In the hopes that someone on the WoW team may end up reading this, I’m going to structure this thread so the main points can be skimmed over fairly quickly.
TL;DR at the bottom.
The Situation
Heirloom gear is a fantastic quality of life feature, invaluable to anyone who enjoys leveling alts. It adds replay value to the game especially for people who don’t care as much for the leveling process. They’re amazing to have when you’re just trying to rush to level cap and get into endgame content. Beyond that, they just feel good. It feels great to have a crit chance higher than 5% while leveling. It feels great to have enough health to not die when you pull 3 enemies. It feels great to actually have additional low-level gear options for the shoulder and trinket slots rather than using the same items for 10-20 levels.
However,
There’s a point in the expansion where heirloom gear will become extremely common and even entirely pervasive in every aspect of sub-80 content. Heirloom sets will, at some point, effectively become the default outfit that the majority of alts will wear. I think that leads to some problems that harm the leveling experience, but I don’t believe it needs to. I think heirloom gear should be reworked to fulfil its purpose better and to roll back the damage it will inevitably do to the leveling experience mid-expansion.
The Primary Issues
(Click each item to expand for further explanation)
Heirloom gear trivializes the value of most dungeon and quest gear.
One of the biggest sources of satisfaction in the leveling experience is getting gear upgrades. In my experience (as well as the experience of almost all of the people I’ve talked to on this subject), blue-quality gear from dungeons is the primary motivation for running them in the first place. Sometimes you’ll get a piece of gear that will last you many levels and you won’t even replace it until you’ve made significant progress in the next expansion’s content. It sucks to see all of the items drop in low level dungeons just knowing that they’re all destined to be vendored the moment the dungeon is over. It’s very similar to running 5-man heroics when you’re ICC-geared and the only relevant aspect of the dungeons is the badges you’re collecting. Except this happens in level-appropriate dungeons that should drop enticing gear while you’re leveling. Heirlooms remove that fun aspect from the game for every slot they can be equipped in.
The stat scaling itself is a big reason why heirloom gear is overpowered.
As many people will no doubt point out, heirloom gear isn’t always more powerful than dungeon/world drops and quest gear, which is absolutely true. However, one way that heirloom gear will always beat conventional methods (non-twinking) of gearing is in the fact that all heirloom pieces scale to your level.
Ignoring the fishing heirloom ring, the majority of players will eventually be wearing 5 to 7 pieces of heirloom gear on all of their alts. Before heirloom gear was implemented, it was extremely rare to have that many slots filled with dungeon drops meant for your exact level. Not to mention the fact that heirloom gear is itemized very nicely (lots of useful secondary stats, almost no useless stats whatsoever) unlike a lot of the gear you’ll find in Vanilla content as you level up.
The only situation where you’ll have powerful, perhaps even BiS gear in that many slots at any given level is when you’re twinking a character out, which was effectively killed when they added experience gains from honor. So beyond every piece of heirloom gear being nearly capped in power at every level individually, it also has the unique aspect of upgrading 5-8 slots of gear to being nearly stat capped all at once.
Heirloom gear dramatically raises the cost of entry for PvP.
Not everyone will have heirloom gear, but they will still want to enjoy the content available to them. If you don’t have access to heirloom gear, it’s very unfun to encounter people of a similar level who can global you because they have heirloom weapons and a higher crit chance, or for them to be nearly unkillable because they have more armor and vastly more HP than any non-heirloom-geared character ever would under normal circumstances. It was always my understanding that breaking battlegrounds into separate brackets to segregate people with experience eliminated was a decision to make battlegrounds more enjoyable for people who just wanted some variety in content while they leveled. Heirloom gear effectively reverts this change and makes battlegrounds and world PvP miserable for anyone who doesn’t have it. In fact, you could argue that rampant heirloom gear actually makes battlegrounds even worse than twinks ever did, because at some point it will be far more common than twinking was. When twinking was a problem, you’d typically only have to watch out for 2 or 3 insanely geared players, but we will reach a point where the people without heirloom gear are in the minority, and PvP will become relatively pointless for them.
