A new patch bringing the horror of Onyxia back

I usually don't write about game patches as they aren't usually meaninful enough to people who don't play the game, but this is a special one for us WoW players and it will help segway into a topic I want to cover later in this article. Blizzard, on November 5th, is buffing the Onyxia encounter to match the new level cap of players. They will also include loot that will remain graphically the same and retain the same names, but with updated stats. There will of course be a new drake mount that she can drop that will be modeled after her. Riding a black drake is sweeeeeet. So for those of you who want to grab a quick Onyxia achievement, I suggest you swing back and down her with a few of your buddies before November 5th.

I know many of the new players have never done the Onyxia encounter, at least not at level 60 with a 40 man raid. Many of the new raid encounters were made much more streamlined and less complicated after the Burning Crusades was released. This was to reduce frustration in raids as there were already plenty of other factors, in raiding, which turned casual players off to the idea off to the idea, for example; having to dedicate an entire night to raiding, most of the raiding time being instructions, the heavy cost of repairs, and the level of gear required to even be considered for a raid. With the new "improved" raids, we've lost something in the process. The encounters, while more streamlined, also become trivial. The loss of abilities like fearing, random aggro wiping, and a lower limit on number of players in raids(down to 10/25, from 40) makes an encounter too simple, predictable, and less "epic".

Granted, I'm from the old school players of Everquest, in which there was no cap on number of players as all raids were outdoor encounters; the largest raid I've heard of was on a PVP server(where everyone could kill everyone) where 3 guilds gathered 225 people, and rezz tanked a boss, the boss would one shot a player, another player would take aggro while the previous was being rezzed. Now imagine that with 40 tanks, and another kicker was that in Everquest, you lost experience when you died, so over the course of half a day(which was how long the boss, Kerafym took to kill) all those tanks lost several levels which would take at least a month to regain. Now that's fuckin epic.

Now zoom 5 years ahead and we have WoW, where every noobie and casual guild has Ulduar and Naxx on farm status. Sorry for the extended digression, but that leads me to my current point. I think buffing Onyxia is a fantastic idea to show players what they have left, and hopefully that the grass is NOT greener on the other side. I also think the recycling and reusing old content is a good idea to improve the continuity of the game. WoW is supposed to represent a world, a realistic world, which means a dynamic world. So far it has been anything but that. Every content made has been frozen in time, and gives it a disposable one-time use feel.