That Which Has Been Found Again!

Good news for anyone who came *this close* to getting your LFR tier set that is awesome for transmog, or who is wondering whether scenarios like Battle on the High Seas or The Secret of Ragefire are going to go away in a puff of smoke come level 91:

New NPCs are popping up on the Alpha that will allow you to get into these instances. While LFR has allowed the average player to become a raider (though they require an above-average amount of patience,) and scenarios have allowed Blizzard to create quick and dirty controlled environments for unstructured group play, there has been a glaring problem, which is that these are things that require the Group Finder to use, and thus as soon as you out level them, the Group Finder no longer allows you take part.

While theoretically there could be a group of people who are level 85 who can run LFR Dragon Soul today, the vast majority of players are now incapable of going back in there and getting, for example, a Blue Gurthalak. And while personally I've been a bit underwhelmed by most scenarios (though that has more to do with their rewards than the scenarios themselves,) it'd be nice to be able to back and, say, run A Little Patience again at some point.

There will be three NPCs in the Seat of Knowledge in Pandaria who will allow you to access level 90 scenarios, heroic scenarios, and LFR raids, and there will be a Wyrmrest representative standing outside the Dragon Soul instance portal in the Caverns of Time who will allow you to take on an easier version of Deathwing with blue-colored weapons.

It's a reasonably elegant solution, and a nice acknowledgement of the desire to run old stuff for nostalgia.

Now, if you ask me, this sets a fantastic precedent for keeping old content around, and I would ask Blizzard to, when they have spare time on their hands (and that's a thing that DOES HAPPEN, because they said that was why BFD, RFK and RFD are getting revamped,) that they put similar NPCs next to any dungeon or raid that has been revamped, so that you can go back and run the original version.

I have to imagine that Blizzard hasn't just deleted the files on those old instances. The only major downside to a revamp of an old, beloved dungeon is that you lose that old, beloved dungeon. Sometimes it works out all right, like with the Scarlet Monastery, but sometimes the dungeon becomes something entirely off-theme, like Shadowfang Keep (which was the Worgen dungeon originally.)

I would love to see an Argent Dawn NPC in Plaguelands who lets you run Naxxramas-40, an arrogant Amani Troll who lets you go into Zul'Aman-10, and other such NPCs that allow you to run the old content (complete with old gear for transmog, which is a big part of the motivation for this in the first place.) Yes, the new Scholomance makes far more sense as a modern dungeon design, but sometimes I miss hanging a left and going into that crazy alchemy lab with Ras Frostwhisper, or fighting that Gargoyle demon on that ledge whose name I can't remember.

I'm not designer/developer, and I don't know if there would be complications in implementing this, but the big selling point is that these old instances would be untouched, and that the revamps would remain in place. In fact, with NPCs like this, I would be far happier to welcome major revamps like the ones we saw in Mists, because it would be purely additive to the game. It would mean that I could fight both VanCleefs!