So, I played for a very very long time, and in my opinion the best instanced content in wow was right there in vanilla: Blackrock Depths. It’s a shame, IMO, that this type of content was then so quickly abandoned.
BRD was basically a 5 man raid. It took a long time to do, there were lots (and lots!) of quests. The content was fun, again IMO, and challenging to master. If you didn’t want to do the earlier content… you could just skip it. If you were farming shards or someone was leveling, you could go in with max level players and feel like you were contributing. It just felt very epic to do and complete.
Even after you completed it you wanted to come back for some of the fun areas like the bar, coffer runs, and the unique infinite-respawn lyceum area to show off your AOE.
I have fun memories of swim/jumping through the lava to get my buddies MC attunement, farming for the HOJ for our rogue, and trying to get the set from the arena just because we thought it looked cool.
Now our dungeons are usually 4 or 5 bosses long, and have to be designed for timed M+ runs. Blackrock depths had 40 bosses. F O R T Y.
My thought: Since M+ is (Again IMO) Hot garbage right now why don’t we get some epic dungeons again? They felt rewarding, fun, and replayable: something that for many of us the game just isn’t anymore.
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Pretty sure they built it when they were intending people to only run dungeons once.
People tend to favor shorter dungeons so they kept building 3-4 boss dungeons and the occasional mega dungeon with 8-10
I’ve done a 7-hour dungeon run (Uldaman, pre-nerf. Sunken Temple was pretty long too, pre-nerf). It was awful. REALLY, unspeakably awful.
I would never, NEVER run a dungeon that was that long EVER again.
EVER.
It was REALLY, REALLY BAD.
I cannot imagine ever wanting to repeat that AWFUL, AWFUL experience.
curls up into a fetal position
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With quest chains that require coming back again and again and an 8 level breadth of content? Are you certain were talking about the same dungeon?
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That would be awful, no one would ever do it
You can go ahead and be like “But on classic people did it!”
No they didn’t, they avoided everything in there and only did very quick and specific boss farms, no one ever sat there entered and cleared the entire place and enjoyed it
Hard pass. I don’t want to spend several hours in a boring dungeon.
If I got one of those dungeons randomly I would immediately leave
Seriously, I remember my first run of BRD in late vanilla on my hunter and we were in there for something like 3+ hours. It was amazing, and legitimately felt “epic”. I miss that feeling when setting foot somewhere new in game.
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I think this would be cool if you had a checkpoint/save mechanic that lasted until the reset. That way players had the freedom of choosing how they wanted to tackle such massive dungeons. But with that said I think the concept of an epic dungeon crawler actually works better for scaling solo content.
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I don’t think content like this would be a random dungeon lol.
All of the black rock dungeons are
They are in an easy to skip nerfable mode. When brd come up you talk to the mole machine, jump down, kill 2 dudes, and leave.
This is not the content to which I was referring and i appologise if it was in any way unclear.
I remember healing pre nerf ST as a holy priest… Ah the memories of having to forsake doing anything else that day… for one run.
Well, the point of those dungeons was never to do them all at once - the quests were designed for you to go in, do a wing, come out, get new quests, come back the next day, do some more. I really enjoyed that part of BRD - it was never ever intended to be done all at once.
They more or less continued this but split things into separate dungeons, i.e. Tempest Keep - all the “same dungeon” but more officially split into wings. BRD was split up similarly as well when the dungeon finder came out, just as the original quests intended, the dungeon finder split BRD up into separate runs.
So did they really get rid of epic dungeons, or were they just split up into separate instances? Isn’t Torghast kind of an epic dungeon by this definition?
No. Most everyone hated dungeons like BRD. There is a reason Blizzard didn’t make any more long dungeons like that after vanilla.
Could you imagine the timer for a full mythic+ BRD run.
Imagine that as a surprise final for the MDI.
“Need a moonkin who can shift into cat form when the final boss goes immune to spells every 5 seconds for 4 seconds at a time.”