Feedback: Please chill on the "open concept" dungeons

Community General Discussion
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I’m going to try to keep this as clear as possible, and I’m talking chiefly about leveling in LFD, not your “keys.” This is addressed to the devs, not at the players, though I imagine the players will have opinions.

Other MMOs get a bit of grief for having tunnel-like dungeons, and there’s room to not go that far, but for the love of god, please stop with these dungeons with a gzillion different potential routes, that new players understandably won’t know, that in some cases (looking at you, Brackenhide) make running back from death way more complicated than it should be.

I have been “Back” from a 2-year hiatus since november, and I just had a brackenhide run where I legit had never seen the route we’d taken before, and if I had died, I was just going to drop group. There were so many sneaky skips and twists I’d never seen before and thankfully I didn’t die, but like, we had a near wipe and me and another DPS stayed put while the tank went back to fetch the runbacks: an uncommon degree of kindness, which was, well… uncommon.

Intuitiveness is so key. Any run can be a first run, and the “communal agreement to land on the heights of Nokhudan hold” is NOT universally known, and when you have a group divided on this front, it’s done. Just drop group. It’s over, and that’s ridiculous.

Please observe that most of the community will not be happy welcoming hugs and smiles a year and a half into an expansion.

Now, a rebuttal to my own point: Follower dungeons. I love them, they don’t have this problem, but honestly, they’re not enough of a disclaimer to build your dungeons like this. If you don’t think so, and believe follower dungeons cover your behinds on this, fine, I can’t argue that, but I think it’s an unfortunate defense. Follower dungeons do solve “don’t be knew on other players’ time” (that’s gross to say but you can’t say it’s not a rule in this community, unfortunately) on the axis of class knowledge, but it can’t and won’t cover the axis of “route knowledge.” “Look it up on youtube” is not a defense. Dungeon design that leaves routes intuitive and reasonable is the solution, or accepting that new or expansion-late players should stick to follower dungeons which is… less cool.

So yeah, realize who your audience is, I beg of you. They’re typically not welcoming of new or returning players on this axis. They will expect new players to know the “communally understood” route, and they won’t, and the experience will suck.

Thank you for reading.

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You must have loved Vanilla and BC. lol

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no thanks.
i hate linear, one route, no skips dungeons.
they’re boring.

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You can kind of just choose your own adventure / don’t need to be optimal in norm / heroic / and low keys, no? Optimization isn’t really required.

By the time it matters, if you don’t understand the dungeon (or know enough to look it up) that’s on you tbh.

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WoW is definitely not the place to do this concept. The playerbase is 90% GOGOGOGOGOs who will kick you for not taking the optimal route because with their mentality, that 10 seconds you wasted equals about 5% of their lifespan.

There will be one optimal route, and you will be expected to know it and take it. This is WoW. This is how it’ll be. So adding more routes than that amounts to griefing people who are on their first run.

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Linear dungeons don’t allow for exploration at all, which is boring. Having a couple are probably fine but to have all of them would be, again, boring.

If you don’t want to get lost, just follow the group.

If you don’t know where you’re going, just tell the group that. If they don’t like it, it’s on them. Just move on to the next.

It’s not that big of a deal, and that’s coming from someone who is directionally challenged and who got lost in org for 20 minutes trying to find the herbalist.

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This seems more like a player problem than a dungeon design problem, though… People insist on doing tryhard skips in LFD and are shocked when people get lost trying to run back.

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I disagree. Most old expansions have at least a few dungeons with non-intuitive “clever” mechanics and paths. Most players will instantly release on death in a dungeon they don’t know and thus have no reasonable expectation of rejoining the group. And most players aren’t willing or able to walk in a straight line.

There really needs to be some sort of a way of learning dungeons without inconveniencing a group that is there for fast xp. Maybe a “dungeon basics” scenario that points out common mechanics, telegraphs, and strategies that the tank can be expected to use. Things like what swirlies mean, staying with the group, and hugging the wall on one side when the tank is doing that.

I don’t know what the solution is, but this isn’t working.

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Right, but there’s not that, and there’s not any reasonable expectation that there will ever be that.

Every time they try to let people train on their own, it goes horribly, because it puts people 15% worse but willing to put in any amount of effort, in a position to think they’re good enough, when the GOGOGOGOGOs don’t want them there, no matter how much effort they put in, and the GOGOGOGOGOs want to always be able to say, “It’s because you don’t want to work for it lol.”

This is literally what happened with Proving Grounds. People who know they don’t belong in group content did it 100 times until they passed, and people who did belong in group content were unwilling to do it twice, and raged about it. And they will never, ever, do anything like that again.

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Maybe we can have a little bit of both.

Some linear. Some open. Give people that like different things different options.

