I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t agree with this. There are a number of different reasons to run leveling content. Sometimes it’s to get a feel for a class or spec that you can’t really get from standing in front of training dummies.
Sometimes it’s to try to learn how a class work, beneath all the bells and whistles. You’re not going to, for example, get a feel for how affliction’s DoTs feel when other stuff is going on.
As an example, I still don’t really get brewmaster tanking. It’s kind of weird to heal them sometimes, so I am trying to run one of them through some lower level things on an alt, to see if things click a bit more. It’s not exactly easy to do this is there’s some level 10 arcane mage running blowing things up before I get a chance to even look at them. Then yelling at other members of the party for not ‘keeping up’.
I get that a lot of people are only using leveling dungeons as the fastest way hit the level cap. But a lot of people don’t want to sacrifice fun for speed. And personally, I don’t really like feeling like I’m there just to cheer someone else on. It’s like if you thought 'Hey, you know, it’s been a while since I’ve done this, so…maybe I could hop down to the park and play a quick pick-up game." And then you get there, and you randomly get on a team with Michael Jordan and Lebron James. Yeah, sure, you win, but…feeling like you don’t matter at all isn’t a good feeling.
To clarify, I’m not trying to call you (or anyone who agrees with you) somehow in the wrong with this. I’m just trying to give a reason why someone might care about this, even if you do get free experience and loot.
(This last part isn’t hypothetical. That happened with one such mage who had perfected some kind of run through Plaguefall, and was annoyed that other people didn’t know it.)
I think it needs another look period. This has nothing to do with veterans, in my mind. During Wrath, heroics became some pointless AoE fest where no dungeons really mattered at all (until those ICC dungeons, which rather forcibly reminded you who was in charge. Looking at you, Heroic Halls of Reflection.)
I outright refuse to believe anyone who thinks that a low level shaman/mage/whatever should actually be able to solo group content faster than an equipped group is anything other than some kind of problematic scaling issue.
There’s ‘strong’, there’s ‘very strong’, there’s ‘crazy strong’ and there’s ‘this is clearly broken’.
That last bit you said, though, is something I think a lot of people are overlooking. For new or returning players, it can give them the wrong impression of what’s going on, how dungeons are run, and basic group etiquette. The amount of confusion and frustration after watching a mage annihilate everything in Waycrest, and then when they die to four or five non elite mobs when leveling is the kind of thing that turns people off to the game.
For full disclosure, I think the leveling experience in general with dungeons could use another look. No one really needs to try and do anything, and I’m pretty sure that’s why you end up in your Mythics and Raids with rogues/druids/hunters who don’t know Shiv/Soothe/Tranquilizing Shot removes enrage, of watching (with annoyed indignitation) as the mage/shaman/druid kind of just does nothing while the healer is silenced by a curse.
Double the XP reward bonus at the end for killing all of the bosses if it takes more time. It would just be nice if a dungeon was at least as hard as a quest that had a couple of elite mobs.
I…hope the follower dungeons might help with that, but…I don’t know how it’s going to work.
