Monday, March 01, 2010

Heirlooms and Enchants

Heirlooms and Enchants
Personally, when leveling I rarely ever enchant any of my gear, at least not until I get into northrend. The reason being that, they don't seem particularly worth it. The enchanting mats are expensive, the gear you enchant will inevitably be replaced very quickly, and the enchants themselves are somewhat lack-luster. Spending 40-100g to get +3 or +4 of something on a piece of gear I'd use for a level or two just isn't practical.

This changed with the advent of Heirlooms. Heirlooms effectively negates the last concern, since theoretically it will be used from level 1-80. Because of this suddenly spending 100g on an enchant doesn't seem so unreasonable, provided the benefits are worth it. To this end I started looking for an enchant that would be beneficial for Onaara, wasn't too difficult to obtain, and was relatively "cool".

Enchants

All heirlooms count as having an iLevel of 1. This means that only pre-bc ( Vanilla) enchants will work on heirloom items. This has not always been the case but as of this writing, this is current. There are no obtainable enchants for the Heirloom Shoulders, so that piece is ruled out. The best choices for enchants for chest pieces are:

Greater Stats ( +4 all stats )
Major Mana ( +250 Mana )
Major Health ( +100 Health )

Of those three, Greater Stats seems the most useful. Unfortunately the formula for that enchant seems to only frop off 5-man or Raids in BC. In fact, its basicaly a world drop and thus not realistically farmable. The +3 all stats enchant on the other hand, Bob already had so I decided that was the better option.

While the +3 all stats to chest would at least be useful, and not very difficult to obtain, it was not "cool". I wanted something a bit more flashy, maybe something with a proc. Looking through wowhead, I ran accross an enchant called Crusader. A previous post, Scarlet-cide, says a little of what I went through to get hte enchant. All of this lead me to the conclusion that... I need an heirloom weapon.

Heirlooms

As I mentioned before, at level 40 my choice for heirloom weapon(s) is clear. 2x Venerable Mass of McGowans. But from now until 40 my choices have been muddled. I originally wanted a 2-hand weapon, purchaseable with Stone Keeper's Shards, that would work well with Onaara and Huntry. I've found that there is no such weapon. The only Shard-purchaseable, melee, 2-hander is a sword ( which Onaara can't even weild). There is a decent, 2-hander, Axe available for 65 Emblems of Heroism, but the prospect of spending 65( Bloodied Arcanite Reaper) + 2x(40)(Venerable Mass of McGowan) Emblems seemed completely unreasonable. To this end I decided it wasn't worth stalling and just bought a Venerable Mass of McGowan. I will use that with a Shield or offhand until I can dual-weild at level 40.

On a related note, since Alliance on my realm was finally able to capture Wintergrasp over the weekend, I decided it was time to spend some shards. I decided to get Aged Pauldrons of the Five Thunders. If I hope to be able to heal instances, I'm going to need some dedicated caster gear. Hooff bought both pieces of Heirloom gear, and Bob enchanted the Mace.

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