Hello all! I have a quick question about the dungeon lockout system for normal and heroic dungeons for some gold farming action.
I just recently got back into the game and would like to start farming dungeons once im 120 so I can make some raw gold.
I’ve watched some guides on youtube and no one seems to explain how the lockout system works. For example, I stumbled upon a guide stating you can make 200 gold a dungeon run, 2,000 gold before lockout, for an average of 12k gold and hour. How many times can I run a normal dungeon before lockout? And when I do get locked out? how long till reset? Im quite confused. Help? Is there a particular method he was using that im totally oblivious to?
Sorry for the mini wall of text! Hopefully one of you can help! Thanks!
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You can run a Normal dungeon 10 times per hour by leaving the dungeon and resetting your instances.
There are two kinds of lock out for dungeons - soft lockout and hard lockout.
Soft lockout is what you get from simply completing the instance. If you re-enter the dungeon after clearing it, but before resetting, everything you killed will still be dead. Once you reset the instance, everything will have been respawned.
Hard lockout is when you cannot run the dungeon any more for a specified amount of time. This cannot be overridden by resetting your instances, and is where the 10 times per hour cap comes into play. This clock is (nominally) on a rolling count, so if it takes you >6 minutes per dungeon clear, you will never encounter this cap.
To reset your instances, simply right click on your character frame and select “Reset All Instances”, and you’ll be good to go.
Side note to this: Heroic difficulty has a once-per-day limit, regardless of resets. Raids and Mythic 0 (keys are excluded from this) difficulty dungeons have a once-per-week limit. The reset for Heroic is 8am PDT every day, and for raids/Mythic 0 dungeons is 8am PDT every Tuesday.
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There is a limit of 10 instances per hour, and it’s a rolling lockout. So, if you ran one instance at 10:00AM, then 9 more between 10:15 and 10:45, you’d be able to run a new instance at 11:00AM. But, you won’t be able to run you next one after that until 11:15. This lockout is account-wide, so you can’t swap to a new character to get around it.
Heroic dungeons can be run once per day. (This lockout doesn’t count for random heroics you queue for using LFG, so you can technically run heroics in your current level range more than once per day, just not efficiently since it’s random.) Heroic dungeons (well, technically any instances) will soft reset a half hour after you leave the instance. Sort resets won’t reset bosses for content on a hard lockout, but they will reset trash. What that means depends on the instance. If trash was linked to a boss (which is common in raids) any trash you didn’t kill that was linked to a now dead boss will despawn. Trash that isn’t linked to bosses (common in dungeons) or that is linked to an unkilled boss will respawn, even if you killed it when clearing the instance.
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