Hello!
One of the major things I thought was missing from this patch was a new dungeon or two. Back in the day, it was quite common to see new dungeons being added when a new raid tier came out, especially for the last raid of the expansion. All the way back to the Magister’s Terrace in the Burning Crusade, the Icecrown Dungeons and the Hour of Twilight dungeons did we see new dungeon content added.
In Mists of Pandaria, this ‘tradition’ ended, with no new dungeons being added to the game post-launch, this continued into Warlords of Draenor. I remember the reasoning at the time being given that it was not worth pouring resources into creating dungeons that only work to cannibalise the existing launch dungeons more than they already were, and funnel players into a smaller pool of dungeons when gearing up.
And that was a fairly reasonable justification at the time, but the situation has of course changed now. This was seen in Legion as Mythic+ came into the game, which, outside of the trendsetting Karazhan megadungeon, two other dungeons were added throughout the expansion in Cathedral of the Eternal Night and Seat of the Triumvirate. I do remember that both dungeons were relatively unpopular, but I think that was more to do with their difficulty being implanted into people’s minds from day one, versus the rest of the dungeon pool that people had been familiar with for nearly a year as these dungeons were released.
Since Battle for Azeroth, it seems the post-launch dungeon budget has been devoted entirely into the megadungeons. Whilst these are great, I do feel as if there are opportunities being missed especially now that we have a rotating dungeon pool each season.
I really hope that the negative experiences of Cathedral and Seat, which to me felt like they were primarily about difficulty as opposed to the concept of them existing, hasn’t turned the developers away from creating new non-megadungeon dungeon experiences.
The original 8 Dragonflight dungeons were stretched across the first two seasons, now in Season 3, six out of eight dungeons are old content tuned up. Although to be fair, Throne of the Tides received an extensive overhaul which changed a great deal about it.
I was initially sceptical about the dungeon rotation idea, although I have grown to quite enjoy a new pool each season, it seems like the perfect opportunity to invest more into Mythic+, both on the cosmetic reward side of things, as well as the actual content itself with new, fresh dungeons with each content patch.
What about DOTI, I hear you ask? Dawn of the Infinite feels like it was made as a storytelling megadungeon first, and then turned into two M+ dungeons afterwards. Whilst the dungeon has some fun encounters and difficult trash, it also suffers from what feels like ‘RP first’ design, which is fine in an M0 environment and I loved doing the dungeon when it was first launched in 10.1.5, it doesn’t translate well into M+ with the running between platforms, portals taking you to a platform, mount up, run 50 yards, go into the portal.
TL;DR - Please give us entirely new dungeons each season.
I’m keen to hear other people’s thoughts on this too.