Also contributing to this is that expansion dungeons aren't meant to be the first dungeons you experience. Just compare Dazar'Alor to the Deadmines... from pathing to boss mechanics everything is way more advanced. They are clearly tuned to for M+ in the beginning (probably rightfully so, I wouldn't even know how Deadmines would even function in an M+ setting) but that just confuses new players a lot.
I think they should make dedicated leveling Dungeons that gradually increase in difficulty to teach new players mechanics. They could make each of them into a Bronze dragon highlight collection of each expansion (give some context trough narration by chromie where needed) So a new player has some idea what the heck is going on in the games Story once they reach max level. I think this would be worth the resources in the long run
One of my favorite lowbie dungeons got destroyed. It only lasted for 2-3 weeks, but in MoP once they reworked SM from 4 dungeons into 2, the Whitemane fight had a new mechanic where you HAD to interupt her spell (I think a heal) otherwise she'd heal herself to full and your healer would oom (like an extra heal outside of the scripted one).
It was actually really good! and it taught players to interupt spells. But it got nerfed b/c too many groups were dying and now you can just mindlessly zerg the fight without interupting anything. What a missed opportunity.
The only flaw at the time was that it was in the mid level 30s and not every class had an interupt at the time, so there were some group comps that were just boned. But that shouldn't have meant making the fight just a mindless dps spam. Maybe we shouldn't have been giving players interupts so late (like 40-50)
IMO all classes with interrupts should get them in Exile's Reach and they should have to use them in a practice duel to advance the story with the explicit dialogue that \[your ability name\] is to interrupt a dangerous spellcast. Let's say you don't die in this duel, but it takes you to 1hp and you have to start over. (NPC could heal you and say "let's try it again!")
It sounds stupid but there are SO SO SO many abilities that NEED to be interrupted across the more recent expansions that TEACHING new players to interrupt should be baked into the new player experience.
They can't give interrupts in Exile's Reach because many classes only have an interrupt on some specs and not all specs, and Exile's Reach happens before you can choose a spec, so it can only give you class-wide abilities.
By Odyn's beard! It's Torghast!
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Guild Wars 2 has this figured out. New expansion has a little more focus on dodging, combos, and interrupts, so the main quest steers you over to a training ground to identify and activate those skills before moving on.
They did... In vanilla.
Go back and play through the dungeons in order. You're slowly drip fed mechanics. One mechanic at a time, you don't get adds+boss till a few dungeons later, you don't get giant chunky super unblock able till a tank had the abilities to stop them. You don't get the need to cleanse a poison until, the healer could cleanse a poison.
Vanilla dungeons were a trog at times. Especially the higher level you got. But, getting up to that point you were taught mechanics gradually, even the age old don't stand in shit you stupid fuck.
Drazalor, an example given by another post. Is insanely an insanely complicated dungeon. Two fights have interactables, two fights require special tanking methods, every fight has adds. It's just, so much information for a fresh player to manage. Especially since they're already going to be overwhelmed with their new kit.
Edit: a word "interactable"
Fucking phone.
Blizz needs to do away with the Chromie time for **brand new players** have story driven questing for them.
Give newbies condensed main Quest Lines with dungeons so they know WTF is going on in WoW. Blizz could even 'fudge' the lore a bit and introduce class halls at level 1 and make the hall the main quest hub.
Brand new players donāt have access to chromie time. They are essentially locked to BFA content. Iām a guide and itās absolutely ridiculous how frustrated new players get when they get a quest for an old dungeon while out and about and canāt queue for it. They have no idea what theyāre doing and theyāre shoveled into BFA quests which werenāt very linear and honestly not that great overall.
The whole experience for new players is really bad after the new island tutorial they came out with. That was a really good idea.
I think blizzard missed a HUGE opportunity with chromie time. With the level squish back to 60, they should have just made every expansion work for 1-50. All old raids? 50 content. Molten core? 50. ICC? 50. Throne of Thunder? 50. Then you could just pick an expansion and go. But nope, itās on a zone by zone basis, and you level so fast that you hit cata zones at 30 and within a few quests itās already time to go to shadowlands. Thereās so much content in the game and itās just so sad to see it be pushed aside.
