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Is it just me, or does that name have something about it? For me personally the name Naxx stands for awesome raiding, it's not that the TBC raid instance design is bad, there are plenty of positive things about TBC raiding instances, but still, something is missing which Naxx did have. So when Blizzard announced that they would re-use the Naxx instance as WotLK content I was actually happy. Where a lot of people were mad/disappointed at Blizzard for re-using old content, I wasn't. I can understand those people, of course, they want new fresh instances with encounters that are also new and demand a different approach than the previous encounters that they've beaten, but those people forget two things.
First of all the simple fact that Naxx is probably the worst instance ingame if you look at the amount of work it took to design and the use players made of it. Naxx was the summit of vanilla-WoW raiding, not many guilds made it that far and of the guilds that actually made it there, not many could handle the insane demands of raiding in Naxx.
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So for the huge amount of work it took to make this awesome dungeon, only very little use was made of it, a huge waste of course. Second to that people tend to focus too much on the “ new” part, something being new doesn't automatically make it good (somehow the candy bar Nuts poppes up in my mind here). Look at Star Wars, although part 1, 2 and 3 are new, using all the modern technology and having a budget that's roughly 5 times as high as the old movie, they sux donkeyballz. Same with Naxx, it's old, but I doubt a lot of people are going to claim that they liked Karazhan, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep: The Eye or Hyjal Summit more than Naxx. I rather have content that isn't new but is damn good then new designed content which is horrible. New designed content which is damn good is of course the best, but seeing Blizzard's track record in TBC I wouldn't hope for too much. I would qualify five out of the seven raid instances made so far in TBC as initial failures, only Black Temple and Sunwell delivered. Where Black Temple sadly was undertuned and Sunwell has this damn annoying gates.
But the question remains, why was Naxx so damn good? A lot of reasons I'd say.
The instance design was on a whole new level, dark, evil and huge, a big improvement coming from the cartoon like Temple of Ahn'Qiraj where extraterrestrial (yes even for Azeroth) bugs ran loose. Going to Naxx was a pleasure, I remember that people asked for our raid ID just so they could go inside an empty Naxx and wander around, just to see it all from the inside with their own eyes (and no, they weren't going there to see if we left any frozen runes behind).
The encounters were again better than before, except for Grobbulus who was clearly out of place. All the other encounters were new in some sort of way and more importantly, tuned right. Every encounter could be beaten, but almost none went down easily on a large scale. The focus of the encounters also continued where it ended at C'Thun, on a personal performance level. If you made en error you wouldn't just die, you were damaging the raid either directly or indirectly in a significant way.
Raiding Naxx was something special, having Naxx items set you apart from the masses. MC, BWL and PvP items were standard in those days, but a raider with Naxx gear was something special, he raided Naxx so he must be good (and crazy). Today everyone and his sister has epics of the highest item level quality, we all blur into the crowd.
The race for world firsts in Naxx was probably one of the best ever seen (apart from Kel'Thuzad despawning), the involvement and publicity around the race in Naxx was of a level never seen before. Guilds were all of a sudden known by the community for their good performance in Naxx and with the introduction of server transfers those guilds were now popular destinations for players that thought they were up for it.
Itemisation in Naxx was so insanely much better than anything we've seen before, the amount of upgrades you could get in there, mind boggling. This of course was a big factor in making Naxx the favourite destination of a lot of raiders out there, we all want the best bling-blings possible.
And Naxx of course has the best legendary of all instances, Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian. Not only cause it actually was a damn good legendary, but mainly cause it wasn’t based on a lucky drop but you had to collect it, 40 shard per staff. Only really big flaw in it is of course that it is only for priests, droods, mages and warlocks, not for shamans….
Now I know some of these reasons won't apply again to raiding Naxx when WotLk is released, but the sentimental feelings will not change, unless the dev somehow manages to turn the WotLK Naxx into a horrible instance, but they wont, they simply cant, it’s impossible.
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or perhaps Arthas?
good times