For every applicable slot, heirloom gear is almost always the automatic choice while leveling.
This is really the crux of the issue. There’s no point in actually considering whether you should equip an heirloom item in any applicable slot because there are virtually no negative tradeoffs for defaulting to the heirloom gear even in the rare case that you find a more powerful item. Even when you do manage to find a stronger item (even epic gear), it will only be better for a few levels at best, and if it takes up the chest or shoulder slots, you’d have to trade away the 10% experience bonus, which just wouldn’t make much sense in most cases. Let’s also not forget that it’s common for people to enchant their heirlooms with ridiculously powerful enchants, which at times will mean even some epics won’t be a good replacement unless you happened to obtain it at level. When people didn’t even think about deviating from cookie-cutter talent builds, you revamped the talents.
When people didn’t even think about deviating from their chosen spec because it was the no-brainer meta for the content they play, you overhauled the classes and specs. When leatherworking was going to be mandatory for 20/25 people in raiding guilds because of Drums of War, you nerfed them so they couldn’t have 100% uptime. Even considering their significant cost, heirlooms should not give players the best of both worlds because it effectively removes the other options. That’s just a more boring leveling experience.
The Secondary Issues
(Click each item to expand for further explanation)
Heirloom gear can even raise the cost of entry into dungeons.
I’ve personally bore witness to a lot of situations over the years where someone’s lack of heirloom gear encouraged toxic behavior. It’s not very common, but it certainly did happen. And if I’m being honest, people aren’t entirely wrong to want to only bring others who have it, especially in the much lower level dungeons (15-30). The reality of it is that people with heirloom gear are going to be able to tank far more enemies, heal far more damage, and deal far more damage in dungeons than those wirhout it. It wasn’t uncommon to see the gear difference result in people doing up to 5 times as much damage with heirloom gear. When it’s the tank without heirlooms, they can never hold threat, or they simply die if they try to pace the others because they don’t have the health pool for it. When it’s the healer without heirlooms, they can’t keep up with the damage the tanks take and they can’t last nearly as long in the fights because their mana pools are dismal. When it’s DPS without heirlooms, they’ll seldom even have the chance to DPS because everything will die so quickly, so their already low DPS will be even lower. This leads to situations where people will assume the tank is just bad, or you’ll have DPS just strongarm their way into the tank role and the actual tank will just have to deal with it or leave. It will lead to situations where the healers are blamed for not having enough throughput to keep the tanks alive for pulls that are actually appropriate for the level of the tank’s gear. It will lead to situations where the DPS are looked at as a burden because they’re dismissed as being bad or not knowing how to play their class. No one likes carrying dead weight, and unfortunately, that’s basically what people without heirloom gear become. It’s not even a toxic perspective – It’s literally just true that by comparison, people without heirlooms will often have no meaningful contribution to the dungeon other than their buffs, consumables, and small talk.
Heirloom gear causes some minor economic damage.
I personally think that the effect of heirloom gear on certain discrete aspects of the economy is so minimal that it almost doesn’t even warrant a place in a list of secondary issues, but I’ve noticed that it’s a perceived issue for some of the people on these forums, so I’ll go ahead and include it anyway.
In the same way that heirloom gear trivializes the value of gear dropped from dungeons, it also basically kills any value that most BoE items hold on the auction house. It was always an exciting thing to find a super rare BoE blue item drop in a low-level dungeon because it meant you could probably make a couple hundred easy gold in some cases. It’s definitely true that these items are basically doomed to collect dust in a bank alt’s inventory as they try in vain to sell it, or to simple be vendored. It’s not a particularly significant or important part of the economy, but it certainly was a cool little aspect of the game that is effectively pointless when heirlooms exist.
Everyone's wearing the same uniform.
