I want to raise some concerns about the current dungeon mob XP balance because, for me, this is by far the biggest gameplay issue I’ve experienced in the Forever beta. I’m not asking for dungeon grinding to become the undisputed leveling meta, and I understand why Blizzard wants to discourage boosting and endless dungeon spam. I just think the current solution is creating some serious unintended problems with how players actually behave inside dungeons.
The biggest thing I’m already noticing is that people don’t want to actually play the dungeon anymore. They want to complete their quests while killing as little as humanly possible.
Hug the wall. Skip that pack. Sneak around those mobs. Grab the objective. Kill the boss. Turn in the quests. Move on.
When the overwhelming majority of the XP comes from the dungeon quests and the mobs themselves are barely worth anything, this is the behavior the game encourages. Why would a group full clear a dungeon when the mobs they’re clearing are worth so little?
I think that’s a terrible direction for dungeon gameplay.
I actually LOVE the idea behind making dungeon quests important. It encourages open-world questers to step into dungeons, while dungeon-focused players have to venture into the world, travel around, find quest chains, talk to NPCs, and gather their dungeon quests beforehand. That’s a great interaction between the two sides of the game.
But perhaps the incentive from those quests should lean more heavily into items, gear, gold, reputation, unique rewards, or other meaningful incentives, while more of the actual experience comes from playing the dungeon itself and killing the mobs inside it.
Right now we’ve almost flipped that around. The dungeon is becoming a container for a giant bundle of quest XP rather than content worth repeatedly playing.
The current balance heavily encourages one-and-done dungeon groups.
Get your quests. Run the dungeon once. Collect the massive quest XP. Leave.
That creates several other problems.
Tanks and healers are already the hardest roles to find, and this gives them even less reason to run a dungeon again. Once they’ve completed their quests, why come back unless they personally need an item?
That means someone trying to form a group later may have an even smaller pool of tanks and healers available.
It also makes farming dungeon loot unnecessarily painful.
If you’re chasing a specific item and it doesn’t drop, there’s a good chance you’ll need to rebuild your group almost every single run. The other four players got their quests done. They received the bulk of the XP the dungeon had to offer. Unless they also need loot, what incentive do they have to stay?
One of my favorite Classic experiences is getting a good dungeon group together and saying, “Let’s run it again.”
Maybe everyone is having fun. Maybe somebody needs a weapon. Maybe you’re all getting decent XP. Maybe you finally figured out the pulls and now the group is cruising.
That social experience matters.
Dungeon grinding with friends should be competitive with open-world questing. Neither one needs to be the obvious meta.
If I have four guildmates online and we want to spend the evening running dungeons together, I don’t think the game should make us feel like we’re being penalized for choosing that over open-world questing.
Sometimes it’s actually much easier to play with your existing friends through dungeon content. Open-world questing can be awkward when everyone is on different quests, different steps, or has already completed something. A dungeon gives five friends a common objective where everyone can contribute.
That’s part of the social experience too.
Getting players into the open world is important, but socialization doesn’t stop being valuable when you walk through a dungeon portal.
And this brings me to what I think could become the biggest unintended consequence if this system remains unchanged.
I predict the eventual meta will be high-level players boosting low-level characters through dungeon QUESTS rather than players forming legitimate five-man dungeon groups.
Think about where the incentives currently lead.
If dungeon mobs give poor XP but completing all the dungeon quests gives enormous XP, eventually players are going to optimize around completing those quests as quickly as possible.
Instead of:
“LFM Scarlet Monastery, need tank and healer.”
We could start seeing:
“60 carrying all SM quests.”
A high-level player could help low-level characters gather the required quests, blast them through the dungeon while skipping everything unnecessary, complete the objectives, collect the huge quest XP, and immediately move on to the next dungeon.
Ironically, a system intended partly to discourage dungeon boosting could end up creating a different boosting meta centered entirely around dungeon quest completion.
And if that becomes efficient enough, why would some players bother forming a traditional five-man group at all?
The one-and-done approach may not seem like a huge issue in the earliest dungeons, but I’m especially concerned about how this scales toward higher levels. If dungeon quest XP continues to be this disproportionately valuable, are we eventually going to reach a point where the optimal path is simply doing each dungeon once, collecting the giant quest payout, and moving on until we’re 60?
That doesn’t sound like healthy dungeon replayability.
And Forever has nine new dungeons.
I want to experience them.
I want to explore them.
I want to kill the mobs.
I want to find the strange side rooms nobody bothered entering.
I want a group to decide we’re going to full clear because the mobs are actually worth killing.
I want to run a dungeon several times with my guildmates because we’re having fun and someone still needs a drop.
How are we ever going to discover that rare mob tucked away in some forgotten corner of a new dungeon if the community learns that the correct way to play is to hug the walls and skip everything that isn’t attached to a quest objective?
That’s what concerns me most.
This isn’t only about XP per hour. The reward structure is teaching players how to behave inside the dungeon, and right now it’s teaching them not to engage with most of it.
I’m completely open to Blizzard finding ways to prevent dungeon grinding from becoming the only competitive leveling method. There are plenty of potential approaches that don’t require making the mobs themselves feel worthless.
For example, diminishing returns could potentially kick in after repeatedly farming the same dungeon 3 to 5 times in a row, followed by some kind of reset timer. The exact numbers obviously need testing and tuning, but a system like that could discourage extreme dungeon spam without punishing players who simply want to run a dungeon several times with their friends.
There may be better solutions than that too. Anti-boosting mechanics could target the actual boosting behavior. XP could scale differently when extremely high-level characters are present. There are probably several knobs Blizzard could experiment with during beta.
That’s what beta is for.
What I don’t want is for the solution to become:
“Open-world questing is how you’re supposed to level, and dungeon grinding is intentionally worse.”
Players shouldn’t be railroaded into one leveling experience.
Questing should be viable. Dungeon grinding should be viable. Mixing the two should be viable.
Let players decide what sounds fun that night.
Keep the dungeon quests meaningful. I genuinely think the idea behind them is good. They get dungeon players into the world and open-world players into the dungeons.
But put enough XP back onto the dungeon mobs that actually playing, clearing, exploring, and repeating the dungeon feels worthwhile.
Blizzard created all of this dungeon content, including nine new dungeons for Forever. I want players to have reasons to actually experience that content rather than sprint through it once while avoiding everything they possibly can.
If you’re seeing the same behavior in your groups, please talk about it and submit feedback during the beta.
Even if you agree that dungeon XP needed some tuning, I think there’s an important discussion to be had about whether the current balance went too far and what it’s doing to group behavior.
I’m not asking for dungeon spam to become the meta.
I’m asking for running a dungeon with four friends to remain a legitimate, rewarding way to play World of Warcraft.
Forever has a lot of great new dungeon content. I just don’t want the optimal way to experience it to be skipping most of it.