Everything i’m about to quote is from Jeff Kaplan himself in the Youtube video,
"Blizzcon 2005 World of Warcraft Dungeon Design"
This proves for a fact dungeons were always intended to be a viable alternative way to level and provide the same experience rates as questing.
The wow forever devs do not know what they’re talking about and have lost touch with the original design philosophy which made vanilla great.
“When we started out designing World of warcraft we realized that something that makes an MMO a lot of fun for players is not feeling like they’re funneled through content like they only have one choice at one time.”
Nerfing the experience of dungeon mobs and making it unviable gives players the feeling of being funneled into questing and open world content.
“We also didn’t want to start the dungeons off too early because it takes a little bit more organization to do a dungeon than it does the outdoor world.”
Here he is saying that dungeons require more effort to complete than questing and open world content.
“We figured out that the experience in a dungeon is actually better than the outdoor world but there are a few factors that come into play that make it more efficient to level up in the outdoor world, For example you’ve got to get a group together to even go to a dungeon and there’s a travel time associated with getting to a dungeon.”
Here is the main argument of why people are unhappy with this change. It was always the devs intention for dungeons to provide high mob experience rates but the trade off was travel time to get to the dungeons. With WoW: Forever you still need to form a group and travel to the dungeon which eats into your hourly experience gain.
“Our goal in the burning crusade is to try to get back to where the experience feels meaningful in a dungeon so when you’re leveling 60 through 70 you don’t just shoot to the end and then do the dungeons, We want you to do the dungeons as you level up.”
Here Jeff Kaplan is saying that they wanted to get back to where dungeons rewarded meaningful experience rates so players don’t feel like they need to skip them and be funneled into only questing and open world activities.
"Everybody likes being out in the world and affecting what everyone else is doing but there comes that part in your place experience where you just want to do a dungeon and you don’t want to worry about stepping on other peoples toes or competing with spawns.
You want to have that highly tailored well-crafted gameplay experience and we felt like instancing would sort of get around that."
Here Jeff is saying that sometimes players may get tired of competing for quest items and mobs so he wanted players to be able to go do a dungeon whenever they felt like it and still have it be viable experience rates on par with questing.
Currently with this new nerf to mob experience this is no longer viable. You are actively punished if you get sick of questing and want to re-run a dungeon you’ve already done when it comes to your experience rates.
The video is 20 minutes long so i can’t quote everything but the overall rundown and summery is,
Instead of disincentivizing players from doing dungeons due to poor XP rates, the design philosophy was to make the dungeon experience fun, rewarding, and a viable alternative to fighting over mob tags in the open world."
Having dungeon leveling take ~3x longer than questing was never the original design philosophy for vanilla or the original devs intention. They always intended for dungeons to be a viable alternative way to level when players were either sick of questing or the quest areas were too contested.
I understand the devs want to encourage everyone out into the open world with these changes but the devs can’t have their cake and eat it too. It directly goes again the design philosophy of the original devs.
Disincentivizing group dungeon content was never the vanilla / classic design philosophy and this change directly conflicts with the WoW: Forever teams stated goal to retail the vanilla feel and design philosophy.
If players want to optimize their playstyle and put in more effort for better experience rates in dungeons they should be free to do so. This does not affect players who want to quest and only a minority of players will engage in dungeons this way.
Not once did the original devs say they wanted to prevent players from doing as many dungeons as they want within the 5 dungeon cap per hour. NEVER.
The best quote in the video is hands down,
“We have learnt a lot, Mainly to ignore the forums, Nah, Just kidding” - Jeff Kaplan 2005.
