There is a lot of untapped potential in the old dungeons and raids of vanilla WoW. I suspect that if there were heroic modes of every vanilla dungeon from Deadmines to BRD, they would be wildly successful. This is due to the cavernous, nonlinear nature of vanilla dungeons. We’d be chewing on them for months. Some of the end game 5 mans would make great 10mans as well such as Stratholme and Dire Maul.
I have lots of ideas for new dungeon content, but it seems like a no brainer to bring fresh encounter design to the already beloved vanilla dungeon experience. Not only would it help the longevity and gear catchup of vanilla by sprinkling in new itemization options, it could also smooth over a lot of class design issues without infringing on talent trees. This could come in the form of class-specific items or targeted solutions to things like manual crowd pummeler, adding a max level option for ferals to get the same result without having to spam gnomer every week.
The next obvious addition to vanilla would have to be full revamps of all reputations.
This comes in the form of changes to rewards, acquisition and time involved. Since it is a seasonal server, reputation needs to be acquired faster and rewards need to be more worth while. There is simply no reason to grind bloodsail buccanneer or shen’dralar reputation in a SOM server. Nor is battleground reputation gear comparable in any way to rank gear. If reputation gains were simply buffed 50-100% that would address a lot, but taking an honest look at the rewards of all reputations could spice things up and give us new goals we’d never previously considered accomplishing before. A lot more people would grind timbermaw if there was a winterfall firewater recipe craft at exalted. Low levels would hit the BGs if BG upgrades were realistically obtainable and worthwhile. Raiders in AQ40 who got benched 1-2 weeks wouldn’t be substantially behind the other raiders in obtaining their reputation rings.
While I myself have always been a purist, I played SOM from start to finish and other than bringing back world buffs, these are the two biggest changes I believe they could do to bring back the classic community.
A recipe to craft winterfall firewater that can only be learned at exalted with Timbermaw? That’s a legitimately great idea. The recipe would be extremely valuable. You’d see entire guilds working together to get the recipe for one person. The reputation takes a long time to grind up, there are a limited number of mobs per server, and as a result, this grind would inspire tons of world PvP. Fantastic idea!
Bloodsail/Shen’dralar reps getting new rewards? Also a decent idea. I’m not sure exactly what kind of reward they could give - it would probably have to be something unrelated to your character’s power but still provides a tangible benefit, like that firewater recipe - but I’m sure someone could come up with something.
I don’t like your other changes quite as much. The speed of the rep grinds is fine - you get exalted with the PvP reputations long before you get the gear from the highest ranks, even with the doubled ranking speed in SoM. Also, Heroic Deadmines literally exists in Cataclysm. The heroic toggle doesn’t belong in classic.
I can agree that next season should have harder dungeons. Not TBC heroic Blood Furnace hard, but you also shouldn’t be able to pull a pack of 5 mobs without a shield and without any CC.
The upgraded dungeon sets (available from day 1 in SoM) are plenty of dungeon content. Completing that set takes like 5 days /played if you have average luck getting your chest/helm/legs/boots/shoulders to drop. Potentially longer if you have bad luck.
One idea I had for Shen’dralar exalted was a summonable highborn elf npc who offers portals to major cities or elven ruins around Azeroth on a long CD, like a Vanilla version of wormhole machine. Would alleviate the pressure of needing a second account with a mage to get everywhere you want to go while not adding directly to player power.
Eh. Traveling is a huge part of classic. I’m not a fan of trivializing travel. That would be a really hard item to get if it’s tied to Shen’dralar, but even then, it’s still taking away from what makes classic great. I like where your head is at though.
i hear you. it could even just be a port to dire maul itself, which , if world buffs made a return, would be a nice utility for getting dm buffs. also an opportunity to set up traps at the portal location to poach world buffed players
dude imagine a lvl 60 heroic deadmine wailing caverns and scarlet monastery tier sets that would be sick
yeah it feels like the next natural progression from what they did before which was allowing tier .5 early, which helped some classes like rogue way more than anyone else but at least did something to bridge the gap from noob to buffed, non world buffed SOM raid content. its also just not that fun running 30 ubrs runs for your tier .5 chest. the prospect of defeating rend event over and over again may not appeal anymore.