Story Mode Instnaces Without Blue Loot - Learn Dungeons, Raids, BGs

[sylenna]

Why would you want to play an MMO and then go through this much trouble to avoid other players? LFR fills a "story mode" enough, this is completely unnecessary.

how about learning a fight on normal instead of trying to pug the first three bosses without having high rio + clear achievment + 200+ ilvl and never be able to learn the fight if you somehow get into a group?

and don't come with "make a raid yourself" or "join a guild". i can play good without having the luxury of three nights at 4h each to proof it.

[Ilookfly]

You already have this in exiles reach. Gives you more than enough experience to do dungeons all the way to 60. Also, overcoming challanges and killing boss together with other players in a group is a core concept to world of warcraft.

[loras]

Heya!

So with such a good AI as it exist nowadays,
It's finally time for story mode instances!

The idea is you get NPC group-mates to run an instance - dungeon, raid, or BGs for the first time:

-Entirely optional: you can start grouping up right away, without ever touching completing this feature.

-No blues drop whatsoever, only the very same green levelling ilevel gear you would otherwise get through questing.

-No mount, pet, or any other vanity item dropping in this mode.

-No cheevos, and especially no world firsts - this is your private story after all.

-It exists for learning and taking in the story at your own personal pace.

-Same difficulty as normal instances but with NPCs like in Exile's Reach dungeon.

-Learn the story and the mechanics until you feel ready to be grouped with other players.

-And most importantly finish any instance quests on your own without waiting! Does not apply to repeatable quests like dailies etc.

After that it's time to dive in, have fun and grind the instances with friends and pugs as many times as you like

Not a bad idea.

[vsb]

That would be useful for raids, as many new players want to experience old raids while leveling.

[Destromar]

I would welcome such a mode. Not for myself but for all those players that struggle with getting into groups and experiencing the story and dungeons. My wife started playing in Legion. She chose a troll hunter and loved questing and exploring. She hated dungeons and any story that was tied to going into a dungeon. Why? Because 9 out of 10 times she was kicked out. Some of the reasons were:
-No Heirloom gear
-"Afk" => She was reading the quests at the dungeon entrance or a cutscene
-Getting lost after a death or wipe
-Not enough damage
-Wrong Pet

After the first 2 kicks I made her a macro that she would post every time she entered e group. It basically said, that she was a new player, first character, new to MMOs, never been in the dungeon, would like to read quest texts/watch the cutscenes if any etc. It didn't help. I also tried playing together with her on one of my twinks, but we had a vote kick reqest almost every dungeon we tried... saddest one was after posting her macro, the leader wanted to kick her for being new and he didn't have time "dragging dead weight" through the dungeon. And we are talking all leveling dungeons, not even endgame. My wife eventually quit wo after getting to max level and finishing al quests in Legion minus anything group related.
A friend of mine tried WoW Classic (never played WoW before) because the community was supposed to be really great... she quit before getting level 30 because the community is very unforgiving to new players.

So a story mode version where you can go into a dungeon and experience it at your own pace would be awesome for a lot of players out there. So I fully support that idea

[Omedon]

Honestly, I have a crazy out there theory that this is where soulbinds and/or Ve’Nari are headed. So long as they all have DPS specs, with a tank and healer somewhere among them, it’s doable. The question is will it happen.

The last variable to the singular customer experience that the devs can’t control is the crap shoot that is the often toxic community. There is nothing they can do at the upper end except to keep tweaking M+ to say louder and louder between the lines “no really, PUG this at your own risk,” while the trickle-down gogogogo attitude continues to poison the queued modes curated by the game, which WoW are themselves responsible for, and the players, particularly veterans who take their familiarity for granted, are too much of a variable for new players, especially tanks and healers who set the pace of the queue itself, to find their footing.

There’s no way to avoid, this late in WoW’s lifespan, that an unwritten rule of dungeon PUGing at any difficulty is “don’t you dare be new on my time.” It’s not nice, it’s not fair, but it’s true. An AI story mode is the cleanest solution to this. It was a godsend when I took a vacation in BFA to play FFXIV, and WoW needs this feature to streamline the enjoyment of new players and patient veterans that don’t mind playing a longer game for gear and dungeon pacing.

It’s time.

[DeltrusDisc]

Before inventing and AI for dungeons Blizz should just remove dungeon quests.

Like wtf, why do you even want to play an multiplayer game?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo

[Jazzhands]

Yes, I think a literal robot could not perfectly execute these fights in a realistic manor, meaning that the fight would work like a fight where only players play. Because Robots are dumb as fuck and AI only seems smart, because they learned millions of different variations in their training phase. You literally brute force learning (well, kinda realistic i guess). Now take a fight like blood council. Who decides which boss to kill first? Good luck training 15 different AI players (or one AI for 15 players) to do every mechanic in every order perfectly. That will take years with Blizzard's computing capacity.
You can have two cases here: Either have a scripted bossfight with scripted AI, that doesn't react on the player's actions or you have a smart AI with a real bossfight that breaks when the player does something unexpected or something in the fight goes unexpected. First one is easy, but serves no purpose, second one will be way too much work for Blizz to develop and maintain.
You know Blizzard's current AI, do you? The one they use on Island Expeditions. That AI is stupid as hell.
Developing the Starcraft AI took years and was done by a different company. And it is not foolproof and still failed if the player did something unusual.

You mean the Starcraft 2 AI that hit Grandmaster even with limited reaction and clicking speed to more closely mimic people? Yeah man, that AI sounds like shit, it's only better than like 99% of Starcraft players, no way could anyone develop an AI to take on heavily scripted fights with a bit of deviation caused by a player. Starcraft totally doesn't have basically endless possibilities and variations in gameplay that an AI was able to handle and overcome, nope.

AI is clearly a lot more advanced than you seem to think, and WoW's fights are heavily scripted compared to anything PVP, which makes it significantly easier to do than something like an AI meant to fight players who constantly change and adapt. Comparing the two is laughable.

[Alkizon]

So, you want to devalue stuff, that you already get for free, even more. Great. No, today I'm not going to talk about value and importance of content as movable component of motivational process for initiation, learning and social organization, path of natural progress and legal/harmpless timegate mechanics. I'm afraid, that audience, that somehow still could understand this... well, in short, it's practically gone *shrugs helplessly*

Good luck in your graceless selflessness at trying to help devs diligently fix something that wasn't originally broken, but which now actually is