WoW Pre-Patch Nerfs Heirlooms; Fix Coming in The War Within

With the release of the pre-patch for WoW: The War Within, players discovered that their heirlooms had been nerfed. We’ll explain what happened and why Blizzard is powerless for now.

Thanks to the pre-patch for WoW: The War Within, you can now enjoy the Warband feature. The Warband allows you to send currency between characters and access a cross-account Warband Bank. Another Warband feature is a new type of gear called “Warband Bound” and “Warband Bound Until Equipped.”

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“Warband Bound” basically means “account-wide” or Battle.net account bound, while “Warband Bound Until Equipped” means you can send the item to any character until it is equipped. Once equipped, items become soulbound and cannot be traded or sent, even with the new Warband feature. This system causes a problem with heirlooms that the developers can no longer fix in the pre-patch.

Heirloom Bug Will Only Be Fixed with TWW Release

The change to the Warband system means that heirlooms are no longer account-bound; instead, they are now “Warband Bound Until Equipped.” In simple terms, this means you can still enchant and socket the heirlooms and then send them to secondary characters. However, once a twink equips the item, it becomes bound to that twink and cannot be sent to other characters.

Enchanting weapons before sending them makes the leveling phase much easier. On the official US WoW forum, WoW developer Drough mentions that they plan to address this issue retroactively.

“Originally, we planned to make heirlooms Warband-bound until equipped. After further consideration, we want to continue supporting the playstyle of equipping heirlooms with enchantments and gems and then passing them on to alts as needed. Since patch 11.0.0 is only releasing today, we can’t fix this in the current patch, but it will be adjusted in the upcoming patch 11.0.2,”

said Drough.

With the release of The War Within, heirlooms will become Warband-bound items and can continue to be sent between twinks after they have been enchanted and equipped. Until then, you will have to either do without special enchantments or enchant and socket each item individually. Fortunately, leveling up secondary characters doesn’t take long thanks to Remix: MoP (where heirlooms aren’t allowed anyway) and the TWW pre-patch. The pre-patch for the upcoming expansion has significantly reduced the XP required up to level 70.