Dungeon Design - Speedrun vs Exploration

Community General Discussion
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How do you guys think Blizzard can approach this design philosophy in a more balanced manner? Actually, what sort of design do you personally prefer? As it stands, dungeons are more designed for the speed runner mentality, a linear course packed with trash to clear until you reach the finish line. There’s also the old school vanilla design, more tailored towards exploration and discovery. Mega Dungeons were made to address this sort of.

Knowing how much of a staple mythic plus is for endgame now, it’s safe to say it’s not going anywhere. However, is there a way you think Blizzard could steer dungeon design more towards exploration while also adjusting mythic plus in a way that still supports explorative / dungeon crawling gameplay? Should it just stay the same? Thoughts?

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I just feel that Dungeons are too long and have way too much trash.

I would rather a focus be put more on Bosses being fun and engaging then a bunch of trash inbetween them.

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See, I feel the exact opposite. And therein lies the problem for the dev team. I respect your opinion tho! :slight_smile:

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I like your idea of shorter dungeons but prefer kind of boring bosses with lots of trash mobs around them (that can be pulled with the boss to add as much difficulty as the group can handle).

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Honestly, if they were going to do something along those lines, it would be akin to Torghast, perhaps Island Expeditions. Procedural generation where you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.

You can’t build a set dungeon and have exploration in WoW, as exploration can only exist in a game as explored as WoW in something you can’t know before you start.

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I think vanilla showed the devs that players by and large prefer linear dungeons with 3-5 bosses.

Scarlet Monestary was the horde zone 30-40 dungeons vs Gnomer the alliance zone 30-40 dungeon.

One was incredibly popular, the other was…not.

They changed dungeon design in TBC to be 3-5 boss hallways and it’s mainly been that ever since except for Megadungeons (a feature adding during the mythic+ era) and Halls of Origination.

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They can’t.

They’ve chosen speed over fantasy and have to lay in it.

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All dungeons should be one corridor boss one corridor boss. there made them 100% better.

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The design to cater to M+ IMO is better in the long run. When you first do a dungeon, yeah it’s awesome to just explore and take in the sights. But we’re going to be doing these same dungeons a lot, and it gets old after awhile. I would much rather the dungeon designed to be coupled with M+ and always stay interesting and a challenge for me, even though I also love the exploration aspect of dungeons.

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they had lots of exploring and quest stuff in the dungeons back in the day because they did not expect players to do them over and over…that’s partially why they were designed so large.

i miss the RPG days…i also want to see that return in some way, but no idea how they’re gonna do it with m+ being such a rewarding end game.

gamers aren’t playing MMO’s the way they used’ta…i think time is too valuable these days. :broken_heart:

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Man people are gunna be mad when they remember basically every dungeon since TBC has been real linear

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I just want to stay out of dungeons.

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No wonder gd screams about m+ all the time. Very rarely when pushing keys do you “speed through the dungeon”.

M+ is extremely calculated, delibrate and cautious or you just die past a certain point.

It’s just the average GD player can’t comprehend that pulling 3 packs can be anything other than “omg speed zerg kill spam”.

Anything other than a bio break inbetween each single mob is “too fast” for these boomers.

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I mean, some people might like that stuff. I don’t need that stress in my life so I’ll just do other stuff. I don’t need high ilevel to do the content I like which is casual.

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Bring back required CC on packs like classic and TBC and make it so we cant just gather a room and aoe/cleave them down…

This is the only way to stop speed runs.

Thing is, no one wants that ever again because it was boring and huge time loss, and if you couldnt get any CC or the right CC for your group it fell apart, main reason blizz stopped making trash like that.

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in a way, the mythic+ and speedrunning is just blizzard giving players what they want.

look at how casual content is treated…timewalking? it’s been a speedrun for as long as i can remember. heroics? same deal.

let’s take a look at the classic community - they’ve been speedrunning this game before m+ even existed on private servers…even today on live servers, this is the case.

not blizzard’s fault entirely. :revolving_hearts:

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you definitely don’t want brd’s everywhere. That’s cool once or twice then you don’t want to do it anymore.

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Personally, I’m more of a fan of speed, though I can also appreciate a moment to breathe amongst the chaos. Some dungeon runs can be stressful for me because tanks have 0 chill (which I also appreciate) but it’s a double-edged sword for me. Even just a few seconds of nothingness between a couple of packs is appreciated because, again, it gives me a moment to breathe.

FF XIV’s dungeons are like that. Even when you pull big and clear a bunch of enemies, there’s a few seconds of calm after that and it gives me a brief period of time to collect myself before the action starts again. With WoW dungeons, a properly geared and skilled tank can basically just keep the action going from start to finish.

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Now, how much of that “required CC” from vanilla was just offsetting players still figuring out the game, the lack of proper class design, or both?

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The only CC you needed for TBC dungeons was Constant Consecrate.

Prot Paladins reduced the need for CC to 0.

And people saying you don’t use CC in M+ obviously don’t do M+. We just don’t sheep a mob for 60 seconds to stop a single cast anymore, we just stop that cast.