Breakfast Topic: Musing on old-world instances
When we first heard about heroic level instances in the Burning Crusade, many of us were thrilled at the thought of revisiting our favorite low level instances. We would have them boosted to an end-game level and resurrected into regular play. Then we found out that only the dungeons in Outland were geared up for heroic levels. At least one player was pretty disappointed by this news. One of our readers, Sean, asked to open up a dialog about old-world heroics.
Running the old world dungeons as actual five-man instances seems pretty rare these days. Sometimes we skip past them due to decreased leveling requirements, and an ability to gear our alts with gold earns on our mains. Often when we actually venture into these instances at the appropriate level, we are tailing a capable level 70 character. It's kind of a waste of space and programming effort for Blizzard to leave these instances gathering dust.
The biggest problem with revamping these instances for heroic mode would be the amount of time that it would take to complete them. Blizzard has largely changed the structure of dungeons to make them easier to complete in a reasonable time. At least we shall be seeing Naxxaramas again in Wrath of the Lich King. Well for some of us it will be again. A substantial portion of the current player base opened their accounts after the release of Burning Crusade. My first character hit level 60 in December of 2006, so I haven't seen much of the Pre-BC endgame.
Time and again, Blizzard has assured us that there are no plans to revamp old instances for use by high level players. As I've mentioned before, I love Wailing Caverns. As it is, I find excuses to run through that instance. I would be happy to go into it when it was actually useful to me.
Which old-world instance would be on the top of your heroic wishlist?
