Old Dungeon Revamps

Yes, two posts in a row, so sue me.

When Cataclysm was announced, we found out that, in addition to the old-world revamp, two of the most popular dungeons from vanilla were getting the same treatment. Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep were both emptied out and filled with new enemies and bosses, with a couple exceptions (Silverlane and Springvale.) Overall, I loved these new instances, but at the same time I felt that we lost a bit in the revamp.

Deadmines is, I think, the more successful of the two revamped Cataclysm dungeons. If you do the quests in Westfall (and really, if you haven't, it shouldn't take you long to level up a human character to 10 and check it out,) there's a pretty compelling story disguised as a CSI parody regarding the Defias and the economic depression that's hit the Alliance lands. It's actually one of the few places where the Alliance has been given some moral ambiguity to play with. The Defias might ultimately be thugs, but their motivation is not some kind of dark apocalyptic new world order. They just want respect from a society they feel has exploited them. There's also a good question of what sort of consequences our adventuring ways might have.

When we went in to kill Edwin VanCleef, we didn't think much of it, because the guy was "a bad guy," and even by level 15 most of our characters have a kill-count that would shock Rambo. But if you do the quests in Westfall, you see that by killing this guy - admittedly a dangerous criminal - you've left Vanessa VanCleef an orphan (every notice that Warcraft has tons of fathers but basically no mothers? What's up with that?) In many ways, you (or the players who leveled before you) are responsible for Vanessa VanCleef. If I were a roleplayer, I think Jarsus would need a bottle of scotch after running Heroic Deadmines.

Shadowfang Keep is a bit more problematic. On one hand, I think it's a fun dungeon, and Lord Godfrey is such a wonderfully hateable villain. Seriously, first he sells out his countrymen, then he turns around and betrays the Forsaken. No one likes this guy. Still, SFK loses a bit of its original character. This was originally "The Worgen dungeon." Granted, we now have Worgen players, but if you play through the modern SFK, it's composed entirely of the undead - there's not a Worgen to be found, except in the ghosts that Silverlane summons. While Deadmines was always a slightly off-kilter dungeon with the Defias as its main villains, SFK feels wholly different, even if the map is unchanged.

However, given the Cataclysm revamp, it made sense to go back to these dungeons, and even if SFK is hardly recognizable, it is still totally justified by the quests in Silverpine.

So now we come to Scholomance/Scarlet Monastery. Mists of Pandaria is not doing any of the zone revamps we got with Cataclysm, so the reason we're going back to these dungeons is not entirely clear. We might not even get a quest explaining why we're heading back. So what are these revamps here to accomplish?

Well, these were also very popular dungeons (Scarlet Monastery is where I cut my teeth as a tank, actually.) That's basically the only reason I can come up with. It's not a terrible reason, but I have a few suggestions:

Without the zones around them getting an additional revamp, we are left with the assumption that story-wise, they have not progressed any farther than their current Cataclysm states (admittedly, Scarlet Commander Mograine should probably be dead, because I think his Death Knight brother killed him.) So for the most part, I think we're going to be fighting the same characters in there.

The other worry I have is that by removing certain bosses or rearranging dungeons, some of the crazy old gear we could get there, or some of the fun experiences, would be gone. There's a solution, though:

Just create new heroic modes. Leave the normal dungeons exactly as they are now. I don't know what sort of technological problems could arise from having normal and heroic dungeons with different layouts, but while I'm actually quite excited to take on Scholomance on heroic, or beat up the Scarlets, I think there has to be a way to add on to these dungeons without destroying the old ones.