Blizzard, please end mage dungeon boosting in TBC Classic WoW

The dungeon boost leveling meta in Classic WoW has been one of the two largest influences for players to purchase gold from shady RMT websites.

The dungeon boosters themselves are often selling the gold they make providing the service. This mean they’re selling the gold to the player, and getting that same gold back from the player, in an endless cycle which harms the community at large.

Additionally, the dungeon boosting meta makes your in-game boost less attractive since players can just get mage boosted to 58 in a weekend. I don’t personally support the paid boosting service, but this isn’t about my feelings, it’s about business, and mage dungeon boosting is affecting your bottom line.

In TBC, a new mechanic is introduced to channeling AOE effects which splits the total damage after 10 enemies are affected. At first this sounds like it will break the mage dungeon meta, but testers have already theorized it will not.

The use of the spell Flamestrike, whose ground effect is not affected by this AOE damage cap, has allowed mage dungeon testers to continue the same 500 enemy Maraudon pulls they were already providing.

Please introduce a hard cap to damage provided by AOE effects at 20 enemies. After 20 enemies are affected by damage, the 21st and beyond enemy is unaffected by both damage and spell effect (slow) and can approach the mage at full capacity. This would strike a huge blow to the AOE dungeon leveling meta and place boosting dollars back in your pocket, which means a simple code change to TBC Classic is money for you without additional development time needed.

Please go a step further and apply this AOE damage cap to ground effects at a rate of 20 enemies. This will help stymy the protection paladin dungeon leveling meta that is already being hatched as a replacement to mages by players for TBC. It may not stop it entirely, but it will help.

Additionally, there are a number of pathing tricks used in the game which in Blizzard days previous would have been fixed and referred to as “pathing exploits”, even attracting bans for certain players throughout the game’s history. Please fix these. They are not healthy for this game.

Blizzard, if you have the game installed, please walk out to any level 20-30 leveling zone and look around. What do you see? Do you see players leveling? or do you just see bots? With the dungeon leveling meta, the only people out in the real world are bots who are enjoying a no-competition landscape because every real player is in a dungeon, paying the gold they bought from those bots, to boosters who sell that gold back to them.

Some pathing exploits just off the top of my head:
If anyone can think of others, please tell me and I can list them

  • Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, left side fountain
  • Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, torch stick near Mograine causes evade exploit
  • Zul’gurub bridges, enemies cannot reach you on the guard rail even though it’s only a foot off the ground
  • Slave Pens first boss, enemies cannot reach you on the wall ledge even though it’s just a few feet off the ground
  • Mages can use invisibility and blink to reach the Chess encounter and solo it

Maraudon is not technically a pathing exploit, so changes to the spells themselves are necessary to stop it.

Aside from bots and RMT, mage dungeon leveling has been the biggest bane to the integrity of Classic WoW. Now that we’re in the era of #somechanges, I think we can justify a small edit to this terribly unattractive practice. Allowing something like this makes Blizzard seem like an amateur company who lets cheaters and exploiters run wild on their servers. I hate that feeling of low quality.

Additionally, Sabetha in these comments has suggested an alternate change which is to “make high level characters leech so much XP from low level ones while in a group” so that dungeon boosting is simply not worth it.

PLEASE Blizzard. PLEASE do something about this.

38 Likes

While I’d agree to breaking dungeon boosting, it should absolutely not be done with an AoE cap. All that they need to do is simply make high level characters leech so much XP from low level ones while in a group it’s not worth the time to do it, rather than any sort of gameplay change.

Though once they do that, they should remove the paid boost as well.

20 Likes

Absolute easiest fix would be to reduce the exp as mentioned instead of messaging with AoE cap. I think Sabetha has a great point.

No boost on any sort of classic server seems the best choice as well.

3 Likes

This is probably far more appropriate! I just want something done about this. It’s honestly ridiculous.

