From levels 1 through to 60, the Dungeon Finder regularly groups me with overgeared characters who solo whole instances. Watching someone’s level 10 twink or ilvl 300+ raider murder everything between them and the bosses was fun exactly once. Dungeons are some of my favourite parts of the game, and being unable to engage with them makes me want to drop the game altogether. If these players are going to stop me from playing the game, I may as well save myself the subscription fee and do something else with my time. I hope this experience does not carry into Dragonflight.
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there’s no way to fix this. at all.
today on the forums : clearing dungeons too fast im gonna quit.
They’re not doing anything they’re just playing the game
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yeah there’s no solution for this. My DK got asked to only dps on bosses the other day because tank was 56 n I was I guess pullin his aggro, or we were going to fast for his liking, I dunno. A lot of times those highly geared players are helping friends or guildies. And sure dungeons can be fun, but at this point the average player has done them so many times across so many toons that they are glad the runs go fast. Leveling is a chore and if placed like Mauradon, BRD, etc… took as long as they’re supposed to, it would be awful.
yeah i’m not a big fan of being forced to repeat content for an alt, but such is an MMO.
You’re right. My frustration was obvious, and the post borders on shaming people for doing largely harmless things. My objections should be directed more toward the game’s mechanisms than player behaviours that are using those systems in ways that are optimal for them. I’ll try again: Group Finder frustrates me because I am looking to meaningfully interact with the dungeon using my character’s abilities, and it pairs me with people who are specifically looking to avoid that.
I also think you’re right that there is no solution currently in the game to avoid this. I’m voicing discontent in what I realise is likely a vain hope that it influences design decisions in the future.
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See, I actually miss old-school multi-hour Maraudon and BRD runs. Not that I want to do that sort of thing every day, especially with how the mechanics are showing their age. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I loved getting the gang together and taking on a whole dang city. I haven’t tried it yet, but should I just be playing Classic?
nah, classic is fairly similar to retail in terms of socialness in dungeons. we’ve progressed pretty far since the game has been out for 15 years
Was this on a Time Walking week? You don’t really see raiders in leveling dungeons otherwise. Though Time Walking scales you so I’m not sure if you can solo them, maybe?
Anyway, fundamentally I agree with you that leveling dungeons are pretty trivial content, though it depends on the expansion. Anything before Legion is pretty meh. Anything Legion or after at least has meaningful mechanics.
Maybe they need to tweak those scaling knobs a bit more?
It was leveling in Shadowlands. Across five dungeons, only one didn’t have an overgeared level 60 blasting through it. Particularly frustrating since I only just got access to Shadowlands content and haven’t had much of a chance to play through it as intended.
I hear you. From 10-50 I skip group content completely for that reason. I only do the SL dungeons while leveling if a quest requires it. I’ll do Heroics a bit to get gear, or I’ll do Timewalking if it is an interesting expansion. Mostly I just buy the 226 stuff and do ZM to gear.
I’ve been that guy in NW and HoA because I run those if the Kyrian Covenant is up for those dungeons. I queue as Prot Paladin and could probably solo them on my ~240/272 Pallys. Even at those levels I have geared DPS speed boosting ahead and pulling.
It isn’t good, it isn’t bad. It is what it is. The community has a certain expectation and we are too far down the road now to go back.
- Either don’t do the content
- Just turn your mind off and accept it
- Go back later and solo in a later expansion
At various times I have done all three. Now I am into ignore mode…
So I quit worrying about it and just go with the flow. I’ll try to point out mechanics if I see someone having trouble.
- Point arrow at the boss in NW
- Run behind a jar in HoA
To engage with the dungeons I’d recommend finding a guild and doing low level Mythics with friends/guildies. You’ll get to know the mechanics and it will be more of a team exercise.
Oh yea, from 50 and onwards yes this will definitely happen. You said 1 through 60 in your OP though, which is why I was surprised.
I suspect these folks are doing normal dungeons to get the bonus. I hear you though. I don’t think there’s much to be done for it unfortunately, out gearing content to the point where it trivializes it is a staple of WoW that I think people enjoy. Dungeons are always much more fun at the start of an expansion.
Also, once you get to 60 and start doing those dungeons on M+, you’ll get to experience them as challenging dungeons. So hang in there!
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Of course, the downside to that is that M+ is a timed race, so you don’t really get the same feel as, say, exploration, or absorbing the story, quests, other optional content, or whatever that is present when doing a levelling dungeon for the first time.
Unfortunately, and maybe to the OP’s point, you don’t really get that anyway. I wish they could recapture that feeling of dungeon crawling exploration that they used to have. I really like M+, but I also really liked a dungeon crawl.
I was able to recapture that feeling with Classic back in 2019 briefly, mostly while leveling, but the players quickly turned to speed running and meta gaming and it’s been like that ever since. Unless you play with a group of friends and go at whatever pace you want, that style of play is lost in WoW.
