Do you level with heirlooms?

While leveling my Lightforged Draenei, I’ve had her kitted out with heirloom gear. With rested XP, the levels already go by pretty quickly, but the heirlooms certainly don’t hurt.

However, heirlooms are no longer the best gear I can get. Even ordinary quest items often slightly outlevel my heirloom gear, and sometimes I wonder… is the extra experience worth it? How much use do I really get out of these bonuses anyway?  Would better gear that lets me kill mobs faster do just as much for me?

Then, of course, I think about how I’d have to retransmog my gear every time I got a new piece and decide to keep my heirlooms on. As you can tell, it’s a completely practical and gameplay-based decision. (Looking good is part of the game, right?)

But my Lightforged is only in the mid-60s. On the upper end of the scale, I have a Rogue who’s been sitting at level 100. She’s an old alt that I haven’t played in Legion, and I thought I’d level her up to see the class story. I played her without wearing any heirlooms for three levels before I suddenly thought… I own all of the leather heirlooms. Why don’t I wear them? 

It hadn’t occurred to me to toss heirlooms on such a high level character. (Perhaps because when I last logged on the character, 100+ heirlooms just didn’t exist.) When I did switch to heirlooms, I found my ilevel went up a bit. While I had a couple of pieces of warforged or titanforged gear, most of my gear was lower level. At the top end of the game, heirlooms were better than what I was getting from quests.

But since I’ve put them all on, leveling doesn’t feel particularly faster or slower. I kill things, get experience, and eventually level up, same as always. I’m sure it is faster, but there’s no real difference in the experience.

In the end, I think the convenience matters more for me than the experience or the stats. Having heirlooms that scale with me means I can abdicate any need to think about gear until max level. Which is great, because I have no interest in making subtle gear decisions until the end of the game when gear becomes the primary means of advancement.

So now I’m wondering, readers: how many of you deck your alts out in heirlooms to play them? Do you only use heirlooms when their item level is better or do you use them all the time? Or do you, perhaps, prefer to save your gold and skip buying the things in the first place?