The mess that is leveling dungeons

[SirCowdog]

I'm okay with questing being the more lucrative version of leveling tbh. Dungeon farming over and over and over just shouldn't be optimal. It's super repetitive. You're right about the quests being weird though. I miss the old days before LFG came in tbh. Mainly just for leveling. Being asked to go find a band of adventurers to go into this scary cave was kinda cool. They claim to have made these changes to better the new player experience, but having a disconnected leveling experience doesn't help. Connecting the experience, story, and world all together was a big reason they made these changes to leveling, but they've completely overlooked how dungeons fit into that role.

Well, I'm all for allowing people to level up however they want. PVP, dungeons, questing, grinding, whatever. And if you don't like it at all, buy the boost and play at cap I'd that's what you're interested in.

Options. It's all about options.

They took all this time and effort to rebalance leveling, but then didn't balance it very well with other methods of leveling. And I really think that needs to be addressed.

[Netherbrood]

I would argue that nobody learns anything well while below max level. Without the character's full arsenal of talents and abilities, attempting to learn how to play a class at low levels can reinforce bad habits that will be difficult to break later. I would have just left low level dungeons as the mostly mindless button smashers that they were. The leveling experience should be a fun and happy place. Wait til they have to go to LFR to break a player's soul.

I find that i learn more about a class as i level. That being over the course of leveling you learn what a spell does and weave it into the rotation as needed, by the time you hit max level you should have a thorough understanding of what the class does and what the rotation is for it. When it comes to utility, for me i learn when i should be using it by trial and error.

[Dsc]

Newsflash. The game more specifically dungeons was/were never built with "Leveling dungeons" in mind.

When a player got to the appropriate level (after fine tuning his/her skills on real roadside mobs with silver or gold circles around their portrait. which usually were scary as they killed you.) , there was a quest or two in the storyline, normally Orange or Red. Then you would form a proper group and explore the dungeon, with a set of objectives. Maybe you would make it after a bit of study on allakazam, and some wipes.

Zerging from 10 to 110 in a dungeon tool with others looking to zerg too was never how things were designed, at least until Wrath.

[Hctaz]

Zerging from 10 to 110 in a dungeon tool with others looking to zerg too was never how things were designed, at least until Wrath.

It wasn't even designed like that in Wrath either. The LFG tool wasn't implemented until the very last raid tier came out more than halfway through the expansion.

[Deleted]

I'm abit sad they didn't increase the dmg that mobs do in open world and dungeons. I really like that they increased HP but it's not difficult enough. I soloed the durnholde challenge at lvl 27 as a priest. This quest is supposed to be a 3 man quest it says in the quest log. Definately a step in the right direction though.

[Otimus]

People will probably mostly just skip the dungeons.

Yeah, from what I can tell, there's really no point in doing them anymore except for the fun of it. The only other thing I've heard is gear, and I frankly don't think that sounds like it's worth it.

At the very least, it SHOULD be lucrative to at least do them once, as the previous poster said, to end cap the zone. It doesn't sound like it is at all. That's bad.

[Cows For Life]

If you put on heirlooms you basically say that "i want faster leveling experience and don't want gear anymore", dungeons always were for gear, you won't be able to properly level when undergeared (thanks to cata quest rewards give you adequate gear most of the time), when you powerlevel your gear gets outdated really fast, so you have to run through couple of dungeons to grab at least a good weapon (in case of non-casters) for your current level, so you won't spend 20 seconds beating one mob.

Dunno about Draenor, i'll gladly skip this content because of garrison and how questing was paced there. In legion i didn't noticed that (frankly, i've only played in 7.3.5 from 108-110) and because of artifact weapon dungeons feel very trivial. But legion gives you a lot of quests that make you go into dungeons, so there is that for incentive to do them.

Then it's a good thing they forced personal loot to all dungeons with drop chances falling through the ground!

[HuxNeva]

Unlike other threads, the focus of this thread is to highlight the state that leveling dungeons are in. As of now, they are extremely inefficient and not worth the time. Now, I am not here to complain about their difficulty, but rather the problems and lack of attention they seemed to have gotten as of the latest patch.

1). Most people who do LFG don't go in with the mindset of doing a challenge

I expect this to go away with time, but most people still haven't learned about the changes do dungeons. Also, a lot of people don't know simple things like rotations and CC, and many will just pull and lose their patience. Not to mention, often times the LA realms have players you can't even communicate with (must be a mess in the EU)

Not an issue, the community will adapt.

2) Classes lack abilities to adequately respond to mechanics.

Some mobs that heal will heal for large amounts, making it neccesary to interrupt. While I have not leveled all the classes, Prot Pallies don't an interrupts until 35, and Balance druids do not get Solarbeam until 80. Brewmasters lack mitigation to be able to take huge hits in dungeons. While these are a couple of examples, there are more that could be added.

This should be looked into. Basic tools like interrupts need to be available when required.

3) There is little reason to even do them

The XP from mobs is not enough to justify doing them. The amount of XP you get from completing them and the amount from quests is just not enough compared to the time and effort put into doing it.

Not all paths will or have to give the same XP. that said, is the discrepancy temporary as people are adapting and soon dungeons will be run 4x faster?

Now this is something I know people don't agree with, but what if you want to level tanks or healers through dungeons? I know many people who have done that, or at least level to 90 and go through draenor and Broken Isles by questing only. I think leveling dungeons are great practice for tanking and healing and now they are not worth the xp.