Is there even a game that offers that kind of experience anymore? I’m not even sure it’s possible to achieve since you can make whatever kind of dungeon you want, but as long as you put phat lewtz (ie, a reward) at the end, folks are gonna want to run it as quickly as possible.
IDK that it’s fully gone. Like, sure, it’s not the same as, say, Zul’Farrak in 2005, or BRD, but if you have a group of relatively like-minded and new people even in something like Necrotic Wake, there’s a sense of figuring out where to go, mobs and bosses have time to get abilities off, voicelines, etc. It’s certainly much better than having someone round up an entire room and gib it all, I’d imagine.
I don’t think it’s impossible to have or maintain, it just requires actually putting thought into putting various forms of content through the dungeon, rather than slapping a timer on it, or putting a reward on the end-boss/completion. Like, obviously if you put something on the end-boss, and people can clearly see it’s more exp-efficient to just skip to the end, they will do it, but it’s not exactly impossible to, say, incentivise killing all bosses, or putting rewards into “optional” content, and stuff like that.
I think in the modern game it might be. The dungeons just aren’t really designed around that play anymore. There’s very little need to use CC for trash packs at the normal and heroic gear levels, possibly even mythic, and by M+ the timer comes into play. Unless you very deliberately go looking for it in a player base who is conditioned to avoid it, you’re going to have trouble finding that kind of gameplay.
It all comes down to the reward. In 2004/2005 we were doing it for the experience and for the thrill of exploration. The rewards were there but everything was new and exciting, and so we did those long, multi-hour dungeon tours. Once the shine wore off a bit and folks figured out that the game was progressing your character, maximizing your reward became the goal. Even if, as you suggest, the reward was obtained by killing all bosses or rewarding optional content, it would still become about killing it as fast as possible so you could leave, and do it again.
I don’t think this is necessarily bad… I mean, exploration is a reward, but it’s a limited time offer. It’s fun and engaging to do a dungeon like BRD or a full tour of Blackrock Spire, just for the experience of it. The 20th time you’ve done that though, for a lot of folks, the shine has worn off and so some incentive to repeat content is required. Stupid primate brains.
I do absolutely love the design of current WoW dungeons, and the gameplay of M+. I wouldn’t want Blizzard to remove that. However I definitely think something has been lost and I’m not sure how we could ever get it back. Playing for the experience and not the reward. Dungeons like Kara, Mechagon, and Tazavesh make a solid effort at coming close, but I don’t think we’ll ever have the winding, sprawling dungeon adventure experience we had in Vanilla.
I love that we still have access to those in the form of Classic Era. I’m sad that we are unlikely to ever get anything new, but they’re still there to experience. So if anybody ever wants to run any of those dungeons, preferably in as close to appropriate gear levels as possible, hit me up! I’m on the cluster that Pagle belongs to and will happily heal any of those dungeons 
Not sure why the need for CC matters. What I’m talking about is more content, e.g. storylines that make it a good idea to want to explore, say, what’s going on in that library, or an optional boss spawned by mixing a bunch of Slimes in Plaguefall, or things that are unlocked by having certain classes in the group to activate them, like the extra Paladin or Druid questlines in some older dungeons, or whatever. As long as any additional content comes with an appropriate reward, e.g. loot or experience, players will naturally want to do that.
I’d venture an alternative idea - this isn’t an issue of reward, it’s an issue of unoriginal gameplay. Naturally things are going to get boring when they’re being done the 20th time. But the issue there is for one part, that the game involves repeatedly doing things you’ve already done dozens or hundreds or times, and that each “time” is more or less the same. That’s not really the same if one time you’re doing an escort quest that opens up a bunch of new stuff, the next time you have a Monk so there’s more new stuff, etc. etc.
They’ve tried to add more variation in gameplay with some of the affixes, but ultimately the core nature of the game is having a very small group of activities that players mindlessly do. In a given raid tier, there’s anywhere from 8 to 11 raid bosses. In a given M+ season, there’s 8-10 dungeons. Most of it is exactly the same week-to-week, and even difficulty modes are often just numbers boosts. Even when new mechanics/affixes get added, sometimes it’s basically more of the same, or “Do this, but now do it perfectly, or die”.
I think if affixes were literally different challenge modes, e.g. one week is a timer, another week is checkpoints, blah blah, they’d be able to deliver a lot more variation. I think I talked about this sometime before, but if seasons involved actually doing a fair amount of change to a dungeon (e.g. Azshara is now invading Atal’Dazar, you start off on the left side, there’s a new boss at the old entrance, some pulls swapped around, adds added to this boss and this mechanic revamped, blah blah), Seasonal changes would also feel more variable. If you look into those sorts of idea, many of them will come with their own flaws, no doubt, but I think those are valid ways to add and preserve a sense of freshness, but it requires a very different approach to content rather than what seems to be a typical “Slap some stuff out, ask people to grind it for a few months 40 times, make loot drops low so that people feel like they need to be grinding it more”, etc.
