Head and Shoulders

Finally Evlyxx get back to posting! And today the news is awesome. For a long time I have despised head and shoulder enchants being tied to a faction and today I have just been catching up on the WoW news and found out this bombshell:

Head enchants are gone and shoulder enchants are now supplied by scribes! 

Ghostcrawler

Head enchants are gone.

We decided that putting head enchants on the various faction vendors wasn't working well with our design intent for the factions. There is a lot of max-level quest content in MoP, much of it focused around the reputation with the new factions. I think it's really cool stuff -- worlds away from the old Argent Crusade scourge stone days. :)

In previous expansions, the head enchants on the faction vendors served to force players into that 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 MoP is to give players options in how to play, and the 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 or else players would feel like they had to go back to older content or be missing out on power. This way, helmets are just no longer enchantable and you'll have one less required step to get a piece of loot ready to wear.

Shoulder enchants can now be provided by scribes, so those still exist, but they are also not part of the faction reputation system.

source

This news has made me VERY happy. Not so much teh head enchants but the shoulder enchants. Back in Vanilla shoulder enchants were very limited and were a resistance thing provided by the Argent Dawn. Then in the Burning Crusade it improved when we had stats adding to the enchants but they were still a pain in teh ass to get as you were required to grind away faction with either the Aldors or Scryers, but at least the grind was eased because it was a major plot thread and you could choose your faction to grind meaning that you didn't have to do the same thing repeatedly for all of your alts.Then came Wrath and the Hodir faction grind for shoulder enchants. It was a fun grind to, first time round and one I ended up doing 3 times before Blizzard made them Bind on Account meaning you only had to do it one time. 

More recently though we had Therazane rep grind which once you got the tabard wasn't all that bad but getting the tabard meant that you HAD to quest through the first half of Deepholm on ALL your alts unless you had inscription as one of your professions. As the expansion went on I hoped that the enchants would become Bind on Account items, thus far they haven't and for me this is a huge problem because I have many alts all at max level (which while it sounds bad wasn't that hard as I had all at max level in Wrath thanks to a long period of unemployment) and I absolutely loath Deepholm because I HAVE to do it to get the shoulder enchant. 

While I don't like the loss of a helm enchant, we can live without it and this new direction is absolutely the right thing to do. so for once in this little blog I'm gonna praise the devs at Blizzard for doing something that is a massive quality of life change.