Timewalking Dungeons and the Weekly Event Rotation

Community WoW Community Council
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So, a thread on General Discussion reminded me of a topic I wanted to post when I first got the e-mail about the CC. Timewalking Dungeons.

I think it’s safe to say Timewalking Dungeons are one of the few things that have been added in recent years that people look forward to. They get people excited, because it’s a break from the monotony of only have the current X dungeons to run.

However, it’s gotten to the point we have so many Timewalking weeks now that they’re spread out by 4-5 months between the same one, which makes it annoying, cause some TWing weeks are less liked by some people. So if you want your favorite week to show up… well you’ll be waiting a while. And by extension, as more TWing gets added, other weeks like the Mythic Weekly or PvP weekly, or Pet Battle weekly also get spread out by a week.

So, there’s 2 suggestions I see mentioned on the forums a lot:

  1. Remove individual Timewalking weeks. Consolidate them all into a single “Timewalking” week. Allow us to choose which timewalking dungeons we wish to do for the weekly/badges. Consolidate the Timewalking Weekly Quest Item (that drops from the first final boss kill) to turn into Stormwind/Orgrimmar no matter the dungeons you did. When Timewalking week is up, things like the Mage Tower and Legion M+ will be up.
  2. Make Timewalking Weeks separate from the regular rotation. So for instance this week is Pet Battle Week. What if it was Pet Battle AND Burning Crusade Timewalking week? Then next week would be X week and Wrath Timewalking week, etc. This would effectively put each timewalking expansion on a 6 week rotation, MUCH better than the current 4-5 month rotation.

For #2, you’d probably have to tune the quest so it only rewards a Cache of Normal Raid treasures once a month, and just make it reward LFR treasures the other times in the month you complete it. Though with Zereth Mortis giving 252s, I don’t think it’d be -that- big of a deal with this patch, more thinking 10.0 and beyond. I think #2 is the superior solution, because it gives people more options of what to do every week.

I just know the current system is flawed, and could really do with some changes, because when we enter the next expansion and BFA timewalking is added, that’ll further separate the weekly events.

Also, it’d be nice if new toys, pets, mounts, etc… were added to Timewalking Vendors periodically. Maybe on the anniversary of an expansion’s launch, you could add new things to that timewalking vendor?

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I wouldn’t be entirely against this, but it comes with some caveats, specifically regarding queue times and choice. If the queue includes absolutely every timewalking dungeon, you never know if you’ll get the Arcatraz or the Court of Stars, but at least the queue times will be pretty reasonable. If you can queue into specific expansions, queue times could be really long if you pick the wrong one - and there’s going to be a right and wrong answer. The former option is certainly the more attractive one in this case.

You could also instead combine two expansions into each timewalking week, to reduce the gap between each individual timewalking week.

Decoupling it from the other events might lead to some timewalking fatigue, if there’s a timewalking event every week alongside another event, there’s a weekly checklist to do the timewalking quest all the time. It might also be a good thing, as there’d be more content to do, but that is all in the eyes of the beholder.

Personally, I prefer a slight twist on this suggestion. I think timewalking should be available regardless of whether or not the timewalking event is up, and have the timewalking events be supplemental instead of being the only time you can access timewalking. I think there’s another thread that touches on this, where it was brought up that you could combine the leveling dungeon experience with the timewalking experience, so that max players can help levelers out and shorten their queue times, which I think is a great idea. You’d be able to do it year round and reap some rewards, but during timewalking weeks, you get much more rewards, including the weekly 500 timewarped badges and the normal raid level loot. Perhaps it also increases your timewarped badge gain, so that it’s more efficient to farm them during the timewalking week.

And in order to make timewalking more lucrative and worth doing, we would of course need lots of new rewards to actually spend our hard-earned timewarped badges on!

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I’m glad this timewalking thread was made! I have a related item from several months ago and I didn’t want to make a thread just for that:)

After I leveled my DH naturally I needed to go get the Warglaives of Azzinoth. So I waitind for the next BC timewalking and started up a raid group on a Saturday morning and decided that come hell or high water I was going to get it done over the weekend.

Long story short it was a ton of fun and I did get the glaives (my warrior had got both the drops previously).

The tricky part is that forming timewalking raids had to be done manually the old school way. Which is great if you’re doing a guild run but quite a mess if you are running a 100% PUG raid which is what I did. People were coming in and out almost every pull at times and in order to refill the raid I would have to disband the entire raid, go back the shat, reform the raid from scratch personally as the raid lock was mine (fortunately no one stole it) and then que back in to the raid lock and continue. This had to happen over and over and over again all day long. Eventually after about 8 hours of pugging and 2-3 very dedicated PUG members we finally finished with a grand total of me and one other person who was still there from the first pull.

My ask:

  • Would it be possible to upgrade timewalking raids to use the LFR system so groups can autofill with new members as needed without needing to exit the instance, disband and reform entire raid groups?

As I recall there is a bug on Bloodboil in particular which had something to do with when someone leaves the raid the only way to continue is to disband the entire raid, exit the instance, reform the raid by someone who is already locked and re-queue. (This was in Aug 2021 BTW)

As it is now people can possibly have their raid lock stolen from them or end up excluded from a raid that they had been in for hours because they got skipped over by accident on one of the raid reforms.

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They could always just do every other week, and have Trial of Style take its place every other week.

ToS is a fun minigame that is currently twice a year. But it has potential to be so much more.

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One of the reasons I’d prefer to be able to do timewalking whenever, but only have the event itself up once a month or so, is mostly because of FOMO design. If it was up every week, or every other week, a lot of players feel like they’re going to have to do it in order not to miss out on the reward. If it’s going to run concurrent with other weekly events, that’s going to pile up quite quickly and suddenly your weekly checklist is going to be pretty big, which can feel pretty overwhelming.

Some limited time events are nice though. I like Darkmoon Faire because it doesn’t really feed into the same sort of gameplay as timewalking, it’s a bunch of minigames that you use to buy cosmetics, and that’s great. Trial of Style could function much the same way, perhaps you have Darkmoon Faire the first sunday of the month, and then Trial of Style the third sunday of every month? Each lasting for a week, of course.

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So I can definitely agree that I would like to see TW rotations on a bit of a quicker schedule than 4-5 months between seeing the same era.

I personally don’t think consolidation in the answer, which the reasons above cover my hesitations with that idea.

My initial thought would be to just increase the frequency at which they appear on the rotation, but that would mean decreasing something else.

Instead, there is a potential to “double stack” weeks: Pet Battle/Wrath TW on week one, Mythic Dungeons/Arena week two, etc. This would also potentially help for weeks where people are completely disinterested in that week’s rotation (if I don’t pet battle, at least now there is something else to do that week).

My bigger issue with the current state of timewalking is its irrelevancy to the current game. The Normal Raid cache is nice, but the fact that the dropped gear is 210ilvl just doesn’t make sense to me.

In my opinion, the dropped gear should be minimally equivalent to Heroic dungeon loot, given that TW dungeons are supposed to be tuned as Heroics.

The gear drops are the biggest complaint I have personally heard as to why people don’t run TW outside of the 5 for the quest, even on alts - because they can walk into ZM and get free 226 or just run m0s.

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Definitely wish Timewalking happened more often! Figured we should refresh this post since we have our first Timewalking week of the new expansion.

I would like to see Timewalking gear able to be upgraded via the Timewarped badges, It’d be nice.

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