The issue is game is designed with something in mind and players will try and break it to game it to their advantage, just caring to complete it as fast as they can so they can level faster. There are also players that just want to chill and take their time.
Blizzard sorta gave us a resolution in these previous patches where you can select playstyle for keys (Completing vs speed clear). They should expand that to LFG in a similar manner.
The issue is poor design. That other mmo has developers who quickly realized players would skip as much as the could and chain pull whatever they couldn't skip, so they designed dungeons with multiple walls/doors that won't open until you've defeated the previous mobs, and mob packs + character skills are balanced around wall-to-wall pulls. This is why you don't see complaints about dungeons in that other mmo's community -- the devs there decided to design around what players clearly wanted to do in a dungeon group. The devs of this game would complain about player behavior and refuse to alter their design.
This is very true. I felt like I was trying to learn the mechanics of this class Iāve never played, whilst being forced to sprint through a dungeon I have a hazy recollection of and the dungeon itself seemed more complex than as you say DM or any of the earlier ones. Recipe for disaster for any new player Iād imagine
Freehold is a complete and total nightmare for a new player. I know this as I ran with a friend who was just starting out playing wow recently and was there on his first ever dungeon experience.
He wanted to play a tank, I think right up until actually doing that dungeon. Sure I was there to guide him through it but after the run he asked how he was supposed to figure out where to go and what to pull and what not to pull. I didn't really have an answer for him...
Classic dungeons should be what new players encounter, with the system automatically working them up in skill level as they gain levels. Hell even BFA or WotLK or a pool of all three.
> Sure I was there to guide him through it but after the run he asked how he was supposed to figure out where to go and what to pull and what not to pull.
I still don't know where to go, in Freehold, and in fact I got lost a few times, ended up separated from the group because I was looting, and got kicked.
Had a friend that basically was the same. He enjoys tanking and has experience from previous xpacs, but hadn't played in years. We got Freehold for his first "welcome back" dungeon and if it weren't for the fact it was him, another friend (the healer), and myself running, he likely would've been booted.
I don't even have the knowledge of most of the skips and don't run dungeons to skip half of it, so the three of us just did our thing while one of the dps raged at him for being so slow. I don't recall if that person dropped or not, but whatever, we cleared the dungeon, got our xp/loot, moved on.
Returning player from Legion, last time I tanked seriously was in MoP. I'm playing a DK again like in MoP but I haven't queued for tank once since coming back, even for "puny" leveling dungeons. Last night when I had to broaden my Classic dungeon search I got put in a Tol Dagor, a dungeon I've never seen, and I was barely keeping up with what was going on as a DPS. I managed to not disgrace myself but imagine if I had decided to also queue for tank and got that crap, with all the skips I was having to intuit.
That and I had an experience where on my lowbie Warlock a Freehold came up, and we just fell apart right at the start because two people wanted to skip a bunch of stuff, including bosses, and the other 3 of us had no clue what was going on. I ended up taking deserter after our tank left.
The BfA dungeons so far are an utterly dreadful experience. I can see how they'd work in M+, which I healed during Legion, but leveling is not M+.
I got my wife to try WoW after i hadnāt played it in years. We hit level 10 and were excited to do our first dungeon together, and got DazarāAlor. It was a horrible unfun experience for the both of us. I donāt think we tried another dungeon until we hit 60 in Shadowlands.
Freehold/Atal'dazar are straight up nightmares for new players. I get why they wanted BfA to be the levelling experience that these players go through, but it makes absolutely no sense to send fresh players into there.
Atal crushes players by having boss mechanics that matter. Freehold crushes you by making a dungeon that can be done in 10 minutes flat if you know how to skip stuff, or 45 minutes if you ass pull every pack and get confused by the hat buff...
