Remember When Heroics Were Challenging?

As I was getting ready for work this morning I was thinking about my pre-raiding days in WotLK, when I had just leveled my priest to 80 and began to run heroic instances.

I was so excited, because there was so much to glean from them. I got reputation for wearing various tabards, I got emblems, and I got a chance at one piece of epic loot. As a healer, it was never a question of whether I'd find a group. Whether or not that group would actually be good was another story.

Heroics were challenging then, and I was healing them all as Discipline. Best of all, there were several to choose from. I felt a real sense of accomplishment when my group would make it through to the end without any deaths. And even more so if we got some of the achievements done.

Then I began to think what a shame it is that these heroics aren't of any use to me any more. Sure I could still run them just to get greens to disenchant, but it wouldn't be much of a challenge anymore with my 25-man gear.

What could be done about it?

Blizzard could add additional heroic dungeons to the game that are designed specifically for epic geared characters. They could either drop ilevel 226 loot, or just have each boss drop emblems of Conquest. Have them drop some rare crafting patterns too.

This would give raiders an incentive to run them, especially if they added additional items you could buy with the emblems other than Tier gear. How about more heritage items for your alts, or pets, mounts and tabards? Believe me people will spend effort trying to get the vanity stuff, as already proven.

Ok, but what happens when we outgear those dungeons? What if the dungeons could somehow automatically scale based on the average level of gear for the group upon zoning in? What if the dungeon map itself would randomly change? (which I know is possible due to Everquest's LDoN expansion) That would allow more variety without having to keep adding more and more dungeon portals to the world, and players could congregate at one spot.

Would the addition of 5-man heroic dungeons of this caliber destroy raiding? I don't think it would. It would give raiders something to do on off-nights, other than the same boring dailies that Blizzard keeps churning out for us.

Call me crazy but I'd much rather see Blizzard put efforts into new heroics rather than these silly Holiday events.