Alrighty so, i know we have wow classic and the live edition. Also i know that we can do any of the older content anytime we want, i was talking to some friends at my RL job about how the Tmog system is awesome but has its flaws, same with the current best in slot gear and how it just seems like we are grinding the same stuff as the guy beside us. now bear with me.
i think it would be a wonderful idea to make it to where all the old raids from the past expansions are max level and viable gear for endgame content.
example: Molten Core, incredible raid, revolutionary for the MMORPG world no doubt, but aside from classic theres no real way to enjoy that aside from going in and wrecking it with a max level character, not to mention, when you do that you JUST get Tmog. then you go back to grinding the same endgame gear as jimbo over there.
why not make it to where you have the standard regular raids that are the original levels, and then a max level raid version? just mark it as “Heroic” and ramp up the mob/boss/gear stats/levels.
doing this would cut out the boring endgame stalemate and increase gear diversity, not to mention, would make use of dead content and increase the amount of endgame play-ability.
thoughts and friendly comments please, just a casual players thoughts.
-Dagnabit.
To me, this is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory, but would be very hard to actually implement.
Blizzard already does TW dungeons and a couple TW raids. Getting the tuning right for these has proven to be quite challenging. It’s not a simple matter of increasing the levels/stats of the mobs and bosses.
For one, the older the raid boss, the easier it is by today’s standards in terms of mechanics. Boss fights in raids now are much more complex in terms of mechanics than they used to be. Even in Classic with players at the appropriate level and using the abilities/spells available then; the first raids were very easy. MC was being cleared with smaller groups with players decked out in quest greens and there was still little challenge. The fights were just simpler back then, partly because we lacked any previous experience to build on.
Another issue is the vastly different toolsets that players have now. Old abilities are gone, new ones are in their place. Classes are missing interrupts that used to have them, cooldowns have been removed, etc. These things were all part of designing boss fights, so some are now much easier/harder due to these changes.
TL/DR; they won’t be able to just inflate the health, damage, etc and have these fights work at max level. Each fight would have to be re-tuned to keep it challenging (and doable) with the current gear and abilities. And that would have to be redone with each expansion. While it could be fun, it’s just not very practical.
This would take vast amounts of dev time to balance and have working correctly. Far more than they can spare when the current content is so wildly unbalanced as it is.
I’m not sure what you mean by “worth going to.” If older content dropped catch up gear like Timewalking does now, that might be OK; though, old set bonuses might still create some balance issues.
If you’re talking about older raids dropping legit, end-game gear, that presents some serious problems. Imagine being in a progression guild and having to run every raid in WoW’s history every week. No thanks. And if you’re not in a progression guild, how do you choose which raid(s) to run? Imagine every member of your guild looking for BiS gear from a different raid. And if they’re all dropping current level gear, simple raids like MC are naturally going to be favored over today’s vastly more complex raids even if they’re incredibly boring.
FFIX has a system where you can queue for a random dungeon/raid/etc. from a pool of older content. As a reward, you get a currency that’s relevant in the current end game. I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that, but I don’t think you can just make every raid in WoW’s history relevant end-game content.
I can appreciate your optimism, but I don’t think this would be applicable for so many reasons.
The main reason is because it would just be extra work to maintain for very little payout. Balancing one raid is enough work as it is and suggesting that they make previous content relevant is either asking for it to be maintained/balanced or ignoring it so it stays imbalanced. I don’t believe Blizzard would put out content they don’t intend to keep balanced in some respect. Yes, there are plenty of examples of imbalance, but knowing beforehand it wouldn’t be balanced is a different story.
The amount of resources this would take to make it work is absolutely not worth it, simply up-scaling the raids health and damage but giving it high-end ilvl would break the balance of the game, the old raids are far too easy to give current content item level.
Old raids still have plenty of people running them for transmog, there is no logical reason as to why they need to be relevant years later, it’s not dead or unused content. You run the risk of overwhelming newer players if old content gave current rewards, they would likely feel like they had to clear it to get the highest item level.
Not only would it take a massive amount of dev time you also risk balance issues with old trinkets scaling to current ilvl, some classes would have to run old raids to get items for current raids. A lot of players disliked having to do EP for Ashvane and Font as it is and that’s 1 tier difference. Imagine how frustrating it would be for players who want to get into raiding but they know they need to run HFC to get Archimonde class trinkets?
Asmongold and Rich Campbell are currently shooting this idea down on All Craft… I’m not sure if it’s you that is suggesting it, but they’ve made some great points on tank scaling and mechanics. Give it a watch on Rich’s stream.
They did a revamped MC for max level for an event. It was an absolute train wreck. Lets not waste time on out dated content and spend time designing new stuff that has not been played a million times already.