I need to make a quick throwaway toon and do Exile’s Reach. I have still never seen it.
It’s quite nice.
Yes, dungeons with AI companions are on the 4.2.5 PTR. I believe it’s just for the Dragonflight dungeons so far but they hope to expand it later. And it will be used going forward into the next expansion.
I’ve been informed that the NPC’s for the dungeon are the Exile’s Reach NPC’s that I still haven’t seen, which is why I need to run a toon through it real quick.
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Yeah. Garrick is the lead NPC there and she has been tanking the tutorial dungeon at the end of that zone/tutorial since it’s inception. Probably as a form of test bed?
Time spent and effort put in are pretty rarely considered equal. You can’t get a college diploma by doing the first grade 16 times, even though you’ve spent the same amount of time in school.
Oh did they actually say that about next expansion’s dungeons? I ask because that’s basically been my hope that I’m hanging a bit of preparation around haha!
Yep, it’s an announced feature. Just like dragon riding is going everywhere with every mount and being renamed “dynamic flight”.
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Trying to put together a group of like-minded people who don’t run content like it’s a stolen car is more challenging than you’d think.
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I find that surprising, considering the number of threads posted on the subject.
Shoot, in every one of those threads, there should easily be 3-5 groups who could be linking up, but we never see that happen.
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I can’t speak for everyone, and I believe this isn’t the first time you and I have swirled around this topic, but like… If I’m not playing with my friends, I’d rather play alone. If I’m not alone in that sentiment, there’s your answer.
My friends have generally moved on from WoW. My guild of RL friends, formed from two vanilla era guilds in Cataclysm, has been my core friend group since then, and we’re largely an online D&D group now. I won’t form bonds like that again, and bonds like that are the bonds I’m comfortable gaming within. A couple of them still log on and the 2-3 of us will probably do the 1-5 player content in TWW or even before (the 60-70 leveling game of follower dungeons is a big draw), but I’m not looking to form “another gaming family,” I already have one. I’m definitely not looking for a midpoint “united in the cause of not having friends to play with” group, because… well, the game is thankfully telling me I don’t need to do that.
So, no, it’s not on us to group up and solve the problem. I’m not looking to make new friends in the game or orbiting it. The answer is exactly the features I’m raving about in this and similar threads: The ones that, when needed, boil down to catering specifically to me, if not a group of 2-3 consisting of myself and my friends.
As I’ve said countless times, the lanes that WoW can and should most strongly support are “play with friends” or “play alone.” I’m not leaving those lanes once the systems are in place that solidify the idea that I don’t have to play with randos.
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That’s fine, you wouldn’t be who I was talking about then.
I am personally doubtful / questioning the idea that “Show up and win” should award heroic raid ilvl loot.
Wake me up when i can push keys with AI. Maybe i will check out pve then.
You know, I was just thinking as I was running all my 60 tanks through the DF intro to get them ready for the 60-70 follower dungeon leveling life, that while I am extremely excited to heal NPCs… I’ll also be glad to tank for NPCs, because yeah, a lot of bad tanks have helped us reach a moment where the “social compact” of small group “trinity PVE” is dead. Tanks shouldn’t be high and mighty or bossy… but they are (alongside the healer) “in charge” of the pace of a dungeon, whether DPS folks like it or not. I can see how that might get modern DPS players’ backs up, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
All things being evened out by Wheaton’s law, there should, by default, be a degree of leadership responsibility on the tank. That’s intimidating to queue for by itself, but then being ostracized by DPS for expecting it because those folks ran into someone who took that leadership role too far… well let’s just say that when I leveled my tank jobs in FFXIV, those jobs were top priority for using the NPC dungeoning options. I imagine that will be the same here in WoW.
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I’m really looking forward to using these dungeons to get familiar with all my healing specs, not just as a priest but also on my other healer alts, so I can finally feel confident enough to bring them into dungeons with other players. Heck, I might even try learning how to tank, too. Why not?
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Cheers! I loved her character in the tutorial starting zone.
I, also am looking forward to follower dungeons and less gogogo.
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I do think that this will be time gated and maaaaybe have some degree of skill check attached to it, but the open world has been rewarding for quite some time. We’ve reached a point, as I’ve said elsewhere, where the axis of “ambitious™ player or not” has quietly become the line of “top end gear or… not,” with “not” inching its way up further and further, and really… why shouldn’t it?
If you’re ambitiously™ playing WoW PVE, you’re aiming for upper end M+ or Mythic raiding. Those will be the sources of the highest ilvl numbers and always should be, as they require the most “skill” and more importantly co-ordination of organized effort.
Below that, it’s just a “battle for second place,” and in a game with “if you’re not first you’re last” crazies playing unhealthily in some cases… who cares who gets what numbers below “first place,” you know?
Heroic raiding should be up there. A respectably deep plunge into M+ should be up there. If we’re really doing a scaling-group-sized, role-agnostic capstone to the “show up and win” open world, where a glass cannon can program an NPC tank and sit back and blast, where a self-healing tank spec can program an NPC DPS to fight at their side and speed up their inevitably survived delve run, where a party of healers are viable, who says that can’t be part of the race to 2nd place? Why can’t everybody be 2nd place? After all, if you’re not ambitious™, you’ve already (healthily) decided that “not first place” is good enough, because it is for most people.
Why can’t that be legitimately rewarding? What does it harm?
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agree that the AI party bots will be great as they allow a player to consume content in the manner they prefer instead of the race-race-race style of unimmersive toxicity that utterly dominates dungeons for most of every xpac these days
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Possibly the best feature ever added to the game. Hurry up already.
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thats how it starts, but then the AI becomes smarter and leaves the instance upon a “player” death. (prity sure thats what it was doing in the early testing videos people posted. 
)
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