As a tank, I was very much looking forward to logging in, grabbing 3-4 guildies and using RDF to get an instant queue to a dungeon. I get the bonus reward for queuing as a tank (badges, gold, etc) and my guildies get a free instant queue. It’s exceptionally beneficial for everyone with guildies or friends that play together, particularly the DPS that usually sit around for hours or don’t do dungeons at all. Best part is when Timmy needs to go to bed at 9 PM, the 4 of you can queue up again and fill with a random instantly.
My best memories from original Wrath were actually doing exactly this with my guildies. I joined a progression guild at the start of ICC and no one knew me. Over the course of a weekend I had met and tanked for every person in that raid group using RDF and when I stepped into ICC for the first time with them on a Tuesday, everyone knew who I was and what my skillset was, etc.
Just because “RDF” has the word “random” in it, the only thing that’s actually random if you use it the right way is the dungeon that gets selected. But it can also be used as a tool for getting that last body you need to fill a dungeon group and even a tool for running around the world doing quests while waiting to be popped into one of those groups. It helps both spectrums of players! Those with friends and those without!
That’s what people coming from Retail hating the current Dungeon Finder need to realize. RDF in Wrath with a guild or a bunch of friends was literally the best experience ever. I still remember logging into my paladin tank in Dal and getting a whisper from non-guildie friends begging me to queue with their DPS mains for the instant queues. I can’t tell you how many friends I made that way since my non-guildie friends were usually grouped with 2-3 other players from our server waiting on a tank like me to login or join the queue!
My experience with LFG chat in TBC after Phase 2 has been extremely underwhelming and if it continues to be filled with boosters rather than players, I can’t see myself leveling all that many alts this time around. In original Wrath, I had 8 level 80s with full Heirloom gear after starting the expansion with only one character. I did A LOT of RDF. Bare in mind RDF wasn’t released until the start of ICC, so I did all of that in a year while also raiding at the highest level of available content for the time.
I should also mention that since RDF could be used during leveling, I used that opportunity to post the message “Hey everyone, this is my first time playing (so and so class), so if you have pointers, I’d love to hear about it.” Everyone in RDF was also leveling alts at the time, so people that mained those classes would just spew useful tips for playing the class/role I was playing in party/whisper. I think at least one time an RDF group just sat at the start of the instance (SFK) and posted helpful tips for everyone else. The tank would chime in “I’ve never pally tanked before”, well, there was my go-to thing. I had a macro for new pally tanks setup that I would post for the new pally tanks or a general tanking macro for the warriors/dks/druids.
The community in RDF was surprisingly helpful if you simply started a conversation. And new players see these interactions and would pick up the helpful tips that might be relevant to their class as well. It’s a win for everyone! Also it’s always a good thing to see engagement at low levels in dungeons among other players otherwise everyone expects everyone else to already play like professionals and when they don’t, they get sour. Wrath was the period for new players and is widely considered one of the most successful periods of socialization in the game’s history. Dare I say a lot of this can be attributed to the success of RDF.
To be honest when the Lead Classic Dev said there would be no RDF at all, I got up and walked away from the computer because I was in absolute shock to hear them say that. I would love to see it at launch, but I would understand 100% if it was delayed until a later phase since that would match the original timeline. I don’t know who the majority of the people they are talking to about this issue, but clearly those people didn’t play Wrath back then or are ignorant to the social benefits of its inclusion. I hope my post widens the viewpoints of those adamantly against RDF. I was against RDF for Classic and TBC as I wanted the experience to be as accurate to the original as possible, but Wrath was where it was introduced and at this stage of the game, the barrier to entry for new players wanting to experience Wrath is so high that the game is more likely to die than it is to thrive.
We suffered through the World Buff Meta thanks to #nochanges and I’ll be damned if we suffer Wrath without any RDF because of those same people are now spewing the opposite propaganda when it doesn’t suit them, or so they think. If you give Wrath RDF a chance, I promise you, you’ll regret not being pro-RDF the same way we all regret dealing with World Buffs all of Classic and not being able to play our main characters for most of the week.