What I meant by the CC comment was that dungeons are trivial enough, even at low gear levels, that you can just gather up packs and damage them down. So the variety of packs at those levels just isn’t there. They all feel the same. This improves in M+ when enemies are stronger and mechanics are meaningful, but by then the focus has shifted to the timer.
Adding those additional pieces of content and story lines is great, and I would fully support it. I just don’t think the player base will… which is my point. WoW players are primed for short-cycle content that is run quickly and repeatedly. Anything that deviates from an optimal path is unwelcome. Even a BRD style dungeon where every boss and side path was rewarded would be unwelcome. I believe that’s part of the reason dungeon design shifted from Vanilla to TBC. I seem to recall reading an article on that somewhere…
Again, this and all the other things you’re suggesting are great ideas. I love it, bring them on. Variety in gameplay is something that I’m keen on. But none of these things take us back to a more slow-paced, adventurous, dungeon crawl like gameplay where you can spend hours in a single dungeon exploring and defeating encounters.
This is what I mean when I say that kind of content just might not be possible with today’s players, given their expectations. I think some would love it, but many more won’t and I just don’t see Blizzard taking a risk on that kind of content.
Even were they to bring it to Classic Era as a kind of Classic+ type of thing, I’m just not sure how many players would engage with that kind of content past a few cycles.
Sort of. The change between Vanilla and TBC effectively modularised what was previously just “wings”. But that doesn’t (and at least in TBC, didn’t) preclude adding in content, it just obviously means that “content” still works within a smaller dungeon. The big reason for this was that it helped people pick and choose what they wanted to do rather than feeling like they were leaving something incomplete in a long-ish dungeon that could span 4+ hours, and that of course remains true if, say, a 20-25 minute dungeon stays in the 20-25 minute range but with an extra questline replacing random trash mobs.
And I think that ties sort of into what you were getting in the paragraph before. Yeah, people probably will gather up packs and AoE. That’s still fine, it certainly doesn’t stop designers from adding variety, mechanics, or at. Most trash is forgettable because it’s designed to be, it’s generic Undead mob with 1 spell, or Fire Elemental with a fire aoe, or something like that. Nothing stops that from changing if it’s willed to be. You wouldn’t qualify Chess or that Flame guy before Shade of Medivh with the fire squares are just “forgettable”, and even for AoE, the exploding mana thingies in Mana Tombs remain memorable to this day.
I don’t think it has to be expected that you’d spend HOURS in a single dungeon, and I certainly don’t think it breaks that flow if a group did, say, want to spend hours doing 4 or so related dungeons back to back (with the ability to take a break in-between, not worry about trash respawns, etc.). Adventurous or slow-paced doesn’t have to mean glacially slow, to the point that you can’t chainpull and AoE, people will want to kill things faster, get better numbers etc., anyway. It just means you aren’t putting additional external pressures to reward speed, e.g. ending the dungeon gives much better rewards than any individual boss, a timer making you feel like you need to race faster, etc. That’s enough to ensure people will naturally feel more empowered to approach it at their own pace, even if that pace is pretty fast because they’re fairly good, or whatever.
The experience you want will probably happen the first week or two of DF. This late in an expansion to get what you’re looking for would really require a group of like-minded folks dungeoning together. Like with keys, add the chill people you do run into in pugs and you can find your community.
You always had the option to take a break in late-game Vanilla dungeons, provided it wasn’t too long. It’s those long dungeon experiences that I’m talking about here though. My first BRD full clear in 2019 Classic took a solid 3 hours to do and it was extremely memorable and fun. They got faster with gear but still took almost two hours to complete. That’s the kind of experience I’m talking about here. A group of adventurers going into a dungeon and spending a lot of time working through it.
Those dungeons were what raids became, but you could do them as a group of 5 instead of a group of 10/20/40. They were just really great experiences and I miss them.
I do think reward was a large part of the shift, but you’re right, time management as a compelling factor for moving towards a winged structure also makes sense. I think they go hand in hand though. After a 25 minute dungeon you can take a break certainly, but you can also reset and do that same dungeon again to farm the thing you want. In BRD, if you want something off the last boss but someone else wants something off the first boss, you’re looking at a much longer time investment.
(I’m over using BRD here but I think that’s the most fitting example. The same could be said for LBRS/UBRS/Strath full clears, and even Scholo back in the day before it was changed.)
Keep in mind that I’m not looking for glacially slow either, I’m just talking about large. Having to use CC to get by a pack slows down the dungeon for sure, but it doesn’t make it awful. It just spices up those trash packs to make them more interesting. I agree that most trash packs are forgettable, but some aren’t, and that’s a good thing. You can still kill 20+ bosses in those 2-3 hours you spend in the dungeon. I agree that it would be much less enjoyable if it took that same amount of time to complete any of the current 8-boss mega dungeons we have in retail right now.