Redo moar!

Both of your humble hosts happened to get the chance to run the new Onyxia 10-man over the weekend. I have to say, it was good fun. But more to the point, it was a good fight.

I did the old version of Ony once - at 80, with a Death Knight guildie. It wasn't what I would call fun.

No, it was just a long flight to Dustwallow for a sightseeing trip. The only bit of skill I was required to display was to feign death during the whelp phase just so that it would be easier for the DK to get them all rounded up. In the end, I can't say I really got the chance to experience the flow of the fight, or the quirks of the encounter. The drops were pretty much useless too. In the end, I left content to have seen a raid that I'd not been to, but I was very much aware of how pointless it was two expansions past it's prime.

But now Onyxia has been reworked, bumped up to a relevant difficulty, and having done both, I would rather wipe three or four times on the new than roflstomp the old.

On the same weekend I decided to put in a little bit of work on my Argent Dawn rep. I ran Stratholm live and dead, did the Scholomance key quest (finally) and cleared that joint, all in a few hours. I got about 8k rep with the mess of scourgestones I picked up, got my axes and daggers skills up to 400, farmed 20-someodd stacks of runecloth, and decided that they really need to redo some more classic instances.

I remember doing Scholomance and Stratholme when they were relevant, and they were hard work, long nights, and they were a lot better at the time. A 45-minute Baron run used to be a big deal, and you needed your four most skilled friends to do it. I soloed it in about 25 minutes without really trying to hurry.

Rivendare deserves better than that.

Between outright rewrites and heroic mode switches there is ample opportunity to offer current versions alongside a full progression of leveling dungeons for developing players. The hew and cry against actually getting a broad swath of rewrites - because the proletariat prefers new content to kvetch about (ToC) to old content to kvetch about (Ony) - but it would be nice if at least a few more iconic runs would be added to the heroic version list that has been announced for Cataclysm (Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, for the record).

One upon a time I was actually resistant to the idea of buffing the old stuff on the grounds that as a casual raider it would be unlikely that I would get a chance to do a lot of these things in a version that required a large group, but just might be able to get them in eventually if I only need a couple of friends to get them done. I've come around, though, to the lucid side of the argument. First of all, you actually get to run stuff that's at-level difficulty and more importantly at-level loot, even though it takes more people, and second, it's just a whole lot more fun to run something that isn't a total joke.

And aren't we supposed to be having fun here?

Besides, I can now make all sorts of lewd jokes about my pair of dragon sacks.