Old content must be kept relevant

Community WoW Community Council
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I touched upon this in my other posts, but I believe this topic deserves it’s own big post. (Following quotes are taken from my previous posts from here).

“Imagine if you could fight Heroic Ragnaros again without having to specifically create a level appropriate character. Imagine if fighting Ragnaros that way would give more loot than clearing it as we do right now. Imagine all the content that people could experience. The completionism grind.”

“The other one that is also somewhat of a hot topic is Legion Timewalking. Sure, it’s fun. But you do it once, and you don’t do it again, since who cares when it doesn’t give you any M+ rating (even if in a separate bracket), and the fact that it’s going to be gone rather soon. The thing is, these dungeons would be amazing to play (including the BfA ones), but there is no reward associated with it at all. No rating to get, no cool gear to repurpose (wouldn’t it be kinda cool to do level appropriate M+, ya know, making sure old content stays relevant?).”

The fact that WoW has 17 years of development behind it, and we’re stuck playing one patch that was released in July of this year, is pure insanity. The game may as well be called WoW: Sanctum of Domination, the only thing in this game being included is 9.1, and it wouldn’t be any different (it’d be even better cause the file size of WoW is getting MASSIVE).

Here’s an idea - let timewalking be active at any point. In fact, let it be an activateable dungeon and raid difficulty for any old content (not just a select few), letting you scale down to the appropriate level (with Shadowlands stuff being disabled - legendaries, covenants etc), with legacy loot being active + further boosting legacy loot to give you 1-2 more items per boss, to incentivize farming Transmogs and, for those who choose to do XPoff, soften the massive RNG curve.

On top of this, add a “Random Timewalking” dungeon queue, where you can que into leveler dungeons, with the end reward being some relevant currency (such as Justice / Valor, coming off of my PvE gear progression shouldn’t be 100% RNG - and PvP should be 100% deterministic - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com))

I know a lot of players that started playing in BfA and have absolutely no clue of old content, which is just sad. Imagine not being able to experience fantastic raids such as Firelands, Ulduar, AQ40, Tomb of Sargeras, etc…

On top of this, I think it’d be appropriate to have the occasional Timewalking M+ season. Pick an expansion, enable M+, and let people go ham. Give them rating separately, and offer cosmetic rewards such as a re-design of the T2.5 sets and the 4 raid scarabs.

Also, it’d be a treat if the Azerite gear would just work regardless of HoA level, and re-enable Legacy set bonuses, but put a level cap on them so you can’t take them into Shadowlands content.

I understand that this is a lot of work, but you already put a lot of work into those, just to discard them. Sooooo…

This is not even mentioning low level PvP, which I already elaborated on here. The complete neglect of casual and leveler PvP - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

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I think if you look back over the history of the game… classic, tbc, wrath to an extent… there was often a reason to go back and do old content for gear that was still very very good. With the gearing system that exists now - outside of timewalking and what we’re seeing with Mage Tower - there is no reason from a player power perspective to go back and do Mythic Nathria for example.

I don’t think gear from old expansions should be relevant (i.e. thunderfury in TBC), but gear from earlier in the expansion should still matter in some cases. Sure the most recent raid/pvp season/m+season gear will be the highest ilvl, but I am interested to see what happens with some of the SoD gear like the hunter bow and rogue daggers, how long they will be relevant in Sepulcher.

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I’ve been thinking about writing a “timewalking revamp” thread for a while, talking about all of these points you’ve been making :> If the leveler dungeons you’re queueing into are the same ones that actual levelers are queueing into as well, that might mean it’ll be easier for levelers to actually do dungeons - although that might be a topic for another place.

I’m not 100% sold on the idea of you getting JP/VP out of it though, I think we should instead just be able to farm timewalking badges and then do something more interesting with them. There’s a couple of rewards you can get from them already, but nowhere near enough to incentivise people from engaging with this all the time. Maybe letting us upgrade timewalking gear to more current ilevels?.. but that would be a balancing mess, and suddenly your BiS gear comes from raids from the ancient past, and that wouldn’t be ideal. I’d love to hear more experienced theorycrafters’ thoughts on that.

I also think timewalking seasons should still exist, but instead of being the only time you can access timewalking dungeons/raids, it should just give you a rep bonus for an expansion, more timewalking badges from that expansion, and maybe also some additional bonus based on the expansion?

This would be cool! But I wonder how this would be implemented if it is meant to be seasonal, would it last for an entire patch like regular ‘seasons’ do, or would it be something shorter? And they had ought to be recurring, otherwise it might inspire more FOMO.

Yes, I would love to see legacy set bonuses again - although some of them might not actually make sense anymore because of reworked classes. That’s a minor hurdle though!

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True. I actually forgot about them, LOL.

Yep, that’s how it should be. Of course there would be a long pause before it recurrs, since there are many expansions to go through, but I don’t think it would be all bad.

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I don’t like the idea of keeping old content relative throughout multiple expansions. Warframe suffers from a similar issue where the old content is still very much viable and has some required pieces. The problem becomes one of the two, or both.

You need to put in hours and hours of time, often months before you are caught up with the current game/system. One of the benefits of a game like World of Warcraft is that the leveling experience isn’t too overbearing, and you can reach the level cap within a relatively short period of time. At that point you can immediately begin participating in the most recent content accessible. You aren’t put behind an arbitrary gearing system of “requirements”. Imagine having to run multiple different raids across multiple different expansions in order to collect best in slot pieces, and having to do this each time a new raid tier is released.

The second problem becomes participation with such a requirement - if you are coming in the middle of a patch like right now, the gearing system is relatively straight forward. You level, you run some dungeons, you do torghast and get your legendary, and again within a relatively short time span you can begin participating in raid content and build up from there.

If the system was designed strictly around transmog that would be fine, or just a challenge that would be fine. Keeping the gear relevant in any way shape or form is a horrible idea though.

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Yes, Halite already suggested that instead of Justice / Valor, it should reward Timewalking Badges, which is the superior idea - that way, it will have no impact on current progression, therefore keeping the two separate.

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