Just wondering if it annoys anyone else how tanks just try to blast through a leveling dungeon as quick as possible skipping half the bosses and 75% of the mobs when leveling up. I can see doing it in M+ when you’re timed and don’t get any drops / XP from mobs / bosses until the end but in a 50-59 normal plaguefall its super annoying to me. Not only that but if you happen to accidentally pull an extra mob especially as a pet class bc you can dismiss and resummon / mount and follow as quick as they are double jumping through a dungeon they’ll likely get mad at you. The whole things just kinda silly to me, I’ve been sticking to leveling with pvp / quests now bc of it. Just wanna know if I’m the only one that doesn’t like this style of running dungeons full throttle but skipping nearly everything just to get the end xp 10 mins quicker
When the completion bonus gives more XP than clearing the dungeon, I don’t mind it so much. I wish they would just make mobs give more XP and tune down the completion bonuses though; it’s silly for leveling dungeons to use fancier routing than KSM runs.
I think that if you’re a tank, you’re going to have instant queues so it’s fastest to speed through the dungeons and collect the completion bonuses. If your queues are much longer or you can’t play for a long time, you may only do a few dungeons so you would benefit from the rested bonus.
It may be helpful to note that the people without the rested bonus are only getting 1/2 the xp you are for the things inside the dungeon, so they’re probably trying to get that completion bonus xp.
Exactly what Ravicana said. The issue is that the exp to mob ratio is nothing compared to the exp gained from completing a dungeon. I don’t mind either way, skipping or clearing but it’s always been strange when it’s optimal to skip any boss you can.
I typically do a small pull at the start to see how experienced the group is and adjust from their. If I see 4 KSM mounts I’m definitely blasting through it. And when I’m healing I don’t get annoyed by fast or slow runs but would definitely prefer fast.
My question is why do dungeons for levelling if you’re going to have to do all the levelling quests to get your covenant anyway?
If you choose Threads of Fate, it autocompletes all of the campaign quests for you.
Well now I’m way more into the idea of levelling an alt!
Yeah I don’t like how blizzard has bosses that are ‘intended’ to be done to progress through the dungeon but they can be skipped no problem. Like with the first two bosses in plaguefall.
Plaguefall dosent met that def thou.
Those two bosses being skipable was intended as a clue towards the instances secret. So no they where not made to be “inteneded” to progress only the last two where. The first two are optional bosses. Yes they might be near your path but they are optional none the less and made to be. There is no need to try to do anything fancy to skip them it’s just walk by them as they are placed well out of the way intentfully showing them as optional bosses.
You would have a point for bosses than eg there agro range is just slightly to small so wall hugging can get by or using ai via pot or fancy wall/ Clift skip to get by. But plague falls case is blizzard clearly making them optional bosses not inteneded to progress bosses.
I don’t think you understood what I meant by “intended”. When you go into a dungeon, it shows a list of the bosses you can kill on the right side of your screen. These bosses are split between “intended to progress” (i.e. These are the bosses that you HAVE to kill to complete the dungeon) and “optional”. Blizzard tends to put optional bosses in the “have to kill” list, like they did with plaguefall. And you can’t use “challenge mode / mythic +” as a reason why they do that, considering the spider boss in Everbloom is listed as optional for normal, heroic and mythic Everbloom but showed up in the “have to kill” list for challenge mode (since you had to do that boss on challenge mode). Other examples include Dresaron from Darkheart Thicket and Earthrager Ptah from Halls of Origination. Hell, the first 3 bosses in Freehold are examples of this too. As you can just skip all of them and go right to Harlen (which was what groups did for the 4 mythic dungeon weekly until blizzard
forced you to do the other bosses for that weekly). However Skycaptain, the council of captains and Ring of Booty are all listed as non-optional bosses. Even though they are optional except in mythic + back in BFA.
My guess is that blizzard does this to give off the illusion that you have to kill those bosses to progress. Since they are not “officially” listed as optional. Which makes me wonder why even do that in the first place. Sure Plaguefall has the secret excuse, but what about Freehold? Darkheart Thicket? What reason do those dungeons have for listing 100% optional bosses as non-optional bosses on difficulties that don’t require you to kill them to ‘complete the dungeon’ (i.e. I am excluding mythic + and the old challenge modes)?
