I was talking with someone in the Newcomer chat the other day, ended up hopping in Discord and screen sharing because they thought the issue was their enchanting rod, but no, it turns out the issue is all the low level enchants having the “only usable on items below level 50” requirement.
That requirement USED to refer to character level. It was just meant to allow you to use enchants from old expansions throughout the entire leveling process, while ensuring you can’t load up current expansion gear with enchants that expansion doesn’t have slots for.
But that’s not how it’s working right now, and given some forum threads I’ve searched up while trying to help the guy in NC chat, it’s been this way since at least… March? Probably longer.
Anyway, point being, it’s not referring to character level right now, it’s referring to the ilvl of the gear.
You start getting gear over ilvl 50 at roughly character level… 15.
So basically the second you start actually getting access to gear you can disenchant for enchanting mats, you can no longer actually use the enchants you’re learning on the gear you’re earning. Because it’s all over ilvl 50.
The only enchants that work are Shadowlands enchants that don’t have the “must be under level 50” requirement. But a new player / low level does not have access to Shadowlands enchanting / Shadowlands materials. It requires either outright buying 3rd party enchants from the AH or funneling enchants from a high level main.
Am I missing something?
Or is Enchanting REALLY just that freaking broken from level 15 to 50 with no signs of a fix incoming?
Note:
Here is a Deadmines drop at level 16:
Already not able to be enchanted by anything but SL enchants due to ilvl.
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Yes, in order to fix broken SL enchants since prepatch phase 2, devs broke any enchants prior to SL content, and have assured us that all enchants will be working again shortly after DF launches.
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Shortly after probably means not before 2023 
That seems to be referring specifically to enchanting vellums, the issue I’m referring to occurs even when directly enchanting an item. Is there any confirmation that their “fix” is affecting enchanting outside of vellums?
Also, there’s the roadbump of there being older forum threads about this issue, like, way before Prepatch. If there’s confirmation of the prepatch thing being universal and not vellum-specific, then maybe those are just a separate issue, but I’m not seeing that yet.
I’d assume shortly after would be the maintenance the next day, but time will tell.
It actually meant ilvl the whole time, but you expected to reach a between 50-60 ilvl when you were level 50.
Item level of gear at low levels basically follows the levels of the character. Unless something changed during prepatch, you aren’t getting ilevel 50 gear until you’re almost level 50.
Not that the whole enchanting thing isn’t a complete disaster right now, because it is, but ilevel 50 isn’t at level 15. Or wasn’t two weeks ago.
I don’t know if there was another squish or something, but you definitely get ilvl 50 around level 16 now. You can check AH greens, level 25ish stuff is like ilvl 70.
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Maybe. Either way, something is wrong. It’s either checking the wrong number, or the number it’s looking for no longer makes sense and needs to be changed.
It’s a side effect of the re-scaling they just rushed in. 10-50 used to be ilvls 12-55, with 50-60 being 90-145. Now it’s a much smoother curve from 10-60.
At the same time, you can skip all old enchanting categories and just do the SL or DF ones when you get there now.
Alright, fair enough explanation of how the ilvls changed.
Is that related to their vellum fix in any way?
Because to me it seems like a general change separate from the vellum issue causing a new issue that hasn’t been acknowledged yet.
The vellum issue seems to be related to a different bug, and they did the SL fix knowing it would temporarily break the older stuff, since SL enchanting was still relevant at cap when the decision was made.
Alright, that much makes sense. They broke vellums for low level during prepatch, but it should be fine post pre-patch, more or less.
The ilvl smoothing issue affecting low level enchants probably needs separate acknowledgement still though, since it doesn’t seem like something that’ll be solved together with the Vellum issue.
Vellums came off to me like “we can fix this now, but that fix will temporarily break this other thing”, and they went with fixing the end game section with almost all the economic traffic.
Incorrect, item levels have drastically changed with the prepatch, you get ilvl50 stuff right around 18 or 19.
Hell gearing is so busted right now, that lvl 50 mythics have better itemlevel than your coven starter set.
I hope they genuinely fix it in the near future. Yes you don’t need it these days, but there are plenty of completionists out there who want all of those crafting bars to be full when they hit K.
Sucks extra hard for completionist Dracthyr Enchanters.
Also, you know, new player experience. Like I said, this topic came up for me because of someone in newcomer chat trying to do enchanting on their level 30 character (which naturally has gear well over ilvl 50 and therefore can’t be enchanted).
Even if it’s unimportant to long-time players who speed to the current expansion and worry about things there, picking up a profession and not being able to actually use it as a new player would be pretty jarring and leave a bad taste.
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The ilvl issue is one I am familiar with because I used to plan my game play around it leveling to 49. For quite awhile the old enchants could not be applied to stuff with ilvl > 50. I found that in practice, a lot of gear on the AH was ilvl 50 for player level 41. But quest rewards were often ilvl 50 at player level 44-45.
The pre-patch mucked things up because ilvls were adjusted, and I am going to say not very well. There still a lot of discrepancies for gear on the AH, and I also think I have seen some abrupt changes in ilvl at certain player levels, so I am not sure how smooth it is, I would have to see some official chart.
You can have a low level character apply a low level enchant to heirloom gear and send it to a high level player to get around some of these problems. Note, the low level has to have enchanting leveled so the enchant goes directly on the heirloom and not the enchanting vellum.
There are real issues with ilvl now, not the mention the problems with Relic of the Past which I used to use a lot but which is now virtually useless.
Ever since prepatch I have been seeing some (not all) green gear set to very high relative item levels, and equippable by characters much lower than 50.
A couple of my level 40-ish alts have green items in the low 100s equipped.
Just have a look at some of the stuff on the AH and you will likely find some.
Went ahead and made a bug report thread with some of the info gathered here, thanks all.