Introduction
A line on the PTR/Beta patch notes recently caught my attention.
The item levels of leveling gear have been adjusted to be rewarded at an appropriate item level through level 70.
At face value, this is a great change - leveling will be smoother and more seamless since item drops will scale better. But wait…
All leveling items will follow this high item level cadence except for heirlooms. Heirlooms still have the advantage of increasing their item level as the wielder levels.
As someone who has spent countless hours and (in-game) money unlocking and upgrading nearly every heirloom in the game, this statement worried me. I decided to test the item-scaling changes by copying characters.
My conclusion? If the item-scaling changes go live in their current state, heirlooms will not be worth equipping.
Breakdown
Here’s how items currently scale on the PTR/Beta compared to live. As you can see, Heirlooms are never better than Quest Greens awarded at the same character level. If this is intentional, it feels like a slap in the face to heirloom collectors.
| Level |
Live Heirloom |
Live Quest Green |
PTR Heirloom |
PTR Quest Green |
| 10 |
26 |
16 |
15 |
16 |
| 20 |
54 |
37 |
68 |
79 |
| 36 |
100 |
83 |
156 |
164 |
| 50 |
148 |
131 |
232 |
247 |
| 60 |
187 |
170 |
287 |
327 |
Proposed Solution
The power level of heirlooms should reflect the time and effort it takes to unlock them. Players who’ve upgraded, enchanted, and gemmed up full sets of heirlooms for their army of alts should feel like the time they spent doing that matters.
I believe that Heirlooms should scale as rare items do. This will ensure Heirlooms are not only worth equipping, but feel powerful - even without the massive %XP bonuses they’ve historically had.
Levelers and altaholics out there, I implore you to help me spotlight this issue.
6 Likes
Should probably submit a bug report when servers come back on. Heirlooms should be using the ilvl data table for blues. This has gone wonky before in previous prepatch test builds.
3 Likes
It’s not a bug, they changed their philosophy on heirlooms. It’s no longer intended for them to be better in every way than traditional gear. It’s now a tradeoff, heirlooms have set bonuses and scale with your character level, but have a lower item level than traditional gear. Inferred from these comments in the patch notes:
“The item levels of leveling gear have been adjusted to be rewarded at an appropriate item level through level 70. Developer’s note: With this adjustment the leveling content should feel easier for all players as the items being rewarded will be a higher item level. All leveling items will follow this high item level cadence except for heirlooms. Heirlooms still have the advantage of increasing their item level as the wielder levels.”
Maybe not a technical bug, but it looks like they missed the mark. Clearly they wanted to buff quest drops so they’d be relevant as you get them. But saying heirlooms have an advantage since they level up doesn’t work if they lag so far behind quest drops. From levels 50 to 60, heirlooms won’t really catch up to items dropped at level 50 until like 57 or something. If one is questing the whole time getting more items along the way, the heirlooms won’t really have time to catch up.
If the goal is to make quest rewards more rewarding, it would probably feel better if they just had a higher chance of rolling epic upgrades. This way one would still equip a new reward sometimes without making the heirlooms practically obsolete.
2 Likes
The whole point of heirlooms at first was to be a gold sink and to speed alts leveling and power. But if they really don’t want them to be for leveling or strength, they really need to cut the cost by a lot. No one will want to pay that much for something weaker and not give exp %. Plus it doesn’t fill out all the equipment slots so you still have to hunt down some items that will be higher then the heirloom.
So you have to spend a fortune just so you don’t have to equip gear for alts.