Heirloom System NEEDS a Severe Overhaul

Community WoW Community Council
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I had recently opened up a second account that is not tied to my Bnet recently (mainly for 2 more houses :P). This account is fresh, having absolutely nothing on it save for what comes with the Epic Edition of Midnight. Literally square one.

Upon my adventures of starting fresh, I ran across something very disturbing: Heirlooms.

Now, I know that people say heirlooms are pointless and give no value. This is true but also not true to an extent. Heirlooms give a sense convenience as in not having to swap gear while you’re questing since it scales. You’re also able to enchant them, giving you more power gains throughout the experience. I get the arguement that the heirlooms are inferior in strength now which I find is true. I frankly am getting irritated seeing quest rewards have a higher ilvl than my heirloom when heirloom is supposed to be “blue ilvl equivalent.” It’s been a mess since all the stat squishing. I just use them because I like to do the enchant method and not have to bother with upgrades/transmog. I know transmog is changing so that makes it moot but I still like having the enchants.

Now herein lies a much, much bigger problem: How convoluted and EXPENSIVE it is to upgrade these pieces. I really think Blizzard lost track on things and just slapped on prices without thinking of how it would affect players both new and old.

There are 6 tiers to level an heirloom:

Armor, Trinkets, Rings
Tier 1 (to 35) 500
Tier 2 (to 40) 1000
Tier 3 (to 45) 2000
Tier 4 (to 50) 5000
Tier 5 (to 60) 5000
Tier 6 (to 70) 5000

Weapon
Tier 1 (to 35) 750
Tier 2 (to 40) 1500
Tier 3 (to 45) 3000
Tier 4 (to 50) 7500
Tier 5 (to 60) 7500
Tier 6 (to 70) 7500

Per a single, non weapon heirloom, the total cost to upgrade it to max is 18,500.
For a weapon or weap/off-hand, total is 27,750

You need 10 heirlooms to have a completed set. (Helm, Neck, Shoulder, Cloak, Chest, legs, Rings x2, Trinkets x2 - NOTE: I am not including some of the heirlooms that have less tiers to upgrade like the Garrosh weapons and the DF Trinket/TWW Pre-event Ring)

Without Weapon: 185,00
With Weapon: 212,750

For the “basic set” (Helm, Shoulder, Cloak, Chest, Legs) you’ll be paying per set 92,500
With Weapon is 120,250

Here are the DISGUSTING numbers:

Full Set x4 (Plate, Mail, Leather, Cloth) is 851,000
Basic Set x4 is 370,000 With Weapons is 481,000

Now if you’re looking to do enchanted pieces only, here is the breakdown for that:
Enchantable Pieces are Shoulders (Mop Enchant), Chest, Cloak, Neck, Ring x2, Legs, Weapon.

Without Weapon 111,000
With Weapon 138,750

I don’t want to even tally up how much it would be to max every single heirloom in existence. I know there are some people out there who have done this. There are 95 total heirlooms but some of them don’t have 6 tiers.

These numbers are just extremely outdated and absurd. Given how fast leveling is, you’re asking for players to spend thousands of gold to keep their convenience for only a few hours as they progress and then spend another few thousand again when they hit the next tier. Sure, I know with the stat squish the numbers are miniscule in difference, but it’s kind of the principal of the matter on this.

Now let us talk about how convoluted the system is. Six items to purchase for a standard item. First, you need to figure out which one you need, then you need to go through all your pages to make sure you’re finding the right one for every tier. It’s a jumbled mess really and I can see people getting lost navigating it.

I suggest doing the following:

Remove all these tier tokens to upgrade and make all heirlooms automatically scale to the expansion prior to current. When a new expansion hits, the heirloom upgrades to the previous.

So for example: A helmet will go 1-70 (Dragonflight Max), no need to upgrade anything/no armor or weapon casings to purchase.

When Midnight comes out, the heirloom automatically upgrades to 1-80. When Last Titan comes out, it goes 1-90.

Make the price of the heirloom a one time fee. The cost of an heirloom set should not exceed 10,000 in my opinion. Thinking of casual and newer players, I feel 1000-2500 would be fair given the amount of pieces there are. We have added so many throughout the expansion after all.

Finally, may want to consider boosting their power a little bit. I should not be getting greens with a higher ilvl when it’s been stated heirlooms are supposed to feel like blue equivalents. You need to have some incentive here for this neglected feature since you took away the exp bonus. Maybe you could bring that back also? Not as strong as what as was but SOMETHING? Also, let all enchants work maybe?

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You touched on the annoying parts of heirlooms. I don’t care that they don’t give me the 5% to 10% xp buff anymore. I do care about the fact that it is an arm and a leg to keep up with them per expansion. That they don’t scale on level compared to quest gear. At this point it feels more like the first 5 levels are actual gear, anything beyond that is just vanity gear. Which isn’t how I want that system to work. I want them to scale with me etc.