Yea, as folks have pointed out, it’s because it’s more efficient for xp to finish the dungeon asap. Those extra bosses don’t help you level faster in the long run.
I feel you though… sometimes it’s nice to just experience a dungeon! You’ve got a couple options…
- Roll a tank and let folks know ahead of time that you’re doing the whole place. If they’re not cool with it, they can always requeue.
- Impose on your friends to do a dungeon leveling crawl group with you, then you guys can do what you like
They wouldn’t really be considered optional bosses by Blizzard; the idea of being able to skip them just comes down to open-ended dungeon design. When you create a dungeon that’s on rails, it’s easy to lock doors and things to force people to go in a certain order. Short of doing some weird things like, say, “locking” the bridges in Freehold, which would feel unnatural, open-plan dungeons just allow people a bit more freedom to “bend the rules”.
Skipping everything to kill Harlan in Freehold, or skipping bosses in Plaguefall, wouldn’t be considered normal, or even “intended”, gameplay. It’s just technically possible either because they consciously felt the efforts to block it would be more detrimental to the dungeon’s design, or because they made an oopsie and didn’t think people would actually do it. That often comes about in “generic” things (like the Mythic weekly to complete 4 dungeons being triggered by the “last” boss).
Another fun example is Hellfire Ramparts. Omor and Nazan are basically on two equal paths off a central platform, and it’s an entirely arbitrary choice which one counts as “the last boss”.
The funny thing about this is that Omor is considered it because he gives the achievement, but Nazan is the one who gets you the bag of useless goods. Same thing with the purple route for maradoun if you get it as a random dungeon. Cerebras got added to the list of bosses in that wing, but the bag of useless goods (and therefore the dungeon xp) still comes off the Satyr boss.
But honestly if a boss is designed to be optional (as in blizzard makes a conscience effort to design the dungeon with routes that bypass them), they should be listed as such. Not placed in the list of “Kill these bosses to complete dungeon” unless it is something for mythic +.
That’s what I was getting at above - I don’t think Plagefall, Freehold, etc. are examples of Blizzard making a conscious choice in this regard. Optional bosses tend to come with their own wing/event that is themed after them, and a very explicit cutoff that is often visually present.
Look at Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom - Amanitar is off in a lower level, has trash that is different from the vibe just above, and different from the rest of the dungeon as a whole. It’s been a while since I played with in-game music; but I think it might have different music as well? I remember there were things like that back in BC/WotLK. Lost City of the Tol’vir is the same way; you take an active detour to find Lockmaw. You’ll never fight the 3-stack Grummle mob things unless you choose to go down that path, for something I remember off-hand.
In Plaguefull, you’re pulling trash that is associated with Globgrog* on the way to him, even clearing space that you’re clearly meant to use for the Globgrog fight, and then … choosing to walk away. It’s not quite the same. Hell, to date, I haven’t seen a dungeon group that skipped him while levelling any alt, or anything like that.
*possibly even tied to him for respawns?? Remember the days when dungeon respawns was a mechanic!
Don’t blame the players for this. That is how the system works. All the XP is gained from killing the final boss. If you’re in a dungeon for the XP - and most people are - then it’s the most efficient way to get that XP.
If instead each boss awarded XP proportional to the total XP for the dungeon, then people would kill every boss. But that would bring its own set of problems, e.g. in dungeons where the first boss is very close to the start (like Rezan in Atal’Dazar), people would just queue, kill that 1 boss for the XP, then leave.
I don’t think that last thing is an actual issue for the most part because players as a whole tend not to have instant/super short queues. Certain roles do at times, but if they’re constantly leaving runs, they should just get put right back into incomplete runs (I do remember once in … I think Cataclysm, where someone raged and left a dungeon run, we re-queued, and the same person popped back in so we just gave them hell about it. That’s likely rare tho).
But if they were actually concerned it would become prevalent enough to negatively affect the game, there’s options to do things like “Dungeon completion is awarded from killing the final boss, based on the bosses killed” (aka killing every boss gives you the same exp as now, if you skip bosses you’ll start getting less), and stuff like that. It might take a few iterations to come up with the correct formula, but it’s not … inconceivable.
