Goodbye Molten Core

I got a mail from Stargazer asking me "How is all the new quest rewards going to affect us, who hasn't yet had a lvl 60 character. I mean are we ever going to see the inside of said instances as Molten Core and the like for zillion of hours, or will we simply move on and skip all that once we are lvl 58-60? "

 

Well, one thing that is certain is that you won't see Molten Core for zillion of hours, like the people who were stuck there pre-BC. From a pure loot point of view your best option is to step through the Dark Portal as soon as you reach level 58, and never look back. The quest rewards and random green loot items are as good as the stuff found in Molten Core, and the blue items you can find in the first instances (for which I'd recommend level 60) are as equivalent or better than Blackwing Lair loot. But what we old-time raiders often forget is that Molten Core is quite an interesting place by itself, from an exploration / tourist point of view. It has some interesting boss fights, and the summoning of Ragnaros event is certainly impressive, and not something you'd want to totally miss. It is only when you've been there many times that it becomes boring.

 

Are those that haven't reached level 60 yet ever going to see Molten Core? I'm not sure. Blizzard is counting on 90% of the WoW players buying the Burning Crusade, and the remaining 10% are probably not the kind to start a raiding guild. Even if you don't have the expansion, you can buy green level 58-60 items originating from Outland in the auction house. So not enough people will be really interested to go through the enormous effort of organizing a 40-man raid and repeatedly assault Molten Core until you arrive at Ragnaros. Most players have the expansion and will just skip that part, and probably Scholomance and Stratholme as well, and just go directly to Outland.

 

Your best bet to see Molten Core is with a big guild going to MC with a mix of level 60 to 70 characters. Either just for fun, or as a trip down memory lane, or maybe to farm stuff like core leather. I would assume that if the main tank and a couple of other characters in the raid group are level 70, it is going to be relatively easy to beat, as long as some people in the raid have done it before and know what to do. If no-one in the raid group knows MC, the boss fights aren't trivial, but the information on how to beat them can be found all over the internet. But it won't be the same experience as the pre-BC raiders had, of going to MC every week, and wiping often at the same boss until the guild was able to beat him, slowly advancing week by week until you finally met Ragnaros. Soon you'll hear the veterans talking of "back in the days", with nobody listening to their ramblings, and everybody wondering why anyone would do such a thing as Molten Core raiding every week, sometimes several times per week. The risk-reward structure that made such behavior understandable is gone for good. If you want to experience something similar, you'll probably have to hurry to get to level 70 before the next expansion. I assume that level 70 raids are going to be a repeat performance of the pre-BC endgame, just a bit easier to organize due to smaller dungeons and smaller number of players in the raid.