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When we get remix which gives us really short time to level up I wonder why heirlooms can’t be stronger.

At the time where the upgrade cost was switched to a lot of gold in WoD I thought this would give us some guarantee of the power they bring but over the years like it’s been said they felt less and less relevant when gold has become harder to get outside of buying a token and that leveling is possibly much shorter. To me the way gold and heirlooms have been treated haven’t been great for players.

I totally agree that the upgrade system for heirlooms at this point feels unnecessary, I think even reimbursing players that bough upgrades with gold should be part of the solution if heirlooms cannot be made into something more interesting/powerful.

Maybe crafting could be involved more in leveling instead, letting us get gear with embellishments while leveling. There has been a couple expansions where you could craft gear with max level stats but useable from the first level of the expansion and those felt great to use. That kind of gear is pretty fun to use like heirlooms as you won’t be replacing it constantly.

9 Likes
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Another option which I thought could be interesting is making old legendary weapons into heirlooms that would simply scale at for all levels without needing to upgrade them. I think this would be pretty cool and encourage players to do old content to get them for timewalking (which would scale them to max ilvl for scaling purpose only in timewalking) or when they level in a new expansion.

This most likely wouldn’t take much and would still be pretty cool. You could even add a couple fun lore quests to upgrade the weapons into heirlooms. I think it would be pretty cool to level with Shadowmourn, Thunderfury, Dragonwrath, Sylvanas bow, Fyralath, etc.

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The Heirloom system definitely needs to be updated and streamlined. The upgrading system started feeling clunky after the first couple expansions it was introduced.

In an ideal world I think Heirlooms should automatically scale to the level cap of the last expansion. Then every pre-patch right before an expansion have it be updated again automatically with players not needing to purchase anything.

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I agree with the need here.

This is probably one of my first posts here in the Council, but leveling alts is one of the key features I enjoy in Wow (Seriously, my account is full of characters, if I want more I have to find which alt to delete), so I feel like I have skin in the game here.

Heriloom purchase and upgrades:

Holy moley. This is the first introduction to heirlooms players will have, and it’s already pretty big in terms of the issues. Buying the Heirlooms outright will cost a good amount of gold. I recall that the originally cited reasoning for this choice, was to prevent new players from buying them, and then outpacing the content they are in, and becoming lost and confused.

I don’t think that plan worked as well as it should have. Firstly, alot of new players have come on because of their friends, who at that time, would shill out the gold for them to have heirlooms. Secondly, and this is more recent now, there is no EXP bonus to them anymore, unless you count the rested XP gains and retention, which I don’t.

The upgrading system:

This is the clunkiest of the clunks here. This is a result of system stacking at it’s finest. When heirlooms were first introduced, they went to 80, and then stayed there until MoP, I believe, where you can buy a token to upgrade it to 90 (or 85? I forget specifics). Then WoD showed up, gave us the Heirloom tab (thank you lord!), and another token to upgrade it… And so forth.

This has resulted in there being like… 5-6 tiers of tokens you NEED to buy to upgrade the item fully. And they’re expensive. And poorly named. And poorly identified. Many times I’ve had a scenario where I bought an upgrade token, and realized it was for the wrong tier. Luckily there is a refund window, so atleast there was no gold loss there.

The reward:

So, you spent upwards of 12k or more for your full set of heirlooms. You’re going to top every DPS chart, healing, you name it, you’re on top. Nope.

Ever since Heirlooms got moved to the set bonus system they currently are in, they’ve been weaker then alot of questing rewards, and especially dungeon rewards. The benefit is that they scale, so it’ll eventually be stronger, on the assumption you didn’t find a new upgrade for that slot before that happened.

What can be done?

Like some of my fellows have said, removing the upgrade tokens and just having them naturally scale to the previous expansion’s max would be fine (They only go to 70, so it’s behind TWW as of right now). You can also give them a bit more power to them, not so much that people feel ‘obligated’ to get them, but for those that do get them, they feel rewarded. I think as well, they should get something new to their set bonus.

The set bonus is an awesome idea. It gives you some more power in a unique way ala tier sets, but tuned for leveling power. RXP Consumption reduction, out of combat regen, and… Well I suppose you get a random damage nuke and stat increase for 2 minutes when you level, which killing mobs can extend for a limited time. But most of your levels will be when you hand in a quest… Inside a safe zone.

I’d personally take out that damage burst, and give us some XP bonus, 10% or 15.

They should also give a tertiary stat, speed being most likely here. Heirlooms are to help you level faster, so speed seems like a no brainer here.

That’s my over all thoughts on it, though I think I might be missing a few things.

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