Onyxia is back!

Amidst much cries of "more dots!" and "minus 50 DKP" Onyxia made her return to World of Warcraft this week, Tuesday for the US, yesterday for Europe. So yesterday night I went on an impromptu Onyxia raid with my guild. By either great design or great luck the new Onyxia encounter was tuned in difficulty to exactly the perfect level for the raid group I was in. So we wiped a few times while relearning the encounter, and learning the new parts of it, advanced a bit further with subsequent tries, and finally killed her. Besides 3 Emblems of Triumph I also rolled high on a bag containing two epic gems, and the raid group received three rather nice epics in the old T2 design but with iLevel 232 stats, plus a 22-slot bag. Good times, and not only for nostalgia reasons.

Epic Slant is reflecting on Onyxia and asks "can this be considered new content?". No, I don't think this can be considered as being new content, but that doesn't make it a bad idea. In fact I would like to see more old raid dungeons recycled to the level cap, maybe with the next expansion. Old raid content suffers even more than other old content from nobody visiting any more. Well, people run for fun and for the achievement through Molten Core and the like at level 80, but that isn't the same as playing it at an appropriate level. Even if you wanted to, it would pretty much be impossible to get 40 level 60 players together to do Molten Core, and even if you performed that miracle, you'd find that MC isn't retuned for the level 60 characters of today, which are far more powerful than the level 60 characters of 2005.

I'm not saying that Blizzard shouldn't make new raid dungeons any more, but if recycling old raid dungeons is a lot faster than making a new one from scratch, why not do a mix of both? That would result in an overall higher number of raid dungeons to choose from, which would be nice. And while some people might get bored of doing old content again, many others are likely never to have seen BWL in its old glory, and would be delighted. To me that sounds like a better idea than to let the old content rot in obscurity.