This is probably the most minor issue, but it does bug me. Most questing and dungeon gear looks awful as you’re leveling up, so I’m certainly not saying that we’re losing some beautiful aspect of the game in that sense. But it’s a shame when the looks of all the characters running around are more or less the same, especially with the heirloom chest pieces that are full robes. At some point, it gets annoying seeing everyone wear the exact same look for all 80 levels rather than having periods where the looks are sometimes really cool, and they’re almost always fresh.
My Solution
I’m fully aware that it would upset many people, but I think the best solution to these problems would be to nerf the power of heirloom gear in terms of stats, at least when a character is fully loaded with it.
I propose that all heirloom gear should have 2 set bonuses added.
(3) set : For every piece of heirloom gear you are wearing (up to 5), the stats on all heirloom gear will be scaled down slightly.
(4) set : Every piece of heirloom gear you wear increases your experience gains by 2%.
- Note: When a character is wearing heirloom gear in 5 or more slots, all heirlooms will be about as powerful as level-appropriate green quality gear.
- Note: The stat downscaling from the 3-set bonus does not affect on-equip bonus experience gains or item enchantments.
- Note: Experience increase from the 4-piece set bonus stacks multiplicatively with on-equip experience increases from heirloom helms, shoulders and rings.
My Defense for This Solution
At the end of the day, the primary function of heirloom gear was to help people level alts faster. When people are using it for that purpose, I see no reason why it should also be some of the most powerful gear available at any given level. Still, other people want to use heirloom gear solely because it’s very powerful and I wouldn’t want to see that aspect of it removed from the game entirely because its power is indeed one of the selling points. That’s why I’ve tried to think of a solution that allows heirloom gear to still lend itself to
Here are the important takeaways:
- Gear from dungeons and some quests will remain relevant and satisfying to obtain, even for people wearing full heirloom gear sets.
- Being oppressively powerful in PvP will require some time investment on the part of the individual character again, but they can still wear multiple pieces of heirloom gear with no stat downscaling, which means that being well-geared isn’t going to be as tricky or time-consuming as it is in Vanilla/TBC.
- In original Wrath, the maximum experience bonus from heirloom gear was +25% EXP if you got the ring or +20% EXP if you didn’t. If my suggestion was implemented, the new maximum experience bonus would be +45% EXP with the ring and +36.8% EXP without. Nearly double the experience gain in either case. To me, this seems like a very fair tradeoff for stat downscaling, especially considering that slightly weaker gear means slower questing/kill farming.
- Heirloom gear is still powerful when used sparingly. The stat scaling set bonus doesn’t kick in until you have 3 pieces of heirloom gear equipped, which means you can equip a powerful combo of [weapon + shoulders], [weapon + trinket], [shoulders + trinket], or [weapon + weapon] at full power.
- You can “double dip” by equipping only the heirloom shoulders and chest pieces. This way, you can still get the maximum +20% experience on-equip bonus and these pieces remain at their maximum possible power.
- If players choose to use the maximum possible number of heirloom pieces and those pieces are scaled down to green-quality equivalence, there is relatively little “penalty” for using interesting gear drops you find instead of single pieces of your heirloom gear (eg, “I’ll use this awesome blue sword I found and the only tradeoff will be 2% of the extra experience gains from my heirloom set bonus.”)
TL;DR
- Heirloom gear was meant to help you level alts faster.
- The stats on heirloom gear are overpowered and cause issues in the leveling experience mid-expansion.
- The power of heirloom gear should be distributed more evenly between the experience bonus and raw stats.
- Adding this set bonus will fix all of the problems (I can think of) caused by the overpowered stats, as well as preserve and even buff the actual intended purpose of heirloom gear, which is faster leveling through experience gains.
- Heirloom gear will still be maximally powerful when used sparingly.
- It would be much healthier for the game if a whole set of heirloom gear was a tradeoff of power for experience gains than for the gear to offer insane power in stats and experience gains simultaneously because it wouldn’t destroy the the aspect of power progression, which is the cornerstone of WoW’s design philosophy.