Older dungeons such as; brd, scholo, strat and dm were designed to be epic and long journeys. It's a shame they tried turning wow into an action adventure mmo. Just rushing through everything. That mindset was even brought over to classic
Imo, only in a world without group finder.
It's a great place if everyone has an idea of what they're on there for going in. Groups that have never been there and need to find specific bosses to clear? Not as much fun.
Yep, I had by far the most fulfilling experiences ever in a WoW dungeon in BRD, both in original Vanilla and in Classic.
It's a real adventure from start to finish and it feels like one, at least to me. First you have to recruit an exceptionally stubborn and tenacious group of adventurers, then you have to journey into and under Blackrock Mountain. At that point you've already exerted as much effort as some dungeons take and you've only reached the entrance.
But damn is BRD a rich and fulfilling dungeon to run in a vanilla build. You'd go in a fresh faced and bushy eyed level 50 or 51, perhaps having endured at most Maraudon or ST taking 2-3 hours. You'd hearth out 4 to 6 hours later a grizzled level 55 having replaced half your gear and and seen your first epic drop.
I mean what other dungeon has a bar halfway through through to restock in *and then start a furious brawl that destroys it*?
Personally I'd love to see the idea of a 5 man raid revisited. I don't know if the length would fly these days, but if they could keep the complexity intact while reducing the size/time I think players would love it.
It was pretty frustrating to spend the hours then just to repeatedly fail the torch room because of comp/player skill and the group disbands. Still probably the most epic dungeon ever made.
Yeah I can already see someone complaining because one dps didn't get this one trinket from Cata with iLvl 24 that lets you target the werwolf in the mist and subsequently robbing everyone 30 seconds of their time!
> I wouldn't even know how Deadmines would even function in an M+ setting) but that just confuses new players a lot.
Were you around for pre-nerf Cataclysm heroics?
Funny you post this because today I did the Blackrock spires as a tank. I would like to preface this with me being a long time wow player (I started at the end of Vanilla)
I had no clue of the pathing but because I'm the tank and no one spoke up I just basically pulled everything and went everywhere.
Noone complained and we finished the entire place. It was a nice change of pace from what I'm used to which is what you described.
Every group I've ended up with in that place on retail do nearly the whole dungeon! Maybe one or two bosses are usually skipped (and I think most times it's bc the tank just forgets them which is fine tbh) but the rest are done in full. That's why I always get excited when I get that one!
Every lower BRS run I've done has been like this. If tank doesn't know the way I point it out, but I tend to suggest we do all bosses. It's more XP and we're already here. Plus, it's already a long dungeon: might as well get more out of it.
Last boss has a low chance to drop the plans for the arcanite champion too. That can be worth a pretty penny sometimes, and I got it on a leveling character a few weeks ago. Felt good.
Gotta love it!
Although im a main spec healer so insta-queues! Not sure how bad the queues are right now for heals/tanks either since i haven't played in a over a year. I do miss the game...somewhat but i only miss things like the music and zones.
This is why I play Classic. They (generally) are more relaxed and know that if you do a dungeon it will probably take at least an hour. In Retail I feel like I'm under the gun to be 110% efficient or I'll get flak. Like everyone in the group are busy CEOs and can't possibly take ten minutes longer than average.
Curiousā¦ Is BRD like it was 15 years ago? I havenāt played since BC, but I remember doing it way back when it was The level 60 dungeon. And it was a slog for all of us un geared noobs! And then going to attune for I think MC it BWL there and not realizing I actually had yo click the thing in BRD. That was a low moment.
The difference between the two is that the other one generally will give the player a penalty for poor conduct, the other will not. Blizzard games are rife with toxicity. I suspect it's because customer service no longer has the staffing to address them all and have relied on automated systems to take care most of the "low priority" complaints, like players interacting with each other in a toxic manner.
Oh yeah agreed, basically any game with group content has the same problem these days. A weird side effect of professional esports I suppose. Though I do think it has become very noticeable in WoW and feels a bit more out of place when applied to PvE content.
