Turning Back Time

Each week players are given a "bonus activity" which yields a perk for doing a particular activity. Last week, for example, World Quests granted bonus reputation and people who did 20 of them got a little satchel of stuff, previous to that was a bonus for arena skirmishes, yada yada. This week I got the pleasure of "kinda" reliving my leveling experience with "Timewalking: Burning Crusade"


No. Just "no".

Players and their gear may be scaled down to level 70 and then romp through Heroic Burning Crusade dungeons. Do five of them within a week and you'll get a couple of nifties and a piece of gear from the current raid. This last bit caught my eye and I started chain running them with Sun. In a couple of hours I had run my five and I had upgraded my weapon a little with the relic prize I had gotten from the bag, but was it fun?

Almost. I'll give it a solid "that was almost a nice time". It was certainly nice tromping through the old dungeons I haven't seen in years again and running into Millhouse Manastorm in the prison dungeon brought I solid grin. Also, every boss downed dropped token currency used to buy heirloom upgrades, toys, and transmog gear, but I'll give it three problems.

The first was the utter trash that fills your bags. Boss loot scales to "your level" (if you were a fresh-faced wide-eyed level 110), but everything else is vendorbait and clutters something fierce, but I found myself still looting things just in case something with a neat transmog appearance dropped. Sigh.

Secondly, I think it's a damn shame they only run an event like this for a week in over a month. This is the sort of thing that should be a constant option. Get more mileage out of your older content, encourage fun farming of old school rep instead of one-shot killing bosses. It could be amazing. Could.

Ultimately, it gets killed by the third problem: scaling. I know Blizzard tried their best, but it just wasn't there. I get the feeling it was tuned for people with minimum gear and at this point, no one has that. It might have been a little more fun on a max-level Anyth, as hunters are very mobile with a lot of instant multi-target burst damage, but as a druid it utterly sucked. Out of the five, there was only one team that proceeded at a "normal" pace. Throw a single paladin or hunter into the mix and you've got pack upon pack of things eating floor before I can get off a second spell.

Still, I can't complain too vociferously, as it was really cool seeing dozens of players in Shattrath for the first time in nearly a decade, even if they were there just for the token vendor.