You Don't Know the Meaning of "Content" - More ATC Bitching

So one of the bosses in the Argent Tournament Colosseum will be the Argent Confessor who requires you to relive "memories" of past battles, allowing players to fight souped-up level-80 versions of Onyxia, Illidian Stormrage and of course Hogger.

The reaction to this news is split perfectly between two different sorts of moron.

Moron type A says "lol brilliant, this is the best news ever" or even better "hooray, now I get to fight those bosses without wasting time fighting miles of trash".

Moron type B says "I already killed those guys, I don't want to kill them again, I pay Blizzard millions of dollars [1] for new content and they're ripping us off by recycling old fights".

Both types of moron make the same mistake, which is failing to understand what "content" is.

Having a boss spawn a mob called "Memory of Onyxia" is not the same as fighting Onyxia. I haven't actually fought Ony myself - I came to the game too late for that - but a quick look at WoWwikiki reveals that Onyxia was a three-stage fight, which called for careful threat management and stacking Fire Resistance to deal with a taunt-immune boss and massively disrupting fear effects which interacted with environmental hazards.

The list of retro-bosses you can fight in this encounter is huge, and ranges from the deadly (Algalon) to the comical (Hogger, Mutanus). There are two possibilities. Either the players are required to remember, and instantly adapt to, the strategy for any boss that could conceivably be spawned in this encounter, which would make it the single most challenging raid encounter ever, because you'd have to snap immediately into the appropriate strategy for Onyxia, or Illidian, or Algalon without missing a beat. The alternative, of course, is that she just spawns a level 83 Elite mob with the same name as an old boss, who does a bit of AoE and hits reasonably hard on plate.

Place your bets?

What people - and by "people" I unfortunately mean "people including Blizzard employees" - don't seem to understand is that content isn't graphics. It isn't pictures. It isn't scenery or dialogue. It's gameplay. This fight doesn't allow you to fight old raid bosses at 80, it allows you to *remember* fighting them (which is, I suppose, appropriate). It's equivalent of having the boss randomly emote things like "Hey, remember the Black Temple, it's been totally nerfed".

The problem is that you can't really do Onyxia any more. Even if you do it at level, a 60th level character now is flat out more powerful than a 60th level character in vanilla WoW (especially if you have Outland gear) - everything is designed for level 80 content. When this news first came out I thought that Blizzard were actually finally going to retune the old instances for level 80 so that I can actually access the content I fucking paid for but no, they're going to put the name "Illidian" on a generic elite mob, and people are going to think that's the same as doing the BT.

Darn.


[1] The Type A moron will always treat the combined income of any organization they have contact with as having come directly from their own purse.