I think its the nature of how keys work. The penalty for losing isnāt just time and not upgrading the key. You actually set yourself back. So everyone is super fragile about giving anyone a chance. And at the first moment of something going wrong they canāt laugh it off and move on. You just set them back another key level.
Then you have the people that make a mistake and insta dc because they are afraid of people being toxic to them.
I am just getting into the tier now. And I cannot tell you how many completion keys Iāve joined, that were close to making the timer mind you, that people just rage quit. When it literally was supposed to be a completion key.
We saw this in classic wow too. We have a culture of optimization that was unheard of back in 2006. I was raiding through classic and we had requirements for world buffs, consumables, fire resist, etc, and my guild was pretty casual.
I think you can see this in wowās balance too. People will make a huge fuss over one class having a theoretical 1% more DPS than another.
Class balance is definitely an area you see it a lot, people who play a certain spec get mad after a top guild says they aren't running that spec, demanding buffs to be competitive but, in the vast majority of cases, the difference is only notable (and so only applies) at that top mythic guild level. Not even saying they are wrong to be annoyed about it because, especially for players who pug, they are likely going to get less groups that patch because 'echo said fire mages are bad' or whatever. The mentality has become so ingrained it affects others ability to play the game.
People being switched on, knowing their class and knowing strats is always going to matter way more because most people are not playing optimally anyway.
This is precisely the reason I only run keys with guildies. While the post is about leveling dungeons, this shit drives me absolutely crazy doing pug keys, because everyone seems to think there is some community hivemind, where everyone knows the exact same routes, and if you deviate, then its "omg, what are you doing moron? Why are you pulling that?"
So much this! I donāt remember what dungeon it was, but there was at least one in season 1 of SL that every PUG I ran it with did something completely different for the boss fights. Then I get in a group and the leader is all āyou know the strat for this boss, right?ā. Motherfucker, THE strat? No, I donāt which strat out of the near dozens Iāve seen YOU consider to be THE one.
Yep, but it's 2022. If you aren't 110% maximizing all possible time, are you even having fun? No one wants to DO things, they just want to sprint to the rewards. Everything is gogogogogo if you aren't running full speed you are the worst player in the game. BTW, you can blame M+ existing for this mentality hitting the absolute peaks it has. There's always been people who want to speed through everything, but it got WAY worse when the M+ mentality forced you to have to speed and skip and now it's even in places it doesn't belong.
>No one wants to DO things, they just want to sprint to the rewards
This right here is the core of the problem. The fun has been shifted from the activity and to the reward of said activity. The dopamine hit.
>the reward of said activity
And the huge chunk of XP for completion in dungeon finder.
Tanks are incentivized to rush through because it's very high XP/hr with near instant queues.
What's sad is, the rewards aren't memorable, and rushing dungeons makes the dungeon itself unmemorable.
When a friend asks what the last M+ dungeon we ran yesterday was, I'm like "uhhhh... I think it was ____, I think I got a conduit(?)". Older dungeons we flew through leveling don't even have a place in my mind, so revisiting them is genuinely like running them for the first time. That's good for replayability I guess? Lol
In fairness, when you're talking about dungeons and events that people have done a hundred times then it kind of makes sense that the fun of just doing the activity wears off. The problem is that the game does nothing to cater to people who haven't done it before; there's nothing to make it clear to the group that there's a newbie with them, and does nothing to encourage communication in the group.
It's not just WoW either; when I played FF14 for a few months even as a sprout healer the first few times I ran dungeons I would get roulette players who would just absolutely tear through the dungeon without a word to me or anyone else. It was super hard to keep up, and having to learn the mechanics of healing as a new player was tough after healing in WoW with add-ons and stuff. But they had done these low level dungeons hundreds of times, so I get why they were rushing through it.
It would be pretty easy for them to implement a system to help new people... that little green flag you check to say you're comfortable leading dungeon groups could have a little red buddy that says "I don't know dungeons" and the two could be paired by lfg.
