by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Blizzard started talking about iterating on heirloom storage all the way back when Warlords was announced. As it stood prior to 6.0.1, there were a bunch of disparate methods to get heirlooms of different grades, but you also needed to mail them between characters in order to put them to use. Without the ability to send mail across realms, that made players who had alts on different servers work much harder to get the benefits of heirlooms.

The Heirloom tab was something that then got delayed until 6.1. Blizzard was pretty up-front about this when the decision was made sometime last summer, but now that 6.1 is on the PTR and imminent, it’s high time we get to talking about what the system is and how it’s going to fly.

Of course, keep in mind that this is datamined content, so it’s subject to change before Patch 6.1 is released.

#1: Collect Them All

First and foremost, heirlooms are now collected in a collections tab, just like mounts, pets, and toys. However, there’s one critical difference: when you select an heirloom from the collection, it spawns the heirloom in your bags so you can equip it. This means a couple different things:

1. All of the heirlooms you currently have aren’t going anywhere. You can keep them in your bags or delete them if you want, since you can now always recreate them.
2. The heirloom you create from the collection won’t have any enchants or gems attached. If you want to modify an heirloom, you’ll have to spawn it, modify it, and then mail it around like you do currently. This is a pretty logical constraint of the system.
3. For characters dual-wielding the same weapon (like a rogue with Vengeful Heartseekers) you’ll only need to buy the heirloom once, and then just spawn two of them.

Perks of the collection UI are that you can filter for heirlooms usable by your class, aside from being able to screen for collected/not collected. And in keeping with other collections, hovering over an heirloom you haven’t collected yet tells you where to get it.

#2: Streamlined Upgrades

Most heirlooms now have three upgrade levels: no upgrades means it will scale to 60, one upgrade means it’ll scale to 90, and two upgrades means it’ll scale to 100. You can upgrade heirlooms using special items sold by your faction’s primary heirloom vendor. Note that there are two separate upgrade items for armor and weapons.

Note that the Hellscream heirlooms we all got from Garrosh during Mists are an exception to this: they can’t be upgraded, but still only work from 90 to 100.

An interesting quirk of the upgrade system is that you can either use the upgrade item on an heirloom in your inventory, or you can use it directly on that item’s entry in the collection UI. You’ll get the same result either way.

Finally, upgrading an heirloom replaces the lower-level version of it. Of course, heirlooms still don’t change appearance (unless you transmog them, of course) but if you’re wondering why you only have one Staff of Jordan in the inventory, that’s the reason.

Notice how Hellscream’s Warmace is in this list? Keep that in mind for later.

#3: New Heirlooms

There are two major new additions regarding heirlooms that weren’t in the game before: first of all, there are now a set of six heirloom neck-slot items. They don’t provide an XP bonus, but they do have an on-use effect that will heal you for a sizable chunk of your HP, on a 1-minute cooldown.

Second, collecting 35 heirlooms will earn you the Chauffeured Mekgineer’s Chopper, a mount that comes with a driver while your character sits in the sidecar. Very classy. Also, you’ll be able to use this mount from level 1.

There are a set of four heirloom rings that have been added to the data, but they don’t show up in the collections UI and there’s no data on how they’re supposed to be acquired. We’ll keep you posted on that one, but folks may remember when heirloom pants were added in Cataclysm but weren’t actually made available to players until Mists.

Another interesting shift is this: when heirlooms were first introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, you could get a different set of heirlooms by doing Wintergrasp, which was denoted with different gear with some PVP resilience on it. Now it appears that all of those PVP-flavor heirlooms are being swapped out with identical versions that just have an alternate secondary stat on them instead of PVP resilience. For example, Prized Beastmaster’s Mantle becomes Prized Beastmaster’s Mantle on the PTR; note how the PVP Resilience is now Haste. Meanwhile, the more commonly-acquired PVE mail shoulder, Champion Herod’s Shoulder sports Critical Strike.

#4: What’s Not In the Heirloom Collection

It’s important to be specific about what is and isn’t in the heirloom collection. All of the current PVE and PVP heirlooms you can buy are in the collection, along with the new neck-slot items. Other Bind-on-Account items, like equipment picked up from Archaeology, is NOT in the heirloom collection, since those items aren’t heirlooms; the function of scaling with level is what delineates heirlooms here, not the BoA component.

Additionally, for anyone who collected the three-piece Tradition of Cooking set from the Tillers in Mists of Pandaria, astute observers on the PTR will notice that those pieces no longer have the heirloom item color, and are instead rare. All other functionality is the same, but they aren’t heirlooms, so they’re not in the heirloom collection.

Similar to the other collections, the UI will intentionally conceal items that are impossible to get currently. All of the Hellscream heirlooms will show up in the collection ONLY if you have them; if you don’t have that heirloom, it doesn’t show up in the UI at all.

Verdict: Excellent

All told, the best thing this system does is get heirlooms out of your way when you don’t need them, but lets you get to them from any character on the account if you want them. It also streamlines how upgrades will work going forward: now all Blizzard has to do is modify the items to have a new upgrade level, and then provide an item that’ll unlock that upgrade. Conceivably, you could also see more slots fill up with heirloom gear, since wrists, hands, belt, and boots currently don’t have heirlooms.

Even if none of that happens, though, this new UI will be a boon for people who want to rocket their alts through levels.  As it develops on the PTR, we’ll keep you posted on anything that shifts with the system.