There have been many words written in the period prior to 4.0.1 and since on heirlooms, how they should have been bought before the grand restructuring of the badge currency system. How many players are going to be dropping them onto their newly minted Gobrgen to get to 85.
I have to admit I’m sat here wondering “why“.
Let’s have a look at this, yes the end game is where the pretties are, the purples, the new raids and so on. However this expansion also has a different element to both the previous ones.
The Burning Crusade brought us Outland and the two new starter zones, Wrath gave us cold feet, Northrend and the DK starting zone. Both gave us a pile of new 5-man and raid content, Wrath let a lot more players into the raid content than ever before, this rocked.
Cataclysm is giving us a stack of new zones, dungeons and raids. The biggie however is the reworking of the Vanilla world, the questlines have been tweaked, left alone or completely ripped up and replaced depending on where you are in the world at any given time. So I have to ask myself, “why do I want to rush through this?“, to a large extent we’re getting a new game at level 1.
I admit I might slap on the heirlooms as I step through the portal into Outland and keep them on through Northrend, this is content which I can now do in my sleep.
As for the new levelling (80-85), at current tuning for a level 80 stepping into the new zones I’m reckoning on being at 85 halfway through Uldum. For those of us rocking T10 gear it’s not going to be replaced until we’re well into Deepholm and for those in 264/277 heroic stuff then it’s entirely possible that it’ll be still be good well into Uldum and beyond.
So, enjoy the new quests, it won’t take long to get to 85 on your capped out toons.
Above all, speaking as a tank & healer, please remember where your CC is, the game is no longer about how much AoE you throw out.