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[Baijiu]

Try the Call to Arms (I think that's the name) quests given in capital cities. They start earlier now and are built using the delicious phasing system they use in the new expansions.

There's a particularly disturbing Horde quest in the Hillsbrad Foothills. You come across a field of human heads. They're all squirming around and screaming for help and to complete the quest you have to "bash in their skulls" with a quest-supplied shovel.

You actually free them and they run away, but oh god. I didn't even notice that the field was a field of heads at first. I just heard the creepy screaming and wandered around trying to find the source. My heart skipped a beat when I realised the screams were coming from UNDERNEATH MY FEET.

But yeah, the new cataclysm quests in Azeroth are AWESOME.

[Niveras]

but again the world is very bland, they say to add more dinamic content but that leveling treadmill has to stop, WoW has enough content to  burn, what they need to do is cut the power sink and distribute it equally for each expansion content, this means buffing old content instead of adding more.

No no no, re-using content is a bad, bad idea. It's kind of okay to change things up and add new mechanics to old content (like the ZA upgrade or when they rejiggered all the zones for Cataclysm) but when most players hit a given level cap they end up running the same content dozens, hundreds of times. This is especially true of dungeons and heroics, though raids (particularly the final tier in a given expansion) arent necessarily run as often, but that's on the player, not necessarily Blizzard's design.

This constant repetition of the same content is what contributes to burnout. WoW doesn't need less new content, it arguably needs more. Look at EQ1. For 9 years it released an expansion every six months, and is still releasing new content every year or so. Compare that to WoW which went two years between each of its expansions, and gating content by calling it incomplete and releasing in additional free content updates. This model is financially more friendly to players, but not friendly for consumption by players. Incidentally, EQ's model mostly required a progression through old content before achieving new content, which is good in terms of avoiding power resets as WoW does every expansion, but is not necessarily friendly to new players trying to get into more recent content (there is still the occasional reset in terms of new max levels and dungeon-accessible gear equivalent to old raiding gear).

Of course, maybe EQ1 level of survival is not something Blizzard wants out of its flagship. I can agree with you that a major paradigm shift away from expensive-to-produce and hard-to-satisfy PvE content would certainly be easier and cheaper (meaning a shift to PvP content), but would also alienate much of WoW's playerbase, who only focus on PvE.

[Cthulhu]

I wouldn't mind seeing some updates to old raids at least.  I mean, paladins could solo vanilla raid bosses in BC, I can't imagine how wimpy the old bosses are now
But the issue there is the loot.  You gotta give people a reason to put together competent raid groups (rather than just finding three dudes who feel like getting the Onyxia achievement, as my own experience went) and with the huge number of raids we're talking about (There's six vanilla raid dungeons I remember, if you don't count Naxx, and even more in BC and Northrend and Cata, and then we're gonna add all the Panda dungeons to that list in a few months) it might get a little unwieldy.  How do you even set up a tier system for that?  I doubt the ancient raiding guilds who've been doing this thing since vanilla are gonna be interested in having to plow their way through updated old dungeons (A lot of which weren't really all that interesting to begin with when you look at them without nostalgia goggles on) to qualify for better stuff.

That leaves novelty stuff like mounts and transmog gear, but I dunno if that's worth overhauling like twenty complicated dungeons.

But the part of me with nostalgia goggles on still wants to do a 40-man MC with some semblance of challenge (lots of side-thoughts in parentheses in this post)

Still just ridiculously motoring through the game.  I'm 38 now, halfway to 39.  Uldaman is just as bad as I remember.  Dungeon running is boring as fuck but it's so fast I'm tempted to not do anything else. 

I hate heirlooms a lot.  They went through all the trouble of reworking pre-60 dungeons only to have them completely trivialized by heirloom gear.  I was doing Scarlet Halls and the door bugged, locking our tank in alone with Armsmaster Harlan, but it's okay, he soloed him.  Plus everybody all looks the same.  I used to love the Dreadmist set but I'm getting sick of seeing it.

[Baneling]

I still don't think heirlooms are all that good, to be honest.

They give a total of 40% experience up to level 80, which considering how fast it is to level anyway doesn't make that much of a difference.

The stats are roughly equivalent to having level-appropriate blue equipment in a maximum of eight slots(as of MoP), which...again, doesn't really make that much of a difference.

While levelling a character with only looted or quest-obtained gear on retail a while back fairly early on in Cataclysm I was keeping all but two or three slots in level-appropriate blues and greens, occasional purple, from about ~25 onwards. I rarely if ever saw anybody with heirlooms and when I did they never tended to be contributing more than any other player.

Maybe with the addition of a few more with MoP they might be a bigger edge, but it wouldn't seem like it from my experience.

[Cthulhu]

I wasn't sure about it either for the same reasons, but I'm just going by what I've experienced.  I went into WSG at level 19 with greens and blues and got instagibbed by people in heirlooms, like I mentioned I saw a warrior tank solo a level appropriate dungeon boss, etc. etc.

[Sonlirain]

I wasn't sure about it either for the same reasons, but I'm just going by what I've experienced.  I went into WSG at level 19 with greens and blues and got instagibbed by people in heirlooms, like I mentioned I saw a warrior tank solo a level appropriate dungeon boss, etc. etc.

Twinks perhaps?
I think those were a plague at lower level BGs.

[Cthulhu]

Well yeah, they're twinks, but it was never quite this bad.  A decent level 19 could at least do something, but without heirlooms even at level 19 you just die if anyone looks at you.

[Sonlirain]

Well i guess it's like that to deter potential "freemium" players from having fun at lvl 19 BGs.
After all while "free is good" it's also not profitable.

