I often have this phrase in my head when I see which amount of looms many guys piled up over the years:
"there are too many floating around, and I want to make heirlooms very special"
Best chadz quote ever, when you realise the mod went in this direction only once, when the gen xp bonus was capped.
This heirlooming stuff started being wrong after the upkeep patch. Before that heirlooms were actually rare, special and quite powerful but that was fine since you had to sacrifice a lot more than now to get them, which caused them to be rare in the first place.
