5.4 Other than the Raid

Obviously, most of the focus right now is on 5.3's addition of the whole Darkspear Revolution. Horde will aid in overthrowing the brutal tyranny of Garrosh Hellscream, and the Alliance will step in to help destabilize the region for an eventual invasion.

It's all setting the stage for 5.4's Siege of Orgrimmar, which will be the final raid of Mists of Pandaria. Obviously, this is the climax that the whole renewed Horde/Alliance conflict has been building to.

Yet there's likely going to be other stuff than the raid.

5.2 obviously brought Throne of Thunder, but we also got the entire Isle of Thunder, a big zone full of lots of nooks and crannies and special rare-spawn bosses, plus the KTO/SO daily quests and solo scenarios.

I expect we're going to see some other outside content coming in 5.4. Admittedly, the Battlefield Barrens plot certainly plays into the raid fairly directly, but I wonder if perhaps we might see other areas enlivened. It would, for example, be a great opportunity to flesh out the Alliance plot that has been sort of shaky recently (I like Jaina's story, even if by the end of Isle of Thunder she's pulled back from the brink - but that's good, as I don't want to see Jaina become a villain.)

Final patches have a tendency to add something quite big to the game. 2.4 introduced the idea of a daily quest zone, though I'm not sure that's what we'll be getting in 5.4. However, 3.3 introduced the Dungeon Finder, and 4.3 introduced the Raid Finder, both of which had revolutionary effects on the game. (4.3 also brought Transmog and Void Storage, which were pretty cool even if they had little effect on actual gameplay. Also the new Darkmoon Faire, which I doubt anyone can complain about.)

So what might we get this time? Admittedly, Raid Finder was really an extrapolation of the Dungeon Finder system, and all major PvE content is covered this way.

One thing they have been teasing is "something" that will make a lot of old content relevant again. I suspect that it might be a kind of level-scaling for old dungeons and raids. They've shown through Challenge Modes that they can de-power you pretty effectively. Presumably, they could either de-power players or buff up the enemies in old-school raids and dungeons to make the content appropriately challenging.

I think it would be awesome to see all the old areas come back into relevance. I loved, for example, Old Hillsbrad or the Forge of Souls, but these days, there's no reason to go there except for transmog gear.

If they were to implement these beefed up versions of old content, the only thing I'd really wonder is what the reward scheme would be. One of my biggest problems with scenarios is that a rather small amount of VP is not a great incentive to do them. It's so rare that one gets a piece of gear in one's little box, and rarer still that the piece is useful to you, making the whole thing (which, depending on the scenario, can sometimes take a fair amount of time - I'm looking at you, Theramore's Fall) underwhelming.

A big chunk of VP? Well, perhaps if you made these runs reward a serious chunk of your weekly VP quota, they could be good for people uninterested in running current dungeons, but I think it would be more fun if you were to have them give level-90 appropriate versions of the gear they always dropped.

Where would this go in gear progression? I don't know. But it seems that the huge breadth of content would make those weeks where the piece you really wanted didn't drop from this boss or that a lot less painful - you could simply kill Nefarian, or perhaps Marrowgar, or maybe Teron Gorefiend for the 2-hander you need.