Do Leveling Changes Mean Heirlooms Should As Well?

Heirloom armor was introduced a long time ago - I honestly don't know when - as a means to make leveling alts easier. If you never played pre-Cataclysm (though you can, easily, by making a character in Classic) you might not realize just the dearth of easily-acquired gear. Quests tended to offer just one reward, and you might go through an entire little story arc on your Warrior only to receive some Leather armor with Intellect on it.

So one of the major functions of heirlooms when they were first introduced (assuming I am correct in remembering them coming out during Wrath) was just to fill in several piece of gear that were unlikely to get upgrades over the course of normal questing and dungeon-runs.

But they also made things faster - today, with helm, shoulders, chest, pants, cloak, and ring, you can get a full 50% experience buff, and that, to be frank, feels like the primary advantage of the gear.

Vanilla WoW was originally created in such a way that the leveling really was the game. Raiding, while much more simplistic than it is now (remember how shocked Classic players were when they cleared Molten Core so easily?) was considered something for only the hardcore - equivalent to Mythic Raiders today. I think, as originally conceived, the things you were doing at level 20 were just as important as what you were doing at 40 and then 60, and there wasn't as much of a rush to the endgame because, well, there wasn't a ton of endgame.

The natural consequence, though, of a game being around for over 15 years, is that by now, anyone who has been playing this long certainly has their main character sitting at the level cap, and likely several alts (see name of blog).

As the playerbase coalesced at the level cap, WoW has become more and more focused on that endgame content. The last time we got a zone for single-digit-level characters was in Mists of Pandaria, which came out 8 years ago. The emphasis has been on getting characters to max level as quickly as possible, which is why we've started getting a free character boost with each expansion since Warlords. And that makes sense - with most of the players at the cap, you want to allow new players (or new characters) to get into the realm of WoW where things are actually social and you can do the cooperative content the game is built for.

And that's why the level squish, though controversial, is probably a big idea.

Even as they've nerfed the amount of XP needed to level up, and as they've implemented systems to make that nerf less awkward, like level scaling, the fact of the matter is that it takes a LONG time to get a character - even an Allied Race character that starts at 20 - all the way up to the cap. There was a time when the fact that Death Knights started at level 55 felt like a massive head start, but so much content has come out since then that it doesn't actually feel like a leg up.

So soon, you'll just need to get to level 10, then choose any expansion's original level-up range (or Vanilla/Cataclysm revamp) and just do one of those to get up to 50, at which you'll get into the new Shadowlands content.

The question, then, that I have, is this: do heirlooms still need an XP buff?

Leveling a new character is going to be ridiculously faster in Shadowlands. Do we need that 50% xp boost as well?

Now, sure, some people are always going to say faster leveling is always better. And I think there's also a very reasonable argument to be made that, with all the gold invested in upgrading heirlooms, it would seem cheap to remove what, to many, feels like their primary asset.

And yet, there's a kind of tyranny to heirlooms. I've gotten so used to using them on alts (especially after they implemented them as part of the "collection" system) that I'd feel wrong for not using them. It reminds me of the way they changed rested XP in the original WoW beta - originally, "rested" experience was considered normal, and if you went through it all, you'd have "exhausted" XP, meaning you weren't earning as much as you would if you were rested.

People hated this, because it seemed like it was punishing them for playing the game. But the thing is: Blizzard didn't actually change the mechanic. Instead, they made "rested" into a bonus you got for logging off for a while, and as a mechanic to help players catch up, while "exhausted" just became "normal."

The problem is that heirlooms now feel like "normal" when leveling, while not using them feels like it's "exhausted." Of course, Blizzard isn't really to blame here - there's no implied penalty to just using ordinary gear. But it's an easy trap to fall into, especially given the Everest-ian climb that is going from 1-120 (or 20-120) these days.

The level squish and changes to leveling are, effectively, going to be the most profound XP buff the game has ever experienced. Maybe, then, we might feel less compelled to use heirlooms?