Visiting the Old School

Just a few days ago I actually ran through all of Blackwing Lair for the first time ever. It was a big moment for me since my original raiding guild had just started doing that instance before we took a break from raiding. Before that we had ignored a lot of the higher end raids and primarily focused on Molten Core, Onxyia, and Zul'Gurub. It was slow going to get loot from old world instances especially for a casual guild that only raided three nights a week. I remember sometimes going three weeks without any upgrades and I know some people who played more popular classes having even worse dry spells. That's probably why my guild sort of went on hiatus when the new honor system came out. All of sudden it became possible to see your progression towards earning a upgrade and everyone sort of forgot about seeing BWL, AQ, or Naxx.

Wrath of the Lich King changed all of that of course. It wasn't just that Blizzard reused Naxxramas for raid content either. The achievement system revitalized the idea of going back and playing tourist in old raid zones. Not only could players get a chance to see content they missed, but they could make some money at the same time. Daily quests may be a faster way to make money, but they get boring real quick. Also I don't know about you, but the old world armor sets seem to have more pizazz then what we have now in Wrath of the Lich King. Tier 7 makes me want to gouge my eyes out, especially when compared to the glorious Tier 2 from Blackwing Lair. I'm convinced half the interest in old world raid zones come from people who regret deleting their earlier armor sets. I'll have to admit I'm one of them.

It's funny that while I'm having a lot of fun in Naxxramas, I'm equally enjoying the other old raid zones that didn't get upgraded loot tables. It's all new content to me and I guess part of it is the challenge of figuring out how to do old raid content with a single group. None of us know these fights from previous experience so we are learning by trial and error. We could easily look it up on wowhead, but that would defeat the purpose. Encounters like Chromaggus and Ebonroc have tricks to them and it's actually fun to figure them out yourselves when a single misstep doesn't kill everyone. I think that's the idea that Blizzard is chasing with the move to more casual raiding. They may have started out by making the raids in Wrath of the Lich King a little too easy, but they are on to something. Now if they could just get the artists back from their other projects so we could get decent looking gear again.