There have always been multiple potential leveling paths, not just questing. My personal opinion is this is fine as long as the /played for each of them is roughly equal, so it remains a choice without handicaps.

[Zka]

most people in Europe are at least bilingual, and often speak three or more languages.

You obviously haven't counted Hungary. People barely speak their own language here

[HuxNeva]

I would argue that nobody learns anything well while below max level. Without the character's full arsenal of talents and abilities, attempting to learn how to play a class at low levels can reinforce bad habits that will be difficult to break later. I would have just left low level dungeons as the mostly mindless button smashers that they were. The leveling experience should be a fun and happy place. Wait til they have to go to LFR to break a player's soul.

This is exactly how we bread LFR. Let's feed the kids only candy, they'll switch to a healthy diet when they are adults XD

[Deleted]

You obviously haven't counted Hungary. People barely speak their own language here

I played the most of my time on Arathor-EU (pretty hungarian-heavy realm); and i never had issues in communicating with them in english...

[Zka]

I'm lvl 43 now, tried about 10 different dungeons on the way as healer and all of them were fine. Finally they pose some challenge. Pull extras and wipe. Do dumb shit and die. Bosses take up to 2 mins to die, finally you can actually practice your rotations. Outdoors you still rarely finish a rotation cycle. I hope tuning stays like this all the way up to 110. My only complaint is that these old bosses do basically nothing besides melee damage. Maybe they need a strategy lesson

- - - Updated - - -

I played the most of my time on Arathor-EU (pretty hungarian-heavy realm); and i never had issues in communicating with them in english...

Obviously wow players aren't the most clueless of the country. But trust me, we are way behind other european nations when it comes to speaking english or anything foreign.
BTW I'm also from Arathor-EU like many hungarians.

[Flarelaine]

You obviously haven't counted Hungary. People barely speak their own language here

Yes, but we're statistically negligible, so "most" woud still apply.

[Echocho]

I think it's fine that dungeons doesn't offer as much xp as questing. They should however have a couple of quests attached to them so that the first time you do them it's very worthwhile. They should also drop gear that's better than questing gear so that while inefficient for direct xp they'll boost your questing experience with a great weapon or something like that.

[Foj]

new players

People say this and it's awkward because I don't know whether I'm supposed to laugh with them or at them.

Yes, but we're statistically negligible, so "most" woud still apply.

What do people in Hungary speak, then? Finnish?

[Flarelaine]

What do people in Hungary speak, then? Finnish?

People who put some effort in it usually speak English and often even some other beyond our native Hungarian. Folks who don't bother stick to badly mangled Hungarian.

[Foj]

People who put some effort in it usually speak English and often even some other beyond our native Hungarian. Folks who don't bother stick to badly mangled Hungarian.

There's good and bad aspects to being blessed with a native tongue that was apparently beamed down from outer space to a couple of random locations in north-central Europe.

[Deleted]

I left deadmines halfway because I was spamming one ability for 5 minutes at bosses.... Not fun!

[Deleted]

Mildly off-topic but... unlike in the Americas where it's weirdly hip to be monolingual (even in South America), most people in Europe are at least bilingual, and often speak three or more languages.

It's not that uncommon to run into someone who either doesn't understand English or simply outright refuses to use it due to some weird pride. French and Russian people comes to mind, but also people from Hungary. For the most part it's easy enough to avoid by making sure you only got English checked in group finder, but there are times where non-english speakers have that enabled and still try to join your group.

To get back to the topic at hand though, the whole levelling process is a mess and has been for years. Classes don't receive the tools they need to adequately perform their role nearly soon enough. I think a class should start with a much larger kit of their abilities, interrupt included, receiving one ability every level from 1 perhaps, having a quest as to how to best use it for each one to help someone who truly is new understand how it works.

Receiving abilities later down the line as an incentive to keep going is nowhere near as important as actually having a working kit to begin with, especially in group content.

[Naoto]

I'm confused with the term "levelling dungeons" based on my own experience of levelling and doing dungeons, admittedly not for a few years but doing dungeons has never been efficient and the only time you ever did them was to either do any quests relating to the dungeon, for a bit of gear to help questing or for a break from questing, I wasn't aware anyone used them specifically for levelling and even called them "levelling dungeons" simply because the xp has always been shit.

It makes sense though, why go through all this trouble of redoing old zones and implementing scaling technology if you can just bypass all this by spamming dungeons? dungeons have never been imo at least a way to level and never should be, if you can level from 1 to 110 by simply doing dungeons in a week something is very broken and completely defeats the purpose of any form of MMO or even RPG.

I do agree getting your abilities in stages is a terrible design, how can running around for the first 10 levels with 2 abilities be a good thing? how can barely having any skills till you hit 60 and the likes be good, surely someone that wants to play a warrior should have access to the majority of the skills as early as possible THEN you can buff the mobs HP so we can actually use our abilities to kill them, the way wow is designed in terms of levelling is to repeat the same few skills until you get halfway to max level, it's dire.

Levelling should be more like max level content scaled down, ie you have access to most skills, most dungeons and any zone but it's scaled down like TW rather than the carrot on a stick form of torture we have now where all the cool shit and good dungeons won't come your way for ages yet.