Making a forum post because I have a lot of feedback for Ruins of Lordaeron (so much that it doesn’t fit into the in-game beta feedback boxes). As a preface, I’m not a min-maxer or a mechanics person — I just hit things and I try not to die — but this is more flow and general gameplay feel that I noted.
I ran it with a full group of friends and we came to the same general consensus on a few points:
THINGS I LOVED
Overall: It feels good to have a very open-concept dungeon, one that encourages exploration and is less rigid than a single guided path. There was this awesome sense of being able to experience something new in the Classic setting, and we followed a lot of threads on a whim which is always VERY fun game design.
- The Abandoned: Awesome boss encounter. The surprise you feel when you see the statue glowing until the boss itself appears and jumps at you, experiencing this for the first time was awesome. I imagine it’ll still be fun on reruns, too.
- The Pickup for Crest of Lordaeron: Without a guide to go off of, being rewarded with a pickup quest for exploring the dungeon felt very good. We found our’s in the far corner (to the right if you’re just entering RoL via the entrance) against a wall that’s really easy to miss. I’ve also heard since then that it spawns in different places, which makes it even better. LOVE this.
- The Banshee Door Jumpscare: Seeing a random door we could open in an easy-to-miss spot and getting jumped by a banshee of all things was really fun. Points for incredible amounts of whimsy on this one.
- Could also be cool if it randomly spawned a rare sometimes instead? Not sure if this is already something on the radar, since we only ran it once.
THINGS I WANT TO SEE IMPROVED
There were a few threads we attempted to follow that led nowhere (at least as of the time of beta) and it made the dungeon feel a little lackluster. I do acknowledge you could be saving some things for launch, but just in case, these are things we would have loved to see!
-
The Gargoyles: I was the one in our party to point out the open stairwells, and we got so excited to explore a second tier of what we expected to be a one floor dungeon. The gargoyles are great, and their cast into taking no physical damage is a REALLY fun mechanic to fight. It surprised us, we scrambled for a second, and then we readjusted. What felt lackluster though is after finding and killing all of them, that was kind of… it? We were hoping for some sort of trigger that unlocks something in another part of the dungeon, but it felt like we were just going out of our way for nothing. We had a chest spawn on the last walkway we were on, which was nice, but I think what’s missing is a payoff with the gargoyles specifically.
- To be fair, we could have missed some, but we went out off our way to look for the rest and the thread just seemed to end there.
-
THE STAIRWELL DOOR: There’s an open tower with a large-ish door with stairs leading up to it near The Abandoned and Rath’mael that just FEELS like it needs to be opened. I want to interact with that door so bad, but it just looks to be a dead end. (I believe it’s also a spawn point for the Crest of Lordaeron?) I am rattling the bars of my cage I NEED to know what’s behind that door.
- A secret boss? An easter egg from WC3 Forsaken Kingdom? I just wanna open that door and see SOMETHING.
-
Exiting the Dungeon: It’s difficult to leave the dungeon once you get to the end. I know Classic dungeon design isn’t the same as Retail’s quick-exits, but Ruins of Lordaeron feels so open-concept that it’s difficult to backtrack to the entrance again. If you don’t follow the exact path that you took when you ran the dungeon, you’re pulling mobs left and right. We ended up just running into some leftover mobs, died, and ran back into the dungeon to resurrect.
- Maybe the stairwell door opens and lets you back closer to the entrance?
And who knows, maybe y’all are planning literally all of this for Forever’s official launch, or we just missed some stuff, but just in case — here’s some long-winded feedback! It’s overall a great dungeon, I just want to be rewarded more for wanting to explore. I don’t even think actual, tangible ‘rewards’ are necessary, but it just feels incomplete without some of those threads being tied.