For whatever reason, I've gotten really into the idea of a time-travel expansion. It's a little less than three weeks from Blizzcon, and I know that anything I say about the next expansion is likely to make me feel silly, but if they could pull it off (and I know there are some who are super-skeptical about that,) a time-travel expansion could be amazing. The Infinites share my top spot for favorite Warcraft villains with the Scourge (ok, maybe they're in second, because the Scourge is better developed) and I would love to see them branch out to become their own thing: spreading beyond the Bronze Dragonflight so you could start seeing Infinite versions of mortal races (and how cool would it be if in a pre-expansion event, you started seeing Infinite Agents showing up in the major cities, doing nefarious things?)
Anyway, what's gotten me really excited about the idea is that it would be the perfect opportunity to create scaling content.
Setting aside vanilla (where dungeon design was very different,) there have been four expansions full of dungeons and raids. In fact there have been 56 dungeons with heroic modes, all somewhat reasonable in size and scope (though I'm keeping an eye on you, Halls of Origination.)
Dungeons are typically a fun way to blast through some content and earn some valor points, but in recent expansions, we've had the problem that our selection is limited. These days, you only get to run from a selection of nine dungeons when you queue for a random, and during Cataclysm, we spent most of the expansion queueing for either two or three dungeons, thanks the the ill-advised tiered random queue.
However, since then, we've seen two implementations of pretty cool tech: in Challenge Modes and Proving Grounds, they can scale your gear down to an appropriate level, making you rely on skill alone. In Flex raids, the enemies scale up or down depending on how many people you bring.
So, it stands to reason that one could create a system that allows you to run old heroic dungeons that are scaled up to present a challenge to players at the level cap.
Flavor-wise, you could pass it off as being a kind of time-travel. In a time-travel expansion, one could assume that the timeline is in flux, and even your past deeds are in danger of being undone.
Here's how I'd like it to be implemented:
In addition to your typical heroic dungeon queue, which would include all of the current expansion's dungeons, there would be an additional queue that would include every heroic dungeon WoW has ever had. These dungeons would be scaled up to the current level cap, but they would be fixed at a difficulty level comparable to the newest dungeons. To incentivize people to run these, there would be a greater Justice Point drop off of the bosses, but Valor would remain the same so that people did not feel forced to go to them.
Rewards from bosses would be cosmetic, and disenchant for contemporary materials. Likewise, all trash loot (cloth, random green pieces, vendor trash) would be of contemporary level.
The main idea here would be that if you wanted the specific items from the bosses, you would stick to the new dungeons, but once you had all you needed from them and felt you'd rather do something for the nostalgia (or just the variety,) you could run in these ones.
The "Time-Shifted" dungeon queue would also include the most recent dungeons, because the whole point is to increase variety - the more the merrier.
With each new expansion, you would add more dungeons to this queue, so you would have an ever-expanding selection to choose from. In this way, the breadth of World of Warcraft would really give it a huge advantage.
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