Molten Core on LFR

One of the central pieces to the WoW 10th anniversary event is a 40-player LFR raid that sends us into the instance that started it all - Tier 1 itself, Molten Core.

It's actually pretty fascinating. The vast majority of players (myself included) never experienced Molten Core as an actual challenge. This (and the far quicker Onyxia's Lair) came with the game - raiding was Molten Core when WoW first came out.

And because of that, you can really gain an appreciation for how far Blizzard has come.

Because let's be honest - Molten Core is a terrible raid. The bosses tend to have essentially one mechanic, and there are just a ton of adds to justify having multiple tanks. The trash is copious and tedious. And the place itself is drab as hell - kind of literally. It's a fiery cave. Bosses don't have interesting locations - indeed, there are two bosses that just kind of patrol around the trash surrounding other bosses.

I think the main idea behind the raid was to impress with scale. Before going into MC, we never saw anything as huge and intimidating as the stuff we fought there. No one had ever seen a Core Hound before. There was just a novelty of having a huge area in which to fight huge monsters with a huge group of people.

Raiding has come a long way since then. Yes, it has been scaled down. People threw fits when BC shrunk raids to a mere 25 people, but frankly, I've always thought that was a hugely important idea. If you're not a tank in a 40-person raid (and even if you are, to an extent,) your contribution is hard to even quantify. Frankly, I think this becomes an issue as well in 25-player raids, and always enjoyed myself more doing 10-player raids.

This little nostalgia trip actually allows us to undercut the more dangerous aspects of nostalgia - the ones that allow us to look back with rose-colored glasses, prizing the "good old days" over what we have now.

So what do you get for slogging through this fiery cave?

First off - if you kill Ragnaros, you get an achievement that awards one of the coolest mounts they've ever made - a Core Hound (and it's a new model - same design, but rebuilt with modern graphics.) The other guaranteed drop is a iLevel 640 helmet that looks like Crown of Flame off of Ambassador Flamelash in BRD.

You'll also have a chance to get two things: one is a pet called Hatespark the Tiny, which is an armored fire elemental (standard void walker palette swap fire elemental but with black armor - like the last trash mob before Rhyolith in Firelands.) There's also a reusable weapon enchant illusion. Sadly, I did not get either of these, which means either I'll resign myself to being happy with the Core Hound or >shudder< run the thing again later.