I recently just got my DH decked out in all 120 heirlooms. At lvl 112, I’m noticing that the heirlooms are always significantly worse than what you get from questing / dungeons. That is not to mention that they obviously don’t have Azurite traits. This was often the case in lower levels, but not nearly to this extent.
I doubt there are any in depth comparison tests done at this point, so its likely more down to opinion. Either way, I’d like to know what y’all think.
Azerite traits while leveling don’t have that much of an impact because they’re pretty garbage traits across the board.
I use heirlooms to 120. For Alliance zones that allows me to only do Drustvar and the War Campaign to hit cap. I choose Drustvar so I unlock the flight paths hidden behind the quests there. Haven’t leveled another Horde to run a comparison with Vol’dun.
There’s a warrior that tested it pretty extensively and he found that it’s faster to level without heirlooms, specifically the 3 Azerite Armor slots. The stat boosts those pieces give outweighs the 30% increased bonus.
The best way of course, is to execute the quests with normal gear and switch to the heirlooms when turning in the quests for the bonus experience.
Since the stat squish at the start of BfA, heirlooms are not much better stat-wise, but they still provide bonus XP.
I would not use heirlooms in azerite slots but for things like legs/cloak/rings/trinkets they’re good. I also use an heirloom weapon so I don’t have to worry about weapon drops.
Looms are a benefit for the non-azerite slots. From my experience, dual wield characters (especially dual wield with off sets) benefit from loom weapons as weapon upgrades are not super frequent.
The only heirloom I would recommend for 110-120 would be the weapons. The head/shoulder/chest are not worth the loss of stats/abilities versus the Azerite bonuses. You could still use the pants/cloak, but eh.
The azerite traits might be trash (are they though?) but the fact that you can get 3 slots at 285 right at around 110 or 111 outweighs the heirloom gains.
OP, with the scaling I believe they retuned the heirloom stats - it’s still pretty good gear while you’re leveling, and when you ding, it upgrades itself but I’ve found that sometimes you’ll get a blue (or sometimes a purple) that will have better stats than the heirloom piece. Whether it offsets the xp gain or not I guess depends.
I think once you hit BFA, you wanna keep the cape, any weapons you might have (I think the artifact keeps being ‘good’ up until around 112-113? I kept using it on my main until around 115) leg slot and the rings if you got those in Warlords. Oh, and trinkets, maybe? A lot of BFA leveling trinkets are stat sticks or a minion proc.
It’s not the traits, it’s the ridiculous amount of raw primary stats on the azerite pieces.
It makes it difficult to level in full heirlooms because mobs are scaled with the assumption that you will have those stats. It’s not so bad early on, but it will get harder the closer you get to 120
I usually equip at least one azerite piece while leveling to soften the blow.
As I said, that’s not been my experience. I haven’t had any difficulty with it, but then I also don’t have any trouble with Drustvar which people claimed was the more difficult of the three Alliance leveling zones.
Legs, ring, and cloak are decent but yea stat wise they are pretty bad. ITs not uncommon to get a quest green with a higher ilvl. For the cost of upgrading them its pretty crappy how they did them this expansion. Far as the azerite slot goes I would not bother. I think there was a thread few months back where someone actually tested with and without azerite slots and found leveling was faster without them due to the severe gimping heirlooms bring.