With patch 6.1, Blizzard introduced a new heirloom system to keep track of the various items you find that you can use while levelling that scale with the level of characters. It supports upgrades and keeps the upgrade progress on an account wide level. Upgrades are done by buying an item and using it on the heirloom in the heirloom journal. If you upgrade an item in the journal, every character wearing said item automatically has the upgraded version.
As with every new expansion as of lately, in Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard introduced a new legendary quest line. Which, at the end, rewards a legendary ring. This ring exists in many variations, strength DPS, agility DPS, healing, agility tanking, strength tanking. As soon as you reach a new step while progressing through the quest line, you get a more powerful variation of the ring. If you want to also have a different version of the ring, let’s say for playing a different spec, you have to buy it for gold from a vendor. Those additional rings do not upgrade, if you upgrade your main ring, you have to buy the higher version again, for gold, at the vendor. At the end, when you reach the legendary quality level of the ring, you can still get upgrades for it, in the form of an item that drops from the last boss of the current raid tier. Each item increases the rings item level by a flat amount. It does not increase the item level of any secondary rings that you have and might want to use while playing a different spec. This time there is no way to buy a higher item level version of the ring from the vendors.
So after reading these two paragraphs you should already have a faint idea of what I’m going for with this. Basically Blizzard implemented a nice system that does not cripple players that play many alts, offers smooth and easy to understand upgrading, yet still costs a bit of gold, which is always a goal for them, to keep the economy healthy, and then they decided to not apply it to the most important item of the whole expansion.
I’m pretty sure it is already too late for them to switch the rings over to the better system now, but I hope they read this and learn for the next expansion.
How this should have worked:
– At the start of the legendary quest line, you get to chose one ring. If you want to use more than one ring, you have to buy the base version at a vendor.
– At each new step quest line, you get an item that upgrades all your unlocked rings to the next level. The vendor now offers the higher item level version for sale.
– At the end of the legendary quest line, all your legendary rings are on the same level, if you spent the money at the beginning and unlocked them all.
– Now with each raid end boss kill you get an item that, once again, upgrades all unlocked rings by a flat amount of item level. The vendor now offers the higher item level version for sale.
This way you neither punish alt players, rerollers nor dual/tripple spec users and yet still drain some money from the players to keep the economy healthy. Of course there still could be added requirements for how alts are allowed to unlock the rings, like having to complete the quest lines before they can use the upgraded version so alts don’t get everything “for free” without doing anything.
What do you guys think, good idea?
