The Heirloom Trap

[Thagrynor]

Even then, speeding through levels 30% faster (don't discount exp from killing mobs for the quests) is preferable. Consider that you'll need to kill 30% less things, in a way, but azerite won't help you kill 30% faster.

1000% this. Unless you are pulling gigantic groups to the point that you are just dying and the Azerite bubble/heals would save you (in which case, literally just pull a mob or two less), you will never get enough power from Azerite traits to overcome the 30% less you need to do to level.

Better off getting to 120, doing some WQs and buying some crafted gear to kick off decent WQ gear and getting Azerite gear that way.

[Raugnaut]

Look at it this way - When you would otherwise hit 107, with all those pieces as hierlooms, you'll instead hit 110.

[Mic_128]

What I do is use Legion invasions to hit 111. At 111 heirlooms are 216. Sure they have less stats than the azerite pieces but the xp bonus is just too big an impact to me. The lower stats just doesn't seem to slow me down much so the xp bonus seems to be worthwhile imo.

I went with Island expeditions. You can skip all the BFA intro quests, so you can just run straight to the boat and queue for normals. It took about 2-3 to level, barely 10 minutes each, and you still have a (small) chance at the pets/armour/rep things from it.

[Puri]

Fuck this, stop being an apologist for garbage level service design.

Their team wanted to give people heirlooms for 110-120, but then could not be assed to make basic azerite heirlooms. This is literally all that it boils down to.

The azerite items can't even slightly match up to the value of heirlooms. There is no reason whatsoever to equip one piece of azerite gear until you hit max level.

There's no need to make basic azerite gear, you can expect them to stop working once 9.0 hits anyway. And nobody cares for those pointless traits that the few azerite items you get from leveling anyway, and they are easily made up by the secondary stats.

The problem is that they made the primary stat linearly scale from 110 to 120, so a 111 heirloom has significantly less main stat than the azerite item, around 1/4. This is directly noticeable. A cummulative difference of ~700 main stats@111 is a massive dps difference, so it's not so clear if using heirlooms over the azerite pieces in the lower 110+ regions is a speed gain. The closer you get to 120, the less difference it is going to make.

An easy fix, an easy hotfix would just be increasing the main stat on heirloom pieces >110. Just let it scale from ~200 main stat @110 instead of ~50 upwards, problem fixed.

[StayTuned]

there are several problems with producing heirloom pieces with azerite traits
- which traits do you give them?
- where do they come from? are they separate new pieces? do they take up space in the heirloom tab?
- do your existing heirloom pieces morph into azerite pieces? do they have the tech for that?

those are just some of the considerations from the top of my head, but im sure there are others as well.
im not arguing that blizz couldnt have made those considerations and came up with another solution, just that maybe its just not worth the effort.

Make 3 new items per cloth category. Give them 3 rings, 1 cookie cutter offensive, 1 defensive and 1 utility.
Special type of heirloom that can only be equipped from 110 on. Cost 10k gold each.

Don't think many people would have been bothered by that design.

[In Ogres We Trust]

The Azerite system is shit, and to this day, I have no clue WTF I'm doing with it (nor do I care).

P.S. The system would have been better off if they had made Azerite into a currency for item upgrades, mat purchases, and RNG purchases from a vendor (sort of like the shard system in Diablo III... I can't believe I'm mentioning Diablo III).

[yetgdhfgh]

Time is money friend

Seriously keep the looms on a speed through leveling then you can concentrate on Azerite.

I gotta say iam loving the xp boost its so godamn helpful.

[kaid]

I was so overwhelmed that I was finally able to spend my lvl110 boost on a KT Druid that I went for the Heirloom lvl120 upgrades and spent a ton of gold for it. It was at this moment I knew I fucked up.

So how should I handle this? Wearing my heirlooms and give up on the three 285ilvl pieces and azerite traits or wearing my azerite armor and give up on the 30%xp? Needless to say at this point that I was also so dumb to upgrade my necklace

Honestly leveling up azerite stuff is nice but with the xp bonus if you hit invasions when they are up and do stuff like islands you should level so fast that you won't feel any real pain for lacking azurite pieces below max level.

[rhorle]

The fact you have to think of stuff like that is proof blizzard fucked up again and didn't think a concept through till the end

They thought it through perfectly fine. Azerite while leveling isn't that big of a deal. About the only useful traits while leveling are the movement boosters and speed. The ability modifiers can help but are not a big deal. Stuff dies relatively easy.

