What if heirlooms made leveling... harder?

[Keilvog]

Changes to make this cooler/more practical:

• New really good looking badass gear sets (you could costumize part of it, like choosing the color) - no more old school repetitive sets.
• A set is a whole piece (one item includes all gear slots) - you don't need to collect them all
• You decide at lvl 1 if you want to do it heirloom style (you can hop off whenever you want but won't be able to hop back in)

Set "curses":

• No passive hp regen and very low mana regen (you can only heal through spells, potions, food, talents, first aid(?))
• -25% stamina
• No flying.
• -50% xp rate (~20hr game time instead of 10hr).
• Increased agro radius from hostile mobs, maybe (because you look badass).

Rewards:

• No gear from quests/dungeons (because your full set lvls up with you) but 300% increased gold income.
• No durability loss.
• Achievements for lvl 20, 40 and max lvl.
• Title reward for max lvl (class specific).
• Unlocks full set cosmetics at max lvl (like challenge mode in pandaria).
• Achievement to do it without dying.
• At max lvl you earn a battle chest with significant resources useful for the latest content, including any currency, prof mats, gold and one random epic weapon of decent iLvl).

Consequences:
Non heirloom lvling will have gearing up excitement (can just do it through quest rewards and be alright but dungeons give great stuff)
No real change to those who don't care about this

Exciting new way to lvl up for those who love to do it.
Great cosmetics to show off your effort.
Challenging leveling experience that makes you want to consider all game mechanics (all your abilities and professions)
Early food buffs could provide minor out of combat healing
People could cheese it but it doesn't matter because it's just cosmetic stuff
New full sets could be added in the future (randomly dropping from world content) which you could unlock the cosmetics if you lvled a new toon with it.

What do you think?

[Witchblade77]

I think it would make me ragequit that if existing heirlooms that took me a lot of gold farming to buy and upgrade so that my leveling was EASIER were nerfed to the point of being beyond useless for me.

if they add new heirlooms like that without destroying existing ones anymore than they already have? don't care, go wild.

[shadowmatrix]

Only if they were a completely new set, i could see plenty of us altoholics accepting the challenge. Gold alts would become a normal thing for raiding guilds.

[kissy kissy]

I'd want my gold back.

[Razion]

The 'no flying' part would make completing a lot of old quests strictly impossible which effectively puts a stop to the cohesive leveling goal they just tried to complete recently. There's also a problem with dungeons: does the de-buff go away and is invalidated if you do dungeons at all (thereby negating any prestige such a challenge has), or are all leveling people who are in the dungeon queues just going to be randomly subjected to having these arbitrarily weaker party members who are apparently also going to be pulling a ton more trash? Without durability loss, this seems rife for exploitation and griefing in terms of people queueing up just to aggro entire dungeons and wipe the rest of a party who doesn't have the durability protection. You would have to restrict dungeons to manually-formed groups for those cursed players at LEAST. And some kind of very slow fly alternative so that people could actually complete the quests they need to specifically for those quests -- otherwise the slow mount would be used to go over all threats in the world, also lessening the challenge.

[Rendark]

Ya that wouldn't piss most people off all right.

[Darththeo]

I am all for increase challenges, but no.

Less health AND no outside Combat Health regen? I am okay with one or the other, but both is just making it harder for literally no reason.

If you want an increase challenge in leveling, there is already a fan made challenges for that. The Iron Man (Death is Permanent, ie you lose the challenge) and the Tin Man (Death is merely a set back).

[Biglog]

The title kind of threw me off, but actually I like your ideas.

That said, knowing Blizzard I doubt it's something we'll see. It's one of those things like player housing that would be great if done deeply and well. But those types of things tend to get watered down, for whatever reason. There always seems to be something small that puts the kibosh on it. The gear would be difficult since they'd have to code a check to make sure it's never removed while leveling to still get rewards/achievements. What if a player gets halfway leveled and wants to turn it off, can they and how? What if players accidentally remove a piece of gear while leveling? They wouldn't want to lose rewards and would have to contact support.

So it seems kind of Debbie Downer, but those are the types of hurdles that come up with things like this.

[Detroit11294]

It'd make as much sense as using an ellipsis in a thread title.

[iamthedevil]

Call em faillooms.

[Darththeo]

It'd make as much sense as using an ellipsis in a thread title.

Well, to give him credit. He did use the ellipsis correctly.

[Sansnom]

[B]Changes to make this cooler/more practical:
What do you think?

Personally, if people really wants a challenge to levelling, I would borrow the concept from the D3 Seasonal characters.

Iron man mode. Dead really means dead.

Completely independent. No feeding of items from other characters. items only shared at max level.

You could add others, like slower XP etc. But the above two would make a good start I think.

[Sevaara]

Changing existing heirlooms, no. Creating new heirlooms to enforce or 'make official' challenges such as Ironman, 100% yes, I think that'd be quite popular. Especially if you were to tie in an achievement with it.

[Keilvog]

It'd make as much sense as using an ellipsis in a thread title.

I didn't even know that was a thing

[MrLachyG]

Well, to give him credit. He did use the ellipsis correctly.

yes but he also misspelled dying.

[Keilvog]

I think it would make me ragequit that if existing heirlooms that took me a lot of gold farming to buy and upgrade so that my leveling was EASIER were nerfed to the point of being beyond useless for me.

if they add new heirlooms like that without destroying existing ones anymore than they already have? don't care, go wild.

In my case, I really just don't care about that.
But in any case, selling the set and getting yourself the money back could be an option.

[Azerate]

Heirlooms have already been rendered pretty much useless. So at this point it's just whatever.

As for new heirlooms for iron man modes etc... sounds interesting on paper, the problem with that is WoW just isn't a game where leveling is intended to be meaningful in any way. All the changes made to the leveling process ever make that abundantly clear. Neither the players really want that, nor the devs. Sure, if you made it into an achievement, people would go for it, myself included probably, but would I find that particularly entertaining? No

[callipygoustp]

Then heirlooms would never be used.

[Morae]

You are already pretty much wearing heirlooms at all times when compared to past. You also cant unequip them since its now just how leveling and xp is scaled.

[MrLachyG]

you want levelling to be harder? go play Classic