How would you canonically revamp old-world content?

It’s still sometimes hard to wrap my head around the fact that the original World of Warcraft zones were in the game for a much shorter time than their post-Cataclysm counterparts have been. Even though I’ve been playing the game every step of the way, I feel like I’ve spent much more time in the original zones than in the ones we have now. Granted, that may be true with how long travel and exploration took back then — and will take again in Classic — but I suspect most of it is just nostalgia.

Regardless, we’ve had the current iteration of the old world for far longer than the original one, and another revamp is starting to feel long overdue. But Cataclysm’s revamp was notoriously time consuming, and many point to it as the reason for not only having a long content drought at the end of Wrath but also as the reason for lack of max-level content in Cataclysm. Frankly, it seems unlikely to actually be on the table as something that will happen. And yet, I still can’t help but think about how it would be done, were Blizzard to decide to do it.

Deathwing was a pretty solid reason for destroying much of the world, but would it even be possible (or reasonable) to go a similar route? Would Blizzard even need to? I mean, if his romp through Azeroth was all about causing damage, maybe the next revamp is just an update on how we’ve fixed things. Who says it has to be another world-ending event? Then again, Blizz has been slowly revamping old zones like Arathi and Darkshore — maybe they could just keep doing the zones one by one! Personally — and I realize this contradicts both of the previous ideas — I’d be all for the Black Empire laying siege to major areas and having that be the catalyst for a revamp. How cool would it be to have the Black Empire span as much as it did in canon lore originally?

But those are just my thoughts. How would you canonically update the old world? Would it be gradual, or all at once? Would you prefer it to be healing, or would it be more change as the result of destruction? Sound off below!