enchants Beheading the Faction Enchants

[Damien 1,514]

Blizzard Official WoW Blog

Head enchants are gone.

We decided that putting head enchants on the various faction vendors wasn't working well with our design intentions. There’s a lot of max-level quest content in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, and much of it is focused on your reputation with the new factions. I think it's really cool stuff -- worlds away from the old Argent Dawn scourgestone days.

In previous expansions, the head enchants from the faction vendors served to force players into specific content. You couldn't even choose which reputation to pursue -- you had to pursue the one with your specific head enchant. Our design intent for Mists of Pandaria is to give players options in how to play, and our previous head enchant design wasn't compatible with that.

Once we decided to no longer offer new head enchants, we made the older ones non-functional to eliminate giving players the feeling that they had to go back to older content or miss out on a little bit more power. Head gear is simply no longer enchantable, and you now have one less required step to get a piece of loot ready to wear.

Please feel free to discuss this with us in this forum thread. Thank you for your feedback!

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft. He thinks there should be a food truck where they sell do-it-yourself food trucks. Some assembly required.

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[MadMonk 154]

I don't mind this very much, that's one less reputation to grind. And I always thought that it was kind of unnecessary as well. Most items have only one enhancement (apart from gems), belts have the belt buckle, most other items an enchantment, the legs have the special leather enchant. Heads always had 2 special things (meta gem and the reputation enchant) and I always seemed to forget the head enchant for some stupid reason. I progressed through half of Dragon Soul heroic without an enchantment on my normal tier head.

[Damien 1,514]

I've always found it gratifying to reach exalted standing with a faction for the first time. What has always bothered me was to have to do it again with all my characters, especially on other servers because the BoA head and shoulder enchants can not be sent cross-realm. Maybe they could have implemented a sort of "account-wide reputation" system, so we would only have to grind a given reputation once.

[brammer 1]

I agree with Damien on the BoA system, or to just make them available as part of enchantment profession - I dont think it should be removed completely. The chore of having to grind out rep with multi characters didnt appeal to me either and normally only done it twice.

[Peelyon 416]

I've never seen the problem with rep grinds, after all if you are willing to put the time and effort into a character to raid then surely you should want to put time and effort into preparing for it too.

Lets face it with the way that reputation tabards have worked you were able to grind the rep for factions as you geared up through heroics, so it wasnt a problem for me. Yes Deepholm got a little tedious for the 3rd / 4th times etc but making certain things in the game a grind isnt a bad thing in my opinion.

I suppose it wont matter too much now, its one thing less to think about when gearing up, but it just feels like another way of dumbing down the game for me.

[Rossta 0]

I also agree, they should be account bound once you have earned them, rather than do away with them completely. The head enchants however are already BoA, for example: Arcanum of the Dragonmaw. The shoulder enchants are not and that truly is a pain having to re-grind the same rep over and over again. I found myself going without the best enchant for some of my less played characters for that reason. I did not mind grinding rep to exalted ONCE to earn an enchant and actually found some gratification in doing so.

Edited June 5, 2012 by Rossta