Shiny New Unannounced Feature

There seems to be a developing tradition among final patches in expansions. 3.3 brought us the Dungeon Finder, 4.3 brought us the Raid Finder, and it looks like 5.4 (or 5.5 or whatever winds up being Mists' last one) is going to bring us... something.

But we do actually have a bit of information, in that hints have been dropped. The thing is, WoW is by far the biggest and also one of the longest-lived MMOs out there (I believe Everquest is still up, which is where a lot of the older veterans of my guild started out.) The point is, there's a ton of content. Altogether, excluding those that have been shut down (and counting revamped ones as a single raid) there are twenty-nine raids in the game, with at least one more coming during Mists. And if you think that's something, consider that there are seventy-two 5-man dungeons.

When Burning Crusade was first released, I was a wee newbie, with hardly a character above level 30, walking around in "of the wolf" gear. I had heard about these new things called "heroic dungeons," which were lower-level dungeons re-tuned for level 70 (the max level at the time. Keep up, people.) What I thought was that this would apply to all the dungeons, but instead it only applied to BC-era ones, which in retrospect was fairly reasonable.

The new feature they're teasing us with is supposed to open up a lot of old content for players who are already at the cutting edge (or really just current.) Obviously, there are a numerous ways this could be applied, but here's a concept:

We know that Blizzard can futz with our iLevels, lowering them for challenge modes or even just testing on the PTR. We also know that they can futz with the iLevels of individual pieces of gear, thanks to the since-removed upgrade Ethereals.

So here's a radical idea: what if they could simply scale a dungeon and all of its rewards up to the max level?

Let's propose a fourth difficulty level for dungeons (or a third for raids,) a kind of "throwback heroic" difficulty. What this would mean is that the dungeon scales up to your level, and all the loot that drops off the bosses becomes the iLevel of whatever heroic dungeons ought to be dropping during the current expansion (so 463 today.)

This would vastly expand the options for people who might be tired of running the same nine dungeons over and over (though I have yet to get tired of the new Scholomance - love that place.) It also means you could pick up things like that trinket from ICC25 that turned you into a Vrykul and have it actually work well at level 90.

Even without the upgrading of loot off those instances, the ability to power yourself down and see the place as it was meant to be seen would be fantastic. It's pretty seriously hard to get ten level 70 people together to hit up Karazhan, and in fact, given the way talents, abilities, and mastery has shifted around, many people would not have a complete toolkit to be serious raiders at that level anymore. With a system like this, you could toss down your Hammer of Light to round up those dancing ghosts outside of Moroes' chamber.

One of the traditions my guild has is the old-school run. Back when we were a regular raiding guild (the glory days of ICC - a main run and an alt run each week) we did old-school runs every week, hitting up an old raid from the BC or Classic era just to see the place. It was great, because otherwise I'd have not been able to see those places until 5.1 lifted the requirement to be in a raid group in order to enter one. It also meant those bosses with mechanics that just plain needed multiple people would go down just as easy.

If the new feature is anything like what I described, it will make for an even better version of the old-school raid, in that you'll actually be able to experience the boss mechanics, rather than killing things in a matter of seconds.

Of course, the new feature could be totally different, so who knows?