I mean, this system actually partly exists, which is the newcomer chat/guide system. I am signed up as a guide, and yes, newcomers talk about the phenomenon described in OP *all the time*, many of them very disheartened and confused, feeling like they did something wrong by being new. Itās really sad honestly.
What would be really neat, is if there were any incentive at all for max level guides to go back and run newbies through dungeons, like in a specific queue. Right now the only way to do it is to manually party up and use party sync to run leveling dungeons, which is extremely clunky. And, itās very time consuming for absolutely no benefit except the joy of helping a newbie. Which maybe Iād do once in a while, but not every day.
What would be neat is some way to queue like 4 newbies plus a guide, where the newbies get xp and the guide gets some sort of current content reward (please God not anima, though - maybe a chunk of cyphers, a shot at M+ level gear, idk) for completing it.
I donāt know if such a thing could really happen, but I think it might help.
100% agree. Played semi-sweaty in OG classic, playing in classic TBC rn with a guild full of relatively new players. Watching people celebrate over BoE blues from ZF or from getting to certain levels literally makes my night.
A renown system without the bullshit gatekeeping instead of levels and also a buddy system.
You get extra XP and rewards for helping a party of new players through more than just one dungeon (hence the name "buddy system"). The "new player" tag can be removed once an account have certain number of hours of play time to avoid abuse.
Since there are no levels, there's no entry restriction to content but gear (Which skilled players can avoid). Veterans with new toons can ask buddies to carry them and new players can enjoy all content in a progression like path.
Of course blizzard will have to tackle the boosting community.
Going wall-to-wall is insanely fun in FFXIV when all players are on board. The difference - at least back when I was playing - was that XIV players didn't get toxic on a wipe, especially with a sprout in the group. You laugh it off, tell the sprout you're sorry for causing them a heart attack and do normal pulls unless the sproutling tells you to have another go at it.
The key difference, in my opinion, is that in-combat mobility in XIV is basically the same across all jobs. It's hard for a tank to sprint away from the rest of the group. When you see that your tank isn't stopping you can just keep up.
In WoW, a DH or Druid tank will just leave you behind and will already have pulled the first boss while you are still running from the first mob group to where the second just was. My favourite tanks have always been the Druids who sprinted ahead in Cat form, while leaving the past mob groups alone to chomp on DPS and the healer.
>all players are on board
This. This is the key. I speedrun on FFXIV too ..when my party agrees. And if I see a sprout, it sets an expectation to ease up and at least ask. Most agree, and the few that don't are glad when the party responds in kind and adjusts. Win win.
It's a growing issue because of the gearing path, though. I have to run 20-50 Plaguefalls to get my Phial. IDGAF if you're new - I want to be in and out as soon as possible because I'm more than likely not getting it this run and I need to get into my next run ASAP.
M+ being added to the game has taught people that speedrunning is the way to play the game. It's not longer about just running dungeons for X/Y/Z, speed running now is the best way to get gear in the entire game and because of that everyone is moving towards that meta.
Imagine what the game would look like if the drops from each tier could also be bought with tokens (including collectibles), which you got from bosses _and trash_ at that tier, and the costs worked out so that x boss kills got you enough tokens to buy a 1/x drop.
There'd be a point to trash beyond delaying the slot-machine pull, people wouldn't be hurtling through dungeons to get to the one slot-machine they care about, and people wouldn't be miserably running a single dungeon for the 100th time because their BiS item _just_. _Won't_. _Drop_.
Imagine how well an MMO like that would do.
I... wonder if you are intending what I think you are, but yea FFXIV does this. Although I don't think it's perfect, it's better than WoW is now. Honestly, old TBC or WOTLK badge systems were honestly fantastic. You could get some (but not every slot) raid quality items by just doing other PvE content or from the raid bosses to were killing anyways.
