Dungeon Scaling Tech Mostly Complete, Apparently. How Might Rewards Work?

While we aren't going to be seeing it in 5.4 (which is a mere two weeks away, and is presumably in the last stages of being polished,) Blizzard has made mention of the fact that they have been working on adapting the sort of item-scaling and Flex-raid scaling features to allow us to run old content (as in, previous expansions) scaled-up to our level (or perhaps with us scaled down.)

The only reason, according to Blizzard, that they have not yet implemented this system is that they are not yet sure how to reward participation in such a thing. While it would be nice to simply think that people will run it for... you know, fun, WoW is a game that really encourages you to run content with a potential for a good reward over one that doesn't. Player-power is the biggest reward, but there are a lot of tangential rewards that feed into that that are not so high-stakes as to require a massive challenge. Current raids of course drop the most powerful items, but running dungeons, scenarios, and daily quests give you Valor Points, which is more "grindy," but are therefore seen as a fair way to amass power without perhaps challenging the player quite as much.

I can imagine that you could do a weekly old-school raid quest and you could have a weekly old-school dungeon quest. These would reward a decent amount of VP, but not enough to cap. Subsequent runs of old-school content might reward a smaller number of VP (much like LFR, Dungeons, and Scenarios.) You could even keep item drops the same, as their main value would be for transmog (and thus you aren't flooding the item-possibilities with a million different things to min-max.)

You might then add one or two scaling items or perhaps new pets and mounts. How about a little djinni pet from Throne of the Four Winds or Vortex Pinnacle? Or a flesh-beast from the Arcatraz? Come to think of it, why the hell do we not have a mini-Kobold pet yet?

There is such a wealth of content in WoW that we never really get to see anymore. The heroic revamps of Deadmines, SFK, Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance were all great (well, perhaps Shadowfang Keep might have retained at least some Worgen? Somehow?) but of course, now that we're past Cataclysm, the former two are just as irrelevant as they were before the revamps. Hell, heroic dungeons are such a small niche in the days of LFR that even the latter two (which in my mind were done far better) have even fallen out of relevance within their own expansion.

I'd love to see scaling allowed for lots of things. Just being able to go back and enjoy the quests in a zone again would be cool, as long as it didn't feel mandatory for those who did not wish to do them.

So, even while we see VP being de-emphasized, it is perhaps the perfect reward for content that you want to be attractive while not feeling mandatory. We all get our VP the way we want - some do dailies, some raid, some run dungeons, some run scenarios. Let's let Old-School content be another option there.