[zanny]

You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did.

So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.

[jlees]

Yes, one of the more depressing things I did recently was level up a new character in WoD after having not played since pre-Cataclysm, basically. Going back and soloing instances that I remember grinding for months and months, encounters I remember working out for the first time with my guildmates (no videos or strategy guides!), bonds I made and the sense of achievement we all had at the end... totally destroyed by a fifteen second punch to the face by my brand new level 100 character. Though I wanted the gear for nostalgia's sake, it wasn't worth the heartache.

It felt a little like going back to college a couple of years after graduating, where a layer of nostalgia wasn't enough to disguise how much I, and the place itself, had changed. (Because college, like WoW, is a lot more about the people for me than the physical buildings.)