No, that isn’t how it works. If you leave a run, then you get put back into the same dungeon (not into an incomplete run). This is actually advantage if you were trying to farm the first boss of Tol Dagor or Atal’Dazar for XP or loot.
If I see a clear alt route that bypasses a boss (e.g. Skycaptain in Freehold), then that is a conscious choice. If you can skip a boss because there is no invisible wall (or a visible one) blocking you from progressing through the dungeon (first two bosses in Plaguefall), then it is a conscious choice. If they can be skipped then they are optional. That is by definition optional.
Trash is a different story as most of the time you don’t need to kill all the trash to reach a boss. Some bosses require you to kill all the trash in their section (i.e. Stitchflesh) though. Also there is no trash counter for normal, heroic and mythic 0 difficulties 
Although for Lost City you do need to kill Lockmaw (along with the other 2 bosses) to get to Siamat. You don’t need to kill Augh though (heroic only) to get to Siamat, but you do if you want Lockmaw’s loot.
There’s 2 different bits of logic at play.
When you leave an incomplete dungeon without killing the final boss, you’re “preferred” for the same dungeon again. Also, separate from that, when an incomplete dungeon queues for re-filling players, it gets bumped to the front of the queue. And there’s balancing logic at play to make sure none of these are waiting “too long” (even if that means overriding other rules).
It’s not exact on how the two bits interact, but what should happen if there are a lot of incomplete dungeon queues, is that people will be funnelled into the incomplete runs more often than not. It might be incomplete runs of the same dungeon (in which case no benefit for leaving at all), or incomplete runs of other dungeons (also no benefit for leaving at all). And if you THEN leave those runs without … I believe killing at least 1 boss, you get the Deserter debuff.
If I see a clear alt route that bypasses a boss (e.g. Skycaptain in Freehold), then that is a conscious choice. If you can skip a boss because there is no invisible wall (or a visible one) blocking you from progressing through the dungeon (first two bosses in Plaguefall), then it is a conscious choice. If they can be skipped then they are optional. That is by definition optional.
OK, but that’s not necessarily the logic Blizzard subscribes to, and linguistic definitions don’t always work that way when it comes to code/design. Intention only really matters from their PoV.
And I can kinda get their logic, because from a pure design PoV, invisible walls, etc., are just ugly, and better avoided if possible. You’ll also notice a lot of these examples (Plaguefall, Freehold) etc., are not just dungeons, but instances created from open-world areas onto which dungeons have been super-imposed. From a purely philosophical view, invisible walls, and scripted events would ruin the effect of that.
Trash is a different story as most of the time you don’t need to kill all the trash to reach a boss. Some bosses require you to kill all the trash in their section (i.e. Stitchflesh) though. Also there is no trash counter for normal, heroic and mythic 0 difficulties
That’s not the point I was making though. The idea with trash often is that it’s thematic to the boss/wing you’re in. It’s why Globgrog has lots of Slimy stuff, but Domina Venomblade has Ambushers/Sharpshooters. It’s easier seen when dungeon design is more narrow, or you have distinct, non-connected wings (e.g. King’s Rest, Theater of Pain), but it still applies on a more open space. Like, you get Guano-bombed as part of Skycap’n Kragg’s trash in Freehold because that’s part of “his” experience, regardless of whether you decide to detour away from pulling him or not.
So the intention is still to experience both together, whereas when they are designing it to be optional, you won’t see any of it.
Although for Lost City you do need to kill Lockmaw (along with the other 2 bosses) to get to Siamat. You don’t need to kill Augh though (heroic only) to get to Siamat, but you do if you want Lockmaw’s loot.
I believe that was an actual change that happened at some point, I can’t remember if it was 4.1 or 4.0.6 or something, or something after Cataclysm was the relevant expansion. Maybe it was a PTR build before he went Live. I vaguely remember a discussion that it was in response to the fact that Lockmaw is so out of the way, people who needed stuff from him were having trouble even convincing people to go to him, or having to explain where he even existed.