Farming old raids is part of daily life for many in World of Warcraft. However, the reasons for its frequent failures were explained in a developer conversation.
When there’s nothing to do in World of Warcraft, players attempt to tackle old content. After all, there is still much to gain there – although not strong gear, there are transmog, pets, or achievements.
The raids from the previous expansion are usually still significantly too difficult, but the raids from the penultimate add-on offer a solid challenge.
This is also intended by Blizzard. During a live chat with the Community Council, the developers revealed a few details about how they envision this and what their goals are.
How strong will you be in the new add-on? Blizzard has fairly clear ideas about how strong characters will become throughout an add-on. The guideline is a multiplier of 5. This means that by the end of “Dragonflight,” you should be about 5x as strong as by the end of “Shadowlands.”
This, in turn, also means that by the end of Dragonflight, you will be about 25x as strong as in Battle for Azeroth and then 125x as strong as during Legion.
This leads to the difficulty of old raids:
- Raids from the last expansion are nearly impossible to handle alone (there are exceptions), as you are only 5x as strong as intended for the content.
- Raids from the penultimate expansions are solo doable but provide a solid challenge – as you have roughly the power of a full raid group because you are 25x as strong as back then.
- Older raids are trivial, as you are 125x stronger than initially intended – meaning you alone have the strength of nearly 5 raid groups.
What is the problem with old raids? Old raids often need further adjustments by Blizzard to ensure they are soloable. Many bosses have mechanics that require multiple players. Be it areas that need to be absorbed by multiple characters or different objectives that need to be fulfilled simultaneously – there are several mechanics that simply cannot be played alone.
Blizzard therefore wants to adjust all raids from Battle for Azeroth “before the end of Dragonflight” so that fights with special group mechanics work differently if you are solo. They have done this in previous expansions as well, but the demand from the community seems to be growing each time.
Is farming old raids worth it? That probably depends on what one desires. If it’s about completing the wardrobe, it might be better to wait a bit before farming old raids. With the start of the next expansion “The War Within” (or the Pre-Patch 11.0), you will be able to unlock transmog for armor classes that you can’t even use yourself.
Thus, mages will be able to unlock plate armor in the future – or warriors can add cloth to the transmog collection. That makes farming old raids for transmog significantly more efficient.
Do you enjoy exploring old raids? Or can such content not entice you at all?
The first tests of “The War Within” are already taking place – the first realm is online.
