Wow: The Never Ending Dungeon

Has World of Warcraft become a never ending dungeon? There use to be a time when players would level up by doing quests in the over-world. Sometimes solo. Sometimes with a pick-up group of people. At times they would gather at a Meeting Stone to go into a dungeon.

After some time Dungeon Finder became popular and people realized that they could just join a random group of strangers, spawn directly into a dungeon, have the classic Tank, Healer, and 3 dps and complete the dungeon fast, getting plenty of experience to level up as well as good loot.

Then the Devs changed leveling mechanics and people found that dungeons could be run very fast. This availed the player a very time efficient way to level up quickly. Now Azeroth’s forests and grasslands, it’s savannas, deserts and mountains remain empty. With only the natural wild life roaming around. Even the cities and towns that were the mega meeting centers for adventurers to find quest givers and party members have become almost abandoned ghost-towns.

Now players log-in go to Dungeon Finder, or Raid Finder. Choose a dungeon and spend the rest of their playing time running through dungeons as fast as possible. Even when they reach max level they then turn to Mythic Plus Dungeons. So apparently World of Warcraft has gone from a game of adventure, discovery, and exploration with friends to a Never Ending Dungeon Run. At this point Wow should be called: “World of Dungeons.”

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Hard to say. Of the seven million or so people who play WoW we never hear from about seven million of them. No question the forums have a heavy representation of people who do dungeons and raids.

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I like the writing style! I personally prefer dungeons to questing, mostly because I like not having to read anything in that little hard-to-see text box from 2004, and my character feels much more powerful in a group, using my AoE abilities.

In my case it is Dungeons of Warcraft, by choice. I would be interested in questing again if they read them aloud and used the nice Diablo 4 quest format, and stopped making my characters bad at something (depending on their role) in the open world. My healers and tanks usually are bad/slow at doing single target damage and my DPS can’t survive the elite mobs in WoW.

I don’t think this is necessarily the only reason that old leveling zones look like ghost towns. The reason old leveling zones look like ghost towns is because you can literally level in any old zone you want from level 10 now. BFA is most popular, and where you are most likely to see other players, because all new players get funneled into it. WoD is a close second because it’s the fastest.

As for everywhere else, the issue is that there could be 100 people on a realm all leveling at the same time, and they would never see each other because they are all in different stages of different expansions. And this issue comes from an effort to actually get people out into the open world more, by allowing them to avoid skipping expansion stories that they want to play because they quickly overlevel them.

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I did that in Mists of Pandaria: Remix, Season of Discovery, Dragonflight, Shadowlands, Classic, Battle for Azeroth, Legion, Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria, Cataclysm, Wrath of the Lich King, The Burning Crusade, and Vanilla.

I swear you’ve got to be plugging these into ChatGPT or something.

Nobody can come up with this volume of random nonsense threads on their own.

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Well Human Beings Have been writing for thousands of years without ChatGPT. I don’t get why you think I need a computer program to help my writing simple posts on a gaming forum? I mean it’s just a few simple paragraphs.

Oh and just because you think I write nonsense doesn’t make it so.

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How long does it take leveling via dungeons in a new expansion?

Leveling in the open world takes about 4-5 hours (Dragonflight, for example) on launch day.

My impression is that quest leveling is still faster than dungeons.

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What about the period between expansions? Just curious to see what you say.

Between?

Who cares? What’s the hurry.

Sorry I don’t understand your meaning?

Look at it this way:

If leveling via questing is faster on launch, why wouldn’t it be faster 3 or 6 months later?

oh, ok, got it.

A lot of zones have minimum level ranges still, but you hit the nail on the head there. When you decide to roll a new character, your odds of running into another player basically boils down to the following:

  • Someone else decided to roll an alt at roughly the same time (or play them with roughly the same /played)
  • They chose the same expansion as you (there are effectively 8 options currently)
  • They opt to quest in the world instead of run dungeons
  • They chose the same zone as you (for most expansions, there are 4-8 options, while EK/Kalimdor have ~20 each)
  • They happen to be questing in the same part of the zone as you (most zones have 8-15 quest hubs throughout them)
  • They are leveling their character at the same time you are
  • Sharding hasn’t jumbled due to players flying overhead or something, and has placed you both on the same shard
  • You actually notice them (they’re not playing a stealth class, you’re not playing in tunnel vision)

That’s a lot of things that have to line up, and that’s not even accounting for players noticing each other and opting to not interact at all, which is like, 99% of world encounters since time spent interacting is less time spent leveling.

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I primarily quest to level. Also crafting gave a decent amount of experience this expansion. I gained 1.5-2 levels only from skilling up both of my professions on a character.

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Its w/e you want. Its the journey not the destination

Yes, its great.

If I want to quest in a MMO I’ll play a MMO with decent questing.

wow is whatever the community want it to be , enjoy

For every new expansion, I run one through all the quests in all the zones. I go for loremaster and uncoverting the map and getting all flight points. I will drop into dungeons as they fit into the questline.

The alt army? They do some questing and then jump to leveling by dungeons with the option to quest again later. Professions and finding treasure also contribute to this process.

I have a friend who never touches dungeons for leveling and just puts all of hers through quests.

shoulda seen my sigh when i was up in the air floating around having to bomb spiders with the weird finicky system they have again… :expressionless: like this is your spectacle? one of these ?