Instead of the classic WOW MMORPG experience of dungeon crawling, getting loot off each boss and being able to target and farm bosses for loot, we instead have to deal with a timer and random diablo-style affixes.
A timer doesn’t suddenly make a dungeon take more skill, all it does is push groups to even more unbalanced FOTM comps, leaving some specs and classes in the dust.
A timer doesn’t allow for quick breaks when stuff happens. A timer doesn’t allow you enjoy the experience: it just promotes a gogogo speed clearing mentality.
Not being able to loot a boss and just fishing for a random drop from a chest at the end of the dungeon isn’t fun. It doesn’t let me target or farm my BIS. I could be doing anything - I am completely disconnected from the dungeon.
Cancerous affixes that heavily punish certain classes and specs are not fun - they just make the dungeon tedious, or lock out certain classes.
Bring back dungeons. Ideally we would have a set ilvl in the dungeon and dungeons of different difficulties. Like Mechagon, and mechagon hardmode. Every patch, add more dungeons! Keep the fun 5 man spirit alive with new dungeon content, with updated rewards.
However, we obviously aren’t going to get away from scaling ilvl loot, so use the tech in Torghast. Let us choose a “layer” of difficulty for each dungeon, with scaling ilvl rewards. Weekly lockout per layer, but otherwise remains an untimed dungeon experience with scaling difficulty and rewards.
This would be a great alternative for people who don’t want to deal with M+. Leave M+ for the people who enjoy the gogogogogo timed diablo content. But give us back our dungeons!
For the current generation of gamers, mythic plus works very well. Having a timer makes it so you have to plan better, coordinate which mobs you need to kill or skip, when to use cds. The standard dungeons are pretty much braindead since you most likely use your cds on cooldown and zug zug until the end. While there are so many good things about mythic plus, my favorite part of it is that you can lose. When you always win, it dulls the experience.
Without m+ what would you do once you got all the loot from heroic or mythic0? You’d cap out on gear and challenges in a few months and then what? You want the alternative but aren’t thinking about the future consequences of what you want.
In Vanilla, Deadmines never dropped higher gear than its initial item levels. None of the dungeons did.
We could go in and farm it at endgame, and every alt we had could go in with a group and run it at level, carefully navigating and farming what we liked.
That ability has not changed one jot. The dungeons at normal remain the same as they ever were, and when leveling, they are a challenge, just like dungeons always have been. At endgame, you can farm them the same way at heroic level AND mythic level. No timer. No affixes. No trappings of M+ whatsoever.
They have only added M+ as an option. They have taken away nothing.
They can’t give your dungeons “back,” because your dungeons have never been taken away.
To create equally challenging content without the timer, they would essentially have to make every dungeon boss a raid boss with 1 shot mechanics as well as make the trash unbearable.
What would stop you from waiting for lust/hero every pull…in fact I’m sure it would be expected. This does not sound like fun content
The timer raises the difficulty without requiring the bosses to become ridiculous
I just do casual bg, normal, heroic, LFR M0 now. Oh and complaining on wow forums. On about 9 diff toons. I could do more but that involves probably buying a new computer, focusing on one toon, using and keeping up to date numerous addons (io, raidbots, weakaura, dcr, sharing data with numerous third party applications, joining a raiding guild, using discord or voice chat, buying a headset with microphone), etc., etc, etc.
They have taken away the relevance. 5 man dungeons used to be relevant for a lot longer than they are now. M0 loot is now invalidated by M+ and PVP, as well as raids.