[Lightning4]

I wouldn't mind seeing some updates to old raids at least.  I mean, paladins could solo vanilla raid bosses in BC, I can't imagine how wimpy the old bosses are now
But the issue there is the loot.  You gotta give people a reason to put together competent raid groups (rather than just finding three dudes who feel like getting the Onyxia achievement, as my own experience went) and with the huge number of raids we're talking about (There's six vanilla raid dungeons I remember, if you don't count Naxx, and even more in BC and Northrend and Cata, and then we're gonna add all the Panda dungeons to that list in a few months) it might get a little unwieldy.  How do you even set up a tier system for that?  I doubt the ancient raiding guilds who've been doing this thing since vanilla are gonna be interested in having to plow their way through updated old dungeons (A lot of which weren't really all that interesting to begin with when you look at them without nostalgia goggles on) to qualify for better stuff.

That leaves novelty stuff like mounts and transmog gear, but I dunno if that's worth overhauling like twenty complicated dungeons.

But the part of me with nostalgia goggles on still wants to do a 40-man MC with some semblance of challenge (lots of side-thoughts in parentheses in this post)

I still kind of want to see a "progression" server that starts at Vanilla, and goes through each expansion at a set amount of time so everyone can essentially re-experience old content as it was before.

Though I guess that would expose all the flaws of early WoW too. So I dunno, maybe a modified version with many of the modern class changes and mechanics, but much of the old content intact.
It'd be a lot of work though, so that's probably why they'll never do it.

[Baneling]

I've tried my hand at level 19 twinking before - in 'normal' gear, not heirlooms - during Cataclysm, fairly early on again, and it was basically one or maybe two shotting anybody not similarly twinked. It's pretty easy to get similar effects without heirlooms, is what I'm saying.

[Cthulhu]

My experiences might be a little skewed, before this new binge my last play was in 2009, and I didn't level any new characters.  I haven't seriously played a character in the 10-19 bracket since BC, if not vanilla.  Maybe twinking wasn't as bad in the days of yore, or maybe my memory of the days of yore is just bad.

[Lightning4]

Eh, twinking has always been pretty hardcore.
If anything, it's easier to do it now if it only really requires heirlooms to be good. Before, you had to spend a pretty significant amount of money to be good. And it was pretty much the same thing back then too, the uber twinks would utterly dominate you.

I guess the only thing is back then, the cost of entry made the uber twinks a little rarer too.

[Niveras]

There was a caveat to my old post that I didn't have time to add this morning:

Re-tuning all the dungeons to have max-level counterparts which are all equivalent in terms of gear and tokens (justice/valour etc) would delay some of the burnout from running the same dungeons, but only delay it. And they must be equivalent; the worst example in my time in WoW was the constant rerunning of ZA/ZG five mans, because these were the most efficient in terms of rewarding token points for gear. The older WotLK dungeons still rewarded them but their age and difficulty, and thus loot and point rewards, were inferior so no one ran them, and because they'd already been run hundreds of time prior to the release ZA/ZG. Don't do that.

Maybe doing away with dungeons entirely and rebranding the pre-max game into a solo game, and "hiding" all group content until you're max level is the way to go. This pretty much happens already because anyone who's not leveling for the first time wants to get up to max level as fast as possible, because that's where all their friends are, and thus where all the fun is. As a result there really isn't many people left who want to enjoy the dungeon experience; while the finder lets you run them without having to really organize everything, 3/5 of those people are there because they queued while leveling - they're not there to enjoy it.

But the issue there is the loot.  You gotta give people a reason to put together competent raid groups (rather than just finding three dudes who feel like getting the Onyxia achievement, as my own experience went) and with the huge number of raids we're talking about (There's six vanilla raid dungeons I remember, if you don't count Naxx, and even more in BC and Northrend and Cata, and then we're gonna add all the Panda dungeons to that list in a few months) it might get a little unwieldy.  How do you even set up a tier system for that?  I doubt the ancient raiding guilds who've been doing this thing since vanilla are gonna be interested in having to plow their way through updated old dungeons (A lot of which weren't really all that interesting to begin with when you look at them without nostalgia goggles on) to qualify for better stuff.

As far as re-tuning the raids go, I'd re-tune them into five mans, and move all dungeon loot into token vendors, or duplicate items with various models. Kind of like the Headless Horseman's rings. (Some of the raids would also be broken for brevity, like they did with BRD/BRS.) You'll still have raid tiers for the current expansion, but all the old raids are broken into dungeons for your weekly heroic grind.I don't know how expensive the transmog system is, but aside from leveling it doesn't even really matter what items look like, because people can make them look like more or less whatever they want.

[Baijiu]

My experiences might be a little skewed, before this new binge my last play was in 2009, and I didn't level any new characters.  I haven't seriously played a character in the 10-19 bracket since BC, if not vanilla.  Maybe twinking wasn't as bad in the days of yore, or maybe my memory of the days of yore is just bad.

It's so easy to get good gear for the low bracket BGs. Basically anyone with a high level alt can afford to twink their characters. You want to experience genuine twinkage? Just wait until you hit 90 and you enter your first BG. It's what I think a prison shower would be like.

[Baneling]

As far as I'm aware, transmog is for all intents and free by the time you're likely to be using it(level cap) - the cost is the vendor sell price of the item to be transmogrified plus a handful of gold, which even for top-tier raiding gear is still not going to be very much even if you don't do any sort of active moneymaking such as using professions or selling mats on AH or whatever.

EDIT: Actually, pretty much scratch that. Some items, especially higher level gear, is quite expensive - such as some bind on account hats having prices like 275g to transmog. Jeeze.