True. But what do you learn from Azeroth gear? What itemization was like 15 patches ago? That's not useful. Heirloom does not keep you from learning your class.

elvendude, Agreed, but leveling so quickly can cause you to skip some basics. Not to say I don't or won't use Heirloom or RaF, but the easier it gets, the less the player is prepared for end game content!

Well, frankly you don't really "learn" your character that well while doing a turbo-leveling-hurdle to get to end-game raiding asap. I for instance have ended up using about the three main nukes/moves or each character type I have as alts and just bruteforced my way to 80 and only then can one really begin learning how to _play_ that character class.

Heck, still today I haven't healed even an HC with my priest even thou he's dual spec shadow/holy and farming Naxx-25 at the moment. I'm still learning how to do the shadow priest button/macro dance to get the rotation just-so. Same was with my old main mage during TBC end-game - I had barely even acknowledged spells like Polymorph or Remove Curse before I began raiding Karazhan!

The whole leveling stuff is to milk your monthly fees for a good 6-9 months before you can realistically hit level cap and begin raiding and these RAF & Heirloom & Wintergrasp +xp% bonuses are a way Blizz is trying to not kill the game a) for newcomers with a too long a grind (I've had two friends who both quit at abt. lv56 out of discust and boredom when TBC came out - took them a year to get there...) and b) try to cater for us veterans with a want to have a few alts to facilitate the grind with Heirlooms (that still require alot of PvP/HC's/grinding to get in the first place and are inaccessible for first timers. This ofc is nice that Blizz seems to listen to our QQ, but I'd still happily welcome more +xp gear - loved RAF to get my 8 alts up to lv61 in a flash (you can level your toon to 99,9% of your xp-bar and then grant levels to lv60 to them. The RAF level granter will just add a whole level to your character and not zero the accumulated xp %. Therefore you will end up with toons of level 60 with 99,9% of xp gathered and 1 killed boar will put you over to lv61 ;-) Worked wonders when I brought up my old trusty lv29 PvP rogue at 99% xp with grants to 60 and dinged to 61 with my first hellboar at the Honor Hold gates...

leveling a druid as feral and healing in endgame
leveling a warrior as dps and tanking in endgame
etc...

the playstyle is often very different between leveling and raiding

@Matthew

Basics like what? In WotLK most classes don't need to use their utility abilities and just need to min-max for their role (I wouldn't be surprised meeting a mage these days that didn't know what "polymorph" was). And IMO Old World content is teaching people the wrong basics more than it serves as an instruction to how to play your class. It is the reason you see hunters gemming for spirit and int. I mean they put spirit on warrior armor ffs. Going through the old world is like watching someone trying to connect a Colecovision to a HD TV.

TBH next expansion they need to go back over the levelling experience and start new characters at a boosted level with a condensed number of abilities (eg they should get rid of all the other heals besides Flash Heal and Greater Heal for priests, they have made those other abilities redundant since before BC).

That's why, when I'm leveling an alt with heirlooms, I make sure to get the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement. It's a better way to learn your class than killing 15 wolves or gathering ten pieces of scrap metal.

Anyone who thinks leveling is to learn your character isn't very bright....

Lets go over what I learned on my druid so far from 1 to 17.

-Bear form is for dps
-It is important to shift out of bear form to keep moonfire up
-Rage bar never goes over 20
-Spam my 2 key as fast as I can to queue my 'on next swing' ability

I'll try it in a Naxx pug when I hit 80 and see what happens.

I don't know, I think leveling at least gives you some spaced-out options to test one or two new abilities at a time. I had RAF to level my mage, then I powerleveled my lv 20 rogue to 50. Now I don't have a clue what any of his new moves do and I haven't played him since.

The spacing in learning new moves is what's important. Sure, you don't learn exactly what to do in raid, but you understand the mechanics and/or gimmicks on some of your moves. Try making a premade of a different class on a PTR. You can read elitist jerks all you want, but you'll still be a bit shaky when it comes to actually trying to attack the dummy.

For example, leveling as a hunter, when you get feign death at level 30, you aren't overwhelmed because you only have that and a couple other moves to worry about. You get the "feel" for that move, knowing whether you have to stay down, when it will get resisted, and so on. This isn't a big deal when it comes to raiding, sure, but the better you know your abilities, the better you are. Even if it is something indirect like a split second of hesitation because you don't have the feel of your moves, it will hurt your DPS.

The only way you could argue that Heirlooms take away from your learning process is that you do not have to choose gear i.e. you don't learn how to itemize.

But if you already have one level 80 toon buying your Heirlooms then you alredy know the basics of itemization. And you choose the Heirlooms in the first place, so you are itemizing yourself. And looking at the stats on Heirloom items will only further embrace the correct stats you should have. "well my Heirloom has all stam/str/atk pwr .... i should look for other gear that has the same stats."

The +20% xp (or 40% if they put it on head/pants) does quicken the leveling. But not to a point that it makes your levels irrelevant.

I don't think it's fair to compare Heirlooms to RaF. Ones 300%+instant levels for $, other is +20% for lv.80 items.

For a rogue, yeah, it really helps to practice new abilities as you level. You're going to be using abilities from all three trees at 80. But healing and tank classes are very clearly not intended to level in the same spec that they will use at max level. I'm lvling a shaman enh fully intending to switch him to resto at 80. There's no way I'd lvl resto and we only recently got the option of dual spec.

Personally, I think this makes dual spec alot more necessary than it ever was before. At one time, playing your character all the way from 1-60 was what the game was about. Now it's about playing at 80 only. So, you could have a good play experience as a lvl 45 prot warrior or holy priest at one point, but now it would be masochism. (Maybe not so much the warrior.)

Solution, imo: greatly reduce the cost of dual spec so that people can have some clue what they're doing when they get to 80. My newly dual-specced tree druid would have appreciated that.

Anyone who claims RaF is better for learning a character are not credible altoholics, they just think less of the levelling process because it is now easy to exploit RaF. Heirlooms aren't so bad to 10%/20%, but still it is like opening the gates for people who never bothered doing it _normally_ pre-Wrath. And levelling used to be a noob-filter, but now anyone can be a Deathtard, go to lvl XYZ instantly and then proclaim they have "skillz" of all the lower levels they missed. The days /played needed should always be constant.

@Bullseyed, because Cat form is only available at lvl 20, OF COURSE then Bear form is a viable DPS, so comparing lvl 17 to Naxx is idiotic.

@Ray "loved RAF to get my 8 alts up to lv61 in a flash", well a flash is not long enough to learn anything. Skipping the game 8 times and claiming all those points is mindless nonsense. They are not a veteran, they have no idea what levelling might teach, they have literally skipped 8x60 (480!) levels.