9 Likes

Why do you dislike this so much, the majority of the player base doesn’t wanna level in classic. It’s long, grindy and boring. Not everyone wants to experience the old content’s leveling…

4 Likes

It doesn’t matter what I like, it matters what is healthy for the game, and this cycle of RMT is not healthy for the game.

If you don’t like playing Classic, maybe don’t? I’m not sure what your argument is.

12 Likes

Who determines what’s healthy for the game?

Typical response… same can be said for you, I’m not in this for leveling or the vanilla experience. I’m waiting for TBC.

By asking this question, you’re challenging whether or not RMT is healthy for the game. That alone lets me know where your values lie and I don’t think a debate with you is necessary.

10 Likes

Dont Like It Dont Do It™

It Doesnt Affect You™

4 Likes

TBC also does add some new quests as well as reduces XP requirements and increases XP gained from quests to smooth things out.

If a large portion of a playerbase is trying to skip content, the solution shouldn’t be to let them pull out a credit card and skip said content.

It should be to fix the content.

5 Likes

It’s never necessary, you don’t have a point. You’re a purist, I don’t expect a point from people like you… you’re so stuck in the past.

2 Likes

Fix the content?

I’m curious, what changes do you think needs to be made to it?

XP changes as needed to make 1-60 not so much of a slog, which TBC already moves towards.

TBC also reduces the level requirement for a mount, adds some new quests, flight paths, etc. which should all help as well.

It doesn’t need to be super fast but they can speed the process up, which would also make you have to spend a lot less time traveling to hit up almost every quest just to have enough quests to level.

3 Likes

You completely skip the point of games… TO HAVE FUN. The leveling experience in Vanilla isn’t fun, yes there are exceptions where some enjoy it… but mage rushing is there for a reason. It’s slow, grindy, boring and the story is a 2/10 at best…

Which is why I said fix that it is slow and grindy. The XP changes will do that, unless you have a more specific complaint about it than that that I can come up with a fix for.

If the game is not fun, why are they not at least making an attempt to make it more fun before letting people pay their way past it?

4 Likes

What are you going to do about fixing that? You never answered.

Because it’s a TON less work and is a money maker for them to just offer boosts and allow mage AOE to carry dungeon groups.

In what world is reducing the XP needed to level and increasing XP gained from quests not something that reduces how slow and grindy leveling is?

I answered it. You’ve been ignoring it.

3 Likes

Again… how does that make it FUN. The content is trash. What is so hard about answering that, if you don’t have a good answer that’s fine… not everyone is thinking about it.

I’ll go ahead and give what I would enjoy…

-Cut the experience requirement by 50%.
-Increase blue drop rates.
-Add more group quests.
-Tone down the damage output from mobs by 5-15% for the multiple mob pulls and accidental ones.
-Fix the drop rate for quest items
-Add more dungeon quests
-Make the story more of a forefront and revamp it.
-Increase mana regeneration by 50% during combat and 100% out of combat.

It’s also rather difficult to come up with solutions to “it’s slow, grindy, and boring” when you weren’t explaining further. Slow and grindy I can fix, but “it’s boring” tells me literally nothing about what you think is wrong with it.

That said they could pretty easily hit up a good chunk of the notes on your list without needing to change/add content, just tweaking numbers.

However it’s worth pointing out that TBC doesn’t actually fix most of the stuff on that list either. Why is 58+ content not boring and trash when it doesn’t do most of the stuff on your list?

3 Likes

while i have leveled 6 toons to max and geared a few of them very well, i have to say, after the second or third one i grew very tired of leveling the “proper” way and resorted to mage boosting.

its not a bad thing for the game either.

im tired of people saying it is . it is a natural evolution of the playerbase to want to mage boost. soon it will be paladin boosting.

you try leveling 6 toons the “proper” way or whatever way youre requiring of other people and then come back and say you diddnt get tired midway through.

stop telling other people how to play.

3 Likes