Timewalking Will Group Players of All (Well, Many) Levels

When Timewalking Weekends are in effect, you'll be able to run dungeons from Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King (apparently not Vanilla, Cataclysm, or Mists for 6.2, and possibly just a select few dungeons from those expansions) as soon as you out-level the heroic equivalents, meaning that you'll be able to start Timewalking BC dungeons once you're 71, and doing so with Wrath dungeons at 81.

The Timewalking mechanic will scale players down, reducing their item level to a value equivalent to where they would be if they were just starting heroics when that content was relevant - such as 175 for Wrath dungeons. We'll still likely be a lot more powerful than we were - given all the talent and ability tunings, the removal of hit and expertise, and such - so they're going to try to balance the dungeons to pose a challenge despite the fact that the old balance is pretty much irrelevant in the modern environment.

Players will retain every ability they have at level 100, so there's no fear that you'll have to remember how to Brewmaster without Purifying Brew.

But the interesting thing is that this is not a level 100-only feature. As I said before, as soon as you outlevel an expansion, its dungeons become available to time walk. And because everyone's getting scaled down to the same place, that means that a fresh level 81 might find him or herself running Utgarde Pinnacle with a level 100 veteran.

There are some interesting consequences of this:

First off, this is the closest we've ever gotten to a "mentor" system - something that players have been talking about for a long time. Being able to temporarily de-level to help out a friend without making the content trivial could be a lot of fun.

Secondly, this means that not everyone is going to go in with the same toolbox. While most classes and specs have a pretty complete toolkit by the time they hit level 70, you'll still have some DKs who can offer utility like Remorseless Winter or Gorefiend's Grasp while others just won't have that available to them. Level 100 players with all their Draenor Perks will likely be significantly more powerful than players who haven't gotten theirs yet. Hopefully, the dungeons will be tuned so that having an actual 100 player in the group will be a bonus rather than a necessity.

I'm really eager to see how this feature turns out. I dearly miss running some of those old dungeons, and even when leveling up a new character, it's not really the same experience, given the way that player power across all levels has gone up significantly over time (to be fair, part of that is due to more players having more experience.) I'd love to have a fight against King Ymiron that isn't just brief bursts of carnage between his stunning everyone to invoke the spirit of some previous Vrykul king.