As far as dungeon mechanics themselves, I would like to see more things become standard. Every spell doesnt needs its own ring design. Sure, make the spell itself pretty. But maybe we simplify the mechanics itself with “this is a bad circle you get out of, this is a stacking circle for splitting damage, this is a good circle”

Going off on a irrelevant tangent that has nothing to do with anything. Proving grounds are great and I still pop in every so often regularly for a variety of reasons.

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Closer to 10%. Like 80% of the playerbase doesnt care – you dont see them. And the other 10% are people who you do see, but also dont care. I’ve never seen someone kicked out – mid-key – for a bad route.

Why? Routes dont matter (for 99% of players). If the tank – the person in control of the route – is not pulling large enough, that’s a confidence issue. Better to encourage them to go bigger and hype them up than to kick them out. This is the optimal route for player interactions, after all.

I didn’t like Nok’hud Offensive because i felt there was too much space between the various areas. It felt more like a zone than a dungeon (i know that’s probably the intent, but it felt too open).

A few 1-2-1 routes, like with Theater of Pain (1-3-1), are great. (First boss is set, Next boss is a choice, then the next boss was the other choice, then we get a set final boss.) I think these routes are the best mix between route optimization and player choice.

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Follower dungeons. If they open those up to low levels, people can learn the dungeons easily, taking their time without worrying about other people. They can also learn to tank or heal.

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They’ve kinda done that, though. But it’s mostly with circles that are on the the ground. The ones you have to soak generally have that pillar effect in the middle that goes away when someone’s in it. The bad ones are solid, or just swirls.

Problem comes with effects that are centered on players. Best example right now is the silence on the last boss of Darkheart Thicket. So many people run away from me when I try to get in theirs…and just end up not being able to use abilities for the duration.

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They should start using AI to learn off normal player behavior within dungeons and let newbies enable a ghosting trail that guides them to what most players do (at least in follower dungeons). Would help a lot in getting them familiar with at least ONE way of doing a dungeon.

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op got burnt from brd days lol.

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this thread is funny because ff14 already does a bunch of what’s been requested in here

  1. dungeons are just really pretty hallways so nobody gets lost
  2. mechanics have standardized tells so you always know the difference between a stack and a soak and a “don’t stand here”
  3. hall of the novice… uh, exists? look it’s not very good but at least there’s something resembling an attempt at teaching players the difference between dps, tank, and healer play, and they even put twink gear in there so you get a nice little upgrade for playing the group content tutorial
  4. bot dungeons started off as side content, got revamped in shadowbringers, and are now a thing for… i’m pretty sure the entirety of the main storyline can now be played without ever having to group with another player for anything aside from maybe the 8-man bosses

maybe blizzard will get with the times someday, who knows

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I recommend queueing as dps or healer the first time and following the tank, but keeping careful notes of their route. It takes much less time to learn a normal dungeon route than an M+ route (because enemy forces % doesn’t matter). If someone complains about the route the tank is doing, maybe try to do that dungeon again with a different tank.

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We also have this!

A full swirly means get out

A swirly inside a circle of larger radius means players should probably stand in this one

Now they seem to be doing them with stuff going up where a player should be standing, and the stuff going up disappears when a player is within them

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FFXIV already does this, and it’s genuinely why I can’t stand their dungeons. ESO mixes it up a bit with riddles/secret areas, but it still often too linear. I like how WoW dungeons are open, sometimes entire fields of areas that need mounting to move around or fly in (not just the latest stuff but even as far back as like TBC)… To me the linear stuff is incredibly boring, the bosses are well designed in FFXIV but the dungeons are the same boring 2 hallways then a boss each time, we need more of these fully open dungeons.

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The real issue is the consistency of said visuals. Like why the hell are teal circles being used as something bad - when we have green-adjacent things that can confuse the hell out of people lol. Imagine trying to distinguish that crap if someone was colorblind even WITH the accessibility options used.

But I’m glad WoW is actually improving drastically in this area, I just wish they’d start using more consistent markers for very important mechanics. XIV does it, and it teaches players what to do and how to do it. Then you do those song and dances when those mechanics pop up (because they always do even in WoW).

I agree, but I also see why they do it. It creates a much easier pathway for players to just… Do the content. They don’t have to learn the arbitrary shortcuts that you end up (funnily enough) being just a LINEAR PATH from start to finish that people do over and over and over again.

There probably is a really nice middle ground that WoW could hit where there is variance in how you do a dungeons and still have it feel or be more open otherwise. Kinda like how Left 4 Dead (1 & 2) have randomized pathways that force you to take another direction or hallway, but it’s all huge open areas still that can move and swerve with the horde that spawns. Obvs 2 different games but an example I could think of.