so just to see how things were, i did a follower dungeon today on my poorly geared fury warrior alt. I was in agility heirloom gear with heirloom weapons. I was top dps by 20 % the entire time. The NPC’s kept standing in avoidables and dieing. The whole dungeons was slow and painful. I got no loot to make it even a little worthwhile. And add insult to injury, no bonus xp at the end. So no loot, no xp and slow and painful. Why would anyone do this? I can queue up for a timewalking dungeon, get a lvl or 2, usually get handed any loot i can use that people don’t need and the entire run takes less than 10 mins. Good idea in theory, bad in practice. If i want to do normal dungeons i’ll just go solo them on my main.
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I never thought they were meant to be more optimal than normal dungeons in a broad sense.
Only that you can run them without other people - that’s the only benefit. And it should stay that way in my opinion, there should be incentives to group with other people in an MMORPG.
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the only positive i found doing it was an instant queue. Everything else about it was subpar even to normal dungeons. I wont be doing them again.
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Follower dungeons are for General Discussion people that claim to have such crippling anxiety that the very thought of queuing for a random Heroic sends waves of terror throughout their body.
It’s really not meant to be a good feature. It’s like comp stomp, the bare minimum the developer could put out to try to be inclusive towards even their most impossible customer base.
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The only use for me is to do Brackenhide on my ilvl460+ rogue or priest to craft the special altar LW and alchemy stuff!
Work perfectly since i do 80-90% of the damage and tank is able to surprisingly hold aggro!
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I thought they’d be a nice way to level up alts without huge que times. Never expected the rewards to be better than a regular dungeon, but the XP is so low that the whole thing is just actually worthless.
Although, free mana biscuits so… not totally worthless I guess…
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It’s instant, it’s story mode and there is no drama.
People underestimate how valuable that is to some people. Not as good as FFXIV’s trust system but for a launch it’s descent enough.
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I’ve used them purely to get back into specs I’m not used to. Resto on my Druid, enh on my shaman, holy paladin etc. It has actually helped me just get more of the in-action feel of the rotation. Once I do one, then go to heroic or mythic. I feel it serves its purpose and would love for them to be on timewalking or even mythic but understand that would get rid of the purpose of wow being an mmo.
So what you are saying is that the AI is exactly like a real pug?
Honestly though - it was my understanding that it wasn’t really meant to replace grouping for real since this is an MMO. It’s more in place for people who don’t want to or can’t group with others for whatever reason but still want to see the story. As others have stated, more of an inclusivity thing than optimal.
I can see myself using this feature for alts or to learn/test a spec I don’t normally play rather than inflicting it on someone I don’t know straight off.
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This was exactly my thought when I tried them. I’ve used BH for the Altar of Rot, but for leveling, the follower dgs were awful.
I tried a couple of them just to see what it was like.
They kick better than real people, which surprised me. They switch between braindead stand and hit and then surprisingly halfway confident in actually using their utility. Kinda funny to watch.
You can click whether the bots lead the way or you do. Maybe its there to click for stress relief or something cuz it doesn’t appear to do anything.
Yes, the follower NPCs are not great. They are bad at avoiding avoidables, their damage is poor, and with a few small exceptions, largely ignore most boss mechanics that don’t just involve switching DPS targets. And they are completely incapable of taking advantage of one of the major gimmicks of Nokhud Offensive - the ability to fly, which causes problems in a few areas. And while they are good at using their interrupts, they tend to just interrupt the first thing they see, and are bad at prioritizing important spells to interrupt. And to add insult to injury, they cannot be targeted by the player for Resurrection spells - in, or out of combat, even when you’re a healer.
But, the system exists for one reason - well, aside from the obvious comparison to certain other games. Lets you do a dungeon without needing to play with strangers. It’s not as fast or as potentially smooth as playing with strangers who have some remote clue what they might be doing, but you can do it. I will say, the ability to group with one or two friends and simply have the NPCs fill in the gaps is a nice feature that even said certain other game doesn’t let you do.
It’s a bit of a shaky debut, but it exists, it does what it’s meant to do, even if not much else - and for now, it’ll do. I’m patient, and willing to see how they develop and improve it. If they do. I hope they do, as there is a lot of potential in this sort of system. But they’ll need to put in the work if they want it to live up to it.
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I don’t see the big deal, I’ve used them to get used to specs that I am new to. They helped me learn my healer spec. The reason I didn’t want to run normals or heroics is because the tank will pull half the dungeon and you’re basically just running the entire dungeon which is just unfun and doesn’t allow me to practice the rotation, at least in the follower dungeons I could practice my rotation and get my muscle memory going because the AI bots pull group by group.
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Just ran my first one today and yeah, they are definitely a useless feature currently. Did it on my level 62 warrior alt because I was hoping to use this for leveling mostly.
The AI wasn’t terrible, it got the job done if a bit slowly.
The exp gains were atrocious, not even 2 full bars for Ruby Life Pools. Didn’t get a single item drop either. Also very little gold(though wasn’t expecting this to be a gold maker by any means).
It feels like someone had a really good idea, but it got nerfed into the ground because people who benefit off of gatekeeping content complained very loudly about it. If you’re going to sink development resources into making features like this, don’t nerf it into uselessness right out of the gate. At the very least have it reward as much EXP as a normal group would so it can be used for leveling.
Even mentioning dps meters, you are not the target audience.
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They are great for farming mats for the phoenix wishwing!
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I’m curious, have bots started taking advantage of these yet? That was something we speculated before this feature came out.
A bot-controlled player leading a party of other bots. How meta.
The AI seems to work fine but the XP is a little low.
Pretty much by design. The devs did not want this to be the default leveling experience, so if you’re in a hurry to level (and apparently everyone is), this is not your answer.
It’s better than the PTR (which was a solid 80% reduction if you went in with four AIs), but it’s still a bit.
Pretty sure they wanted it to be fore people who wanted an intro to the dungeon with no anxiety, but I used it to farm smoldering phoenix ash for my phoenix wishwing and it was super useful lol.
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