[RobertMugabe]

I was so overwhelmed that I was finally able to spend my lvl110 boost on a KT Druid that I went for the Heirloom lvl120 upgrades and spent a ton of gold for it. It was at this moment I knew I fucked up.

So how should I handle this? Wearing my heirlooms and give up on the three 285ilvl pieces and azerite traits or wearing my azerite armor and give up on the 30%xp? Needless to say at this point that I was also so dumb to upgrade my necklace

Just use the heirlooms. The azerite gear traits are insignificant at this point anyways and the itemlevel won't make a big impact.

The only mistake you did was to upgrade your necklace... that was really dumb indeed

[rhorle]

The only mistake you did was to upgrade your necklace... that was really dumb indeed

I bet a lot of people did. I'll admit I did upgrade one with out even thinking about it until I read this thread here.

[Schizoide]

The problem with missing azerite gear isn't just the azerite traits, although resounding protection is really nice to level. The problem is the azerite gear is much higher itemlvl, and heirlooms are supposed to be equivalent to leveling in all blues of your level, scaling up straight through. So using heirlooms you're missing out on a ton of stats and azerite traits.

It's totally worth it for 30% XP, don't get me wrong, but heirlooms used to make you feel overpowered while levling. Now you're actually much weaker than you would be in quest rewards. So that kinda sucks. Like lots of changes in BFA like removing portals, it's not a huge deal but it really doesn't feel great.

[Maudib]

The fact you have to think of stuff like that is proof blizzard fucked up again and didn't think a concept through till the end

The fact that someone feels like they have to boost through 10 levels is proof that Blizzard has messed up the leveling process just like the past several expansions.

[valky94]

the sec stats from the heirlooms make up for the loss of the traits on low levels, on 120 you can get azerite super ez these days

[Omedon]

I was so overwhelmed that I was finally able to spend my lvl110 boost on a KT Druid that I went for the Heirloom lvl120 upgrades and spent a ton of gold for it. It was at this moment I knew I fucked up.

So how should I handle this? Wearing my heirlooms and give up on the three 285ilvl pieces and azerite traits or wearing my azerite armor and give up on the 30%xp? Needless to say at this point that I was also so dumb to upgrade my necklace

Wear the heirlooms, give feedback.

Heirlooms are there to be used, will be used, and no player has a right to expect that other players grouped with them wil choose power over XP and time efficiency. If heirloom players are somehow burdensome in leveling group content, that is Blizzard’s error to fix, not yours to work around.

I had 20+ alts parked at 110 waiting for heirlooms, they will be fully decked out and chain running islands with 1-2 friends or dungeons with 2-3 friends. If my heirlooms somehow hinder the group, that’s Blizzard’s job to address it. I’m sure heirlooms will scale to a “good enough” level, but if not that’s not my issue to address.

Wear your heirlooms. Give feedback via official channels. Give feedback also if you find yourself a “victim” of badly scaling heirlooms, like perhaps as a healer healing an heirloom tank.

Optimal or not, they exist to be used and will be used.

But, yeah, maybe skip the heirloom necklace for BFA!

[Schizoide]

Definitely skip the necklace, and one of the rings until 116 if you have a Sephuz with a 5% XP gem. I also skipped the trinkets as they seemed pretty poor. Other than that, fully heirloomed out to +55% XP.

[ablib]

Fuck this, stop being an apologist for garbage level service design.

Their team wanted to give people heirlooms for 110-120, but then could not be assed to make basic azerite heirlooms. This is literally all that it boils down to.

The azerite items can't even slightly match up to the value of heirlooms. There is no reason whatsoever to equip one piece of azerite gear until you hit max level.

First you say that Blizzard couldn't be assed to make azerite heirlooms, then you tell us why they didn't (because Azerite gear while leveling is useless).

lol.

It's true...Azerite gear while leveling is useless, therefore, it doesn't make sense to make Azerite heirlooms.

[Zyrinx]

This is actually sort of making me look forward to hitting up some IEs on my remaining five non-120s, with that 55% bonus plus 10 for an hour if I did an Invasion recently.

Looking at what, 3 to 4 IEs per level? Also Invasions themselves should be half a level as they were about a third, previous to Heirlooms.

[ablib]

This whole thread could have been avoided if people weren't dumb at making gold. I spent close to 500k yesterday upgrading all my heirlooms, and I didn't even notice a drop in my net worth.

[Yuelle]

This whole thread could have been avoided if people weren't dumb at making gold. I spent close to 500k yesterday upgrading all my heirlooms, and I didn't even notice a drop in my net worth.

How are you making gold?