the game yet isn't inferior in power (affixes, armor rating) to the sort of armor you'll usually find in Inferno difficulty.

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That's a great idea. Players are bound to have a favorite armor tier, might as well give them a way to make all their end-game gear look the way they want while removing some gold to boot.|||Won't happen, simply because of how Blizzard feels about players being able to show off their sexy gears.|||I've always been a fan of simple looks for armor and weapons, and I like having the choice of what my stuff looks like. I usually picked ring mails, caps, and sometimes circlets, and I'd always take a broad sword over a crystal sword for spirit.
LOTRO, and probably other games, let you wear stuff over your current armor, but only visually. This lets you wear the ugliest combination of stuff around but still allows you to look how you want to.
I'll probably be the guy on D3 complaining about how dorky or stupid my weapon or armor looks. I'll wear any garbage for a little bit of extra power though!|||

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Q u o t e:
Won't happen, simply because of how Blizzard feels about players being able to show off their sexy gears.

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http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3309048#blog|||I created a topic about this a long time ago.
I loved how you could look "poor" and at the same time be really strong in D2. In D3 seems everyone in inferno going to use 2-3 item tiers and that's all.
Such thing is great when you play the game for the first time, but when you are planning to play it for years it sucks.|||I understand how people dont like having low end looking loot sometimes but in a game like Diablo you also need diversity.|||What we were told was that the 18 tiers would be exclusively distributed over the 4 difficulties. There will also be Legendaries and dyes.
(though I agree it may seem a bit too scant for the amount of diversity a game like Diablo might need)|||I agree. I hate almost all of the end game gear that has been shown so far (admittedly still not much) so it would be nice. But then it would be possible to look the same all the time. That would get boring. And while I wouldn't have to take advantage of the option, I know I would cause its there.