As of January 6th, 2013 there are still problems with Heirlooms that Blizzard could easily fix but hasn’t.
Heirlooms were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, they are bind on account items that can be transferred to another character on the same account and server.
When they were introduced they were introduced for both PvP and PvE stats purchasable with Justice or Honor points.
The advantage to Heirlooms is that from levels 1 to 80 they would scale, some of them also granted an experience bonus. So every level your item would re-adjust itself to be equivalent to a rare item in stats. Once level 80 they stopped gaining stats. Heirloom items essentially level up with you so that you don’t really need to replace gear in that slot.
With the Cataclysm expansion they introduced more slots buyable from guild vendors: legs, head, and cloak; that all granted experience and cost gold but required certain guild levels. These pieces of gear work till level 85, but they still suffer from the same problem.
The Problem with Heirlooms
Ignoring the fact that you cannot transfer Heirlooms to another server even on the same account, there is a major problem with heirlooms because they are not dynamic.
When you buy a piece of gear you have to buy them with certain stats and certain armor types. For example, in the image above it is an agility leather shoulder piece. If you buy this for your rogue or feral druid, hey no problem, but if you change your spec to restoration on your druid then your’e shit out of luck and have to buy new shoulders.
It’s also leather, so you can transfer it to your hunter if you want, but if you had a hunter with mail shoulders it would be no good to anyone that uses leather. This requires you to spend lots of gold and lots of time farming heirloom items for your other characters, there is no point to this.
The Solution for Heirlooms
The solution is to make the gear dynamic, there is no reason why they can’t be. Each piece of gear should adapt to the class and spec and we should only have to purchase one slot.
If I bought shoulders then it wouldn’t matter which character I gave them to. If I gave them to my mage the stats would be intellect and the armor type cloth. If I gave them to my fury warrior they would change to plate and have strength and damage stats on them, if I swapped my warrior to protection they would change to protection stats like dodge and parry.
The solution isn’t that hard. This would cause more people to want to level more characters and even allow Blizzard to make more money.
So make Heirlooms dynamic and allow them to transfer across servers, k thanks.