Hello,
I wanted to take a moment to share some feedback on dungeons. Forever is an amazing game and it is very near to my perfect version of wow. That being said, I don’t hugely care fore how dungeon itemization and experience have changed.
Experience Changes:
Dungeons on the beta are giving simultaneously too much and too little EXP. Getting 2-3 bars for clearing a whole dungeon but then getting 2 entire levels from turning in quests feels bad. Its not immersive and feels really janky and game-y. It basically just means there are some levels that don’t exist. My character on beta was level 14 for about 10 minutes and level 17 for about 5 minutes because all i did during those levels was turn in dungeon quests. I really don’t care for this. The experience changes have also created a weird retail mindset where skips are mandatory. No joke, all three of my dungeon groups on beta for brand new dungeons were insisting on using skips because the mobs give no EXP. Something like the pyramid in ZF used to be iconic because you can see your EXP spike. Breaking natural and intuitive dungeon levelling to avoid having to activley monitor boosting is such an unfortunate compromise.
Suggestions:
I would dramatically cut the EXP from dungeon quests and reallocate some (not all) of that exp back to mobs. Overall, these quests are way too powerful and the progress you get from them does not feel earned or intuitive. Dungeon levelling should overall be 30% less effective than it is on beta right now. Ideally I would like to see quest EXP cut in half and then mob exp bumped up a bit so that we end up at about -30% EXP overall.
Loot Changes:
Too many blues, especially from quests. Having extremely powerful early game blues from dungeon quests really cheapens the excitement of getting a blue item before level 30 (which used to feel huge!) Outdoor content still somehow feels okay even with 8 blues at level 20 so kudos to the team on that, but the real problem is that i just don’t care about loot anymore. That is exactly the problem retail has where you are bombarded with so much high quality loot that none of it really matters. I have a level 20 character that has, no joke, already cycled through 3 pairs of blue quality bracers. Having these blues available from dungeon quests is even worse, because that means every horde character i level will use the same pants from the same RFC quest again and again. This is true in Vanilla as well, but making those pants blue exacerbates a problem rather than fixing it.
Suggestions:
Each dungeon should only have one quest that rewards a blue or if there are multiple quests that reward a blue, there shouldn’t be multiple pieces for every archetype. Maybe one quest rewards a tank shield and a wand and then another quest rewards Agi leather and Int mail. Early dungeons should also have a few bosses that only drop green quality items. I don’t think the “dungeons only drop blues” rule should kick in until around level 30+ because at that point the possibility of a rare epic starts to percolate in.
Conclusions:
These changes, when taken in tandem, make the game feel very similar to levelling a character on retail. I am blasting through levels faster than I can count them and my inventory is getting flooded with blue items faster than I can form any kind of attachment to them. All of this feels inconsistent with a game that isn’t supposed to be about racing to the end.
Accidentally deleted my reply to Phantomstout:
For sure. Sorry I shouldn’t have buried that bit. Difficulty surprisingly feels fine even with inflated gear. They seem to have worked really hard on the numerical progression. I’m coming at this totally from a vibes perspective.
Also both of the new dungeons on the beta are themselves spectacular. 10/10. My issues really are pretty narrow in the grand scheme of things.