Details Appear about Timewalking Dungeons - And They're Not All Good...

6.2 will add Timewalker (or Timewalking...?) dungeons, opening up past expansions' dungeons for players to fight their way through. Characters will be drastically scaled down to an item level appropriate for the given dungeon (an example I saw as 175 for Wrath dungeons, which was roughly where one would be when one started in the 3.0 heroics.) The dungeons will drop the gear they did back in the day, but scaled up to 690 (at least during Warlords) and with the newer gear implementations (like all plate pieces having both Strength and Intellect.) You'll be able to run classic dungeons from yesteryear in a way that remains challenging and fun. Also, the feature will be available to lower-level players as well - as soon as you clear an expansion's level range (such as hitting 81 for Wrath) you'll be able to run them for level-appropriate gear.

Ok, that's the good news.

Here's the not so good news, or the bad news if you will:

Timewalker Dungeons will only be available on certain weekends from noon on Friday to noon on Monday. It appears that they won't be available every weekend - there will be seven different weekend events, two of which will be Timewalking events. (No word on what the other five are.)

It also appears that you'll queue for the dungeons randomly. No word on whether you can queue for specific dungeons.

At the moment, they are only testing certain Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. Specifically:

Arcatraz
Black Morass
Mana-Tombs
Shattered Halls
Slave Pens
Ahn'Kahet: The Old Kingdom
Gundrak
Halls of Lightning
The Nexus
Utgarde Pinnacle

Though before you get upset - that's just the ones that they're testing for now. It's possible that it's just an attempt to test the scaling tech and that we'll get everything from BC through Mists (some of the vanilla dungeons might be tougher.)

At this point, the only seriously upsetting aspect of this announcement is the limitation of when one can do it. Making it weekend-only is pretty mean to players who can't play on those days. Also, I worry that limiting it to only two out of seven weekends will make it a mad scramble to complete. Granted, this could be intentional, as it might help with queues, but I think you have to be careful about that sort of gating.

This is a feature people have wanted for a very long time, and I think this limitation could be very detrimental to the feature. However, this is the very first patch of the PTR, so it's subject to change. Likewise, I could imagine this feature, somewhat like transmog, evolving over time, so even if it goes live like this, we might get a different version later.