I have made more than one post about what I would love to see added to WoW. Unfortunately, they all have been removed when they “update” the forums. With solo dungeons happening, I feel it is time to make another one. As a side note, I have never mentioned solo dungeons in the past. Them being added is just the impetus I needed to make another post like this. And if you want a TLDR, go look at the last bit at the bottom of this post.
What has always driven me to make these posts is the simple truth, I like some parts of previous versions of WoW and would like to be able to play them again. However, I also like a lot of the changes that have happened over time. AoE loot, transmog, auction house improvements, and shared mob tagging have all spoiled me. As someone who is from an RP server who has mained a night elf druid since I started, it goes to say I really do not like a lot of the changes to Kalimdor over the years. So, lets start there.
Having the option to return to the original WoW overworld is one of the highest on my wish list. I liked the old world. I am willing to go without flight there. I understand why it cannot be added. However, I have a modern version of the world sitting on my harddrive because of Classic. I doubt they could just link it, but having it copied over would be amazing. It would be very nice to have a bronze dragon willing to send us into the old world. Rather than just moving to a new phase, it could act like it was sending us to another dimension like the transition that happens when going to TBC. Having one in every starter zone would be even nicer as then I can level a character in a world I really like. And yes, I have played on the classic servers and have been reminded of some of the more annoying things. Having to return to a place several minutes away from a questing area multiple times gets really annoying, but guest what, those quest lines usually have good stories attached to them. To make another point as to why I prefer the older starter zones compared to current ones, the current NE one actually teleports you around a lot. Why they do that, I have no clue. You lose a lot of the ambience of a place when that happens.
Directly after that is being able to have all old zones scale all the way up to max level and not just the start of the new expansions levels. I actually have a number of characters who are level locked so I can run old dungeons and finish older expansions on them at my leisure. And there is another reason why, current leveling gives you no time to enjoy and relax as you do the questing areas. I know people want to get into the new content with alts as fast as possible. I am not advacating slowing down leveling speed, but requesting that I can run even max level characters in old areas with them scaled up to my level and ilevel. what would make it even nicer would be the option to reset the quests in a zone (or what is needed to allow quest chains to work). This goes back to being able to enjoy old content again. In the current NE starting area, one of the fastest ways to get started leveling is just to sit back and massacre the gelkin. They are quick kills that give good exp until you hit about level 5. Then you just start questing like normal. That isnt very fun, just quick. In the classic version, pulling more than one at a time is pretty dangerous. This allows you to get more involved. Not to say it is amazingly better than the retail version, quest mobs with more than a minute respawn time are whole new level of annoying. Yeah, shared mob tagging, it is good for a reason. Regardless, I would love to play those zones again with better QoL stuff.
Then there are older dungeons. Ask me my favorite dungeons and Grim Batol and Vortex Pinnacle are near the top with BRD looking from higher up on that mountain. However, you have such a narrow level range to play Cata and high level vanilla dungeons, when leveling, that it takes forever to get a group. When you do get a group, more often than not, someone just rushes in and pulls everything. The tank is rarely needed. As above, I understand the reason, but there are times when I want to actually do the dungeon.
I have not asked for solo dungeons in the past. I like that solo dungeons will be in the game. However, like something else I will say in a moment, the point of an MMO is to play together with people. Giving people the ability to clear dungeons solo and get as good of gear as people who group up to do harder content goes against what an MMO is. Also, it would be a lot harder to program the AI’s ability to react properly when you get up to the level of one shots. As it is, even on normal, I have seen a few mechanincs where the AI seems to be immune to the AoE damage. Normal being the only option is a good idea.
That said, I would love to have solo dungeons for older dungeons. It means I can go at the pace I want. I can do the content I want, even if there is no one else queued for it,
Like the world content, it would also be nice if I could do old dungeons at max level. Use timewalking mechanics, but have them scaled to mythic level of difficulty rather than the easy normal mode it is set at for timewalking. If I am getting a group together to do old dungeons, I would expect it to be like doing a mythic. We would have to concentrate on the mechanics and not just walk through it. It is meant to be something interesting to do when you want to do something different to avoid getting bored. Directly related to it being used to avoid having nothing to do, it would not give progression level of gear. This is not meant to be alternate progression, but rather doing something to help fill in the downtime between patches. That said, having new transmog gear would be cool. I said no progression gear, not that you cannot get some reward.
Even more amazing would be to allow you to do old raids at the mythic difficulty. Once again, lots of amazing old content and being able to do them again as a challenge. The original Karazhan is one of my favorite raids. TBC Classic showed it is too easy for experienced people to have any challenge. Increasing that difficulty when doing it at max level would be something I would setup a pug raid to do every week. I have friends who still like it and showing it to people every week would be enough to hold my attention for substantially longer.
Once upon a time, we had legendaries. In a previous version, I had this partially silly idea to make running old instances their own progression. You could get gear that had normal difficult ilevels, but had random mini-legendary effects on them. The effects would mimic actual legendaries or old tier sets. As a feral, a good example would be the T4 two piece set bonus. You had a chance to get 1 energy per hit or bleed damage tick. If you stacked that one enough, it could be come that you had 13 chances per hit to get that bonus. They only worked in old content and so did not affect normal content at all. In that idea, there was a normal difficulty and an insane difficulty. You needed to get those mini-legendaries to be able to do the higher difficulty. Add in the raids and it became even more of a way to pass time when you were out of other content to do.
So the short version, let us do old, even currently removed, content as filler content, or just for nostalgia’s sake. Retail has things that annoy the daylights out of me, but that doesnt mean there are not things that cannot make it better.