Monday, June 22, 2009

Classic raiding? I don't think so

Several commenters here and on other sites, including a Blizzard community manager, mentioned the possibility to use the "turn XP off" switch at level 60 and have a guild doing "classic raids". Sounds like a great idea at first, but I'm afraid that is going to turn out to be an illusion. It's not that easy to turn back time!

One important aspect is that a level 60 today is very different from a level 60 three years ago. There have been numerous patches, two expansions, and quite a lot of class changes since then. Most of them making characters more powerful. Spells and talents have been upgraded, and glyphs have been added. If you tried playing a Death Knight you probably considered him overpowered at level 60, compared with your memory of being level 60 in 2006. But I do think that if you leveled another character to 60 now, not only would it go a lot faster, but you'd also find him to be similarly powerful at that level. And if not, you could always take a Death Knight to Molten Core.

And if that wasn't enough, of course a level 60 character nowadays has access to gear from the early parts of The Burning Crusade. That not only makes them more powerful, it also removes much of the motivation of going to a raid in the first place.

And motivation is what is finally going to kill the idea of classic raids. Where do you find 40 people who want to raid Molten Core several times per week for several months just to "progress" to BWL? At the time we didn't have much of a choice, there was nothing better to do. But many who did it felt somehow cheated when The Burning Crusade made all that "progress" obsolete. And nowadays, knowing how hollow the achievements of killing Ragnaros and getting those epics from him is, I doubt people will really go through all the trouble of leveling a character to 60 just for classic raiding. A few might try, but I don't think this will catch on.

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