Rare spawns have been an interesting feature to me since I played Diablo 2 which had random and fixed unique monsters with exceptional item drops that were entertaining to repeatedly farm. Warcraft 3 also featured special items obtained from secrets and encounters with unique enemies especially in the expansion's Orc campaign. WoW is no exception to the rule and while I personally find the older iterations of rare spawns to be less interesting, they became such a prominent feature in Mists of Pandaria to me that I suggested that specific iteration of rare spawns as a form of leveling content. I thought that because Mists of Pandaria rare spawns were challenging and rewarding, they had the potential to accomplish a lot of my goals for improving the leveling system and this still holds true today since it's the first suggestion for this article series.
Rare Spawns as Leveling Content
In terms of providing rare spawns as leveling content, care must be taken to ensure they provide just the right amount of challenge based on the level of the player. To that end, I think the first step is to make rare spawns far more durable than normal mobs but ensure their autoattack damage or equivalent isn't that much higher. This provides room to make rare spawns more mechanically focused and make them more like soloable mini-bosses than elite mobs.
To that end, rare spawns should have a few mechanics that are carefully tuned based on level since it would be inappropriate to introduce highly lethal mechanics at lower levels when players may still be learning basic features. For example, Pandaria rare spawns feature many mechanics I wouldn't recommend for lower level players since lethality was high and largely intended for level capped players.
On the other hand, the mechanical density of Pandaria rare spawns is a trait I would recommend emulating at all levels since they have enough to make an encounter look complex, but not so much that keeping track of the mechanics is an overwhelming task. This means that in general, each rare spawn should have about 3-4 abilities, though it wouldn't hurt to add some exceptions.
Finally, each zone should be dotted with several of these enemies to provide variety and while they shouldn't be too difficult to find, finding and challenging them should generally be a conscious player choice. At lower levels, this means that a more rigid method of placing rare spawns should be used to provide newer players with a process for discovery that might help them find more obscurely placed foes at higher levels. For example, an obvious path off the main road could lead right to a rare spawn early on, but at higher levels there may be multiple paths or most of the path is missing.
What Would This Content Reward?
Rare spawns in recent history have been wildly variant with how rewarding they are. In Mists of Pandaria, they were consistently rewarding to kill since in addition to potentially having a rare drop that was lucrative, there was also a consistent gear drop and an uncommon drop in the form of a bag of reagents. In Warlords of Draenor, there was an opposite problem where most rare spawns only ever dropped anything noteworthy on the first kill and even the few endgame rare spawns that can drop noteworthy items multiple times could only do so once per day and it was often a gear drop. Legion, in my opinion, balanced this out pretty nicely by tying rare spawns to World Quests which in turn occasionally made rare spawns really rewarding to kill. This may sound awful but it's worth keeping in mind that the rare spawn pool was huge and there are consistently many World Quests to kill rare spawns available at any given time.
Based on this history, I think the best approach for lower level rare spawns is to provide a major reward on the first kill and a smaller reward for subsequent kills of the same enemy. This would encourage players interested in this type of leveling content to search for many rare spawns to kill.
When initially killed, players would earn a gear token that provides them with equipment appropriate to their level or at the highest level of the level bracket that the rare spawn is in (for example, a level 1-60 rare spawn can only ever reward level 60 gear at best). The first kill would also award an exceptional amount of experience that I personally think should be 5x the experience of a normal mob and some Justice Point-like currency that can be used primarily to buy more of the aforementioned gear tokens. These rewards would be diminished if the player outlevels the rare spawn.
On subsequent kills of the same rare spawn players would earn less experience, which I think should be about 2x-2.5x the experience of a normal mob, and some of the Justice Point-like currency assuming they are not outleveling the mob. It is worth noting that rare spawns would take a few minutes to respawn, meaning it is somewhat worthwhile to camp them but also monotonous and suboptimal.
Implementation Logistics
Before moving on to the conclusion, it is important to explain how implementing this feature is a quick fix. Fortunately, lower level rare spawns do have a history of being added in the form of patch 5.1, which introduced many low level rare spawns for Hunters to tame. While this was technically an interlude patch and the rare spawns are lacking mechanically, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for the addition of carefully designed rare spawns to leveling zones that can be done in small batches over several patches. Existing rare spawns can be reworked as well, which should make the work easier.
Goals This Feature Accomplishes
I think adding some rare spawns that provide a challenge to leveling players accomplishes at least two of the three goals I outlined in the intro article.
If implemented well, rare spawns can serve as an optional tutorial for players to learn about the mechanics an enemy might use and because they're intended to be solo encounters, they can do so without being judged. The game instead doles out judgement in the form of death for failing and some decent rewards for succeeding, making it also serve as a practical example of the challenges players will face as they reach level cap.
In terms of immersion, rare spawns will generally require that the player is observant to find them outside of using an addon that marks their locations. This encourages the player to explore especially if rare spawns are introduced by making their locations a little more obvious initially, which shows that these enemies exist and can be found off the beaten path. Immersion can be improved further by using rare spawn mobs that fit the environment and game's lore, such as by having some adversaries mentioned in passing show up as rare spawns.
To close, there's a reason I find myself making this suggestion repeatedly and it's largely because the rare spawns in Mists of Pandaria inspired me that much and even if many were intended to be endgame challenges, that didn't stop me from trying to find and kill them while leveling. I hope that much like Blizzard ingrains rare spawns into more recent leveling experiences, they go back and add it little by little to leveling content ranging from levels 1-85.
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