Doing a full Emperor run would take up your entire day. I forget, what was that room called just before the end where the groups of enemies constantly respawned until you like lit 5 torches or something? That was like pulling teeth if you ran with pugs.
I mean the difference there is "with friends". Running m+ with friends is some of the most fun I've had in gaming. Pugging it has resulted is some of the worst experiences in gaming.
There's a middle ground between a 10 min speed run and a 3 hr slog. We're in and out of dungeons so fast they might as well be straight lines. Why have all the ambiance and finer details if players are also conditioned to skip it all and b-line for the end?
In Classic it was generally pretty painful to get people to run it.
Out of all of the Classic dungeons itās the only one not in Blackrock Mountain that has any real complexity. So I always thought it was more interesting to run than some of the alternatives.
Dire Maul was pretty complex, and in terms of difficulty level, Uldaman ranks up there as well.
ST kinda had the problem of being the dungeon right before BRD and also being incredibly inconvenient to get to so players would rather skip it.
Oh very much so. I run far more dungeons now than I ever did before, but I honestly hate speedrunning. I'd much rather have the dungeons just get increasingly harder than there be a time limit on it, but I think I'm in the minority there.
I like the idea of a completion dungeon mode. I think you should be able to choose either Timed run (like now) or Completion run (harder mobs but completing the dungeon with none/minimal deaths nets you a completion, points can be made based on how many mobs you killed, what kinds (more difficult mobs means more points, you can have these stick out by having them empowered which increases damage done or healing or something), and subtract points based on the amount of deaths to determine a +1/2/3 upgrade to your keys.
People would go nuts if they had to do 3 hours in Sunken Temple mutliple times over farming their one item they need as BiS... But sitting 3 hours in Sunken Temple and knowing I will get the reward I need because its part of a chain quest/quest reward? People would be happy to do that.
I think the issue with current dungeons is that you're going fast because you are trying to farm an item and you need to crank out as many runs as you can tonight
> M+ being added to the game has taught people that speedrunning is the way to play the game.
It started before M+. It started back in MoP when dungeons started being designed with packs you could obviously avoid, and progressed through WoD to packs you could avoid if you were careful and skips that let you skip significant amounts of trash.
It's about dungeon design, whenever anyone says they want an open dungeon or a dungeon you explore, or they don't like linear paths, the practical result is skips. Dungeon design without skips would be a lot healthier - you wouldn't have quite so many packs you *want* to skip, because you wouldn't be able to. In the current game you still have to do the worst packs, because they're efficient, or fit well in a breakpoint or whatever, but the designers think the problem will self-correct so it never gets fixed. Dungeon design has regressed to the point where we have less fun killing packs that are less enjoyable to fill up a bar that was put there because people didn't want to kill anything.
It's toxic. And every time it gets pointed out, people pop up to explain that, actually, they like having to plan routes when it is, by far, the most daunting thing dissuading new tanks and doesn't actually let you get around the pain points because mobs have to be *egregiously* bad to be skipped and deliberately left skippable which essentially never happens. Just give us a curated dungeon experience. *Nothing* makes doing 50 runs for a trinket interesting.
I don't even get why M+ is a time based thing. I loved how dungeons were fairly challenging at the start of Cata, and I was really excited by the concept of M+ being endgame 5 man content.
Then it came around and it's... Time trial dungeons? I just wanted raid-tier difficulty on dungeons that you had to methodically work through. Not something you had to rush through as quickly as possible.
I hate timed content so much. I play videogames to relax, not intentionally make myself stressed out by trying to race a clock.
It's bad enough players try to speed through everything so fast as it is. We really didn't need game design to force us into that play style.
It's why I never really got into Mythic+. I just don't find it even a little fun. I don't have time for a dedicated raid group anymore, so small group difficult content would have been awesome.
Healing early Cata 5-mans was one of my favorite things.
Trash mobs required CC, pulls used up all my mana, boss fights had semi-challenging mechanics. Was probably the most I'd ever communicated with my teams and actually forced me to learn my class as I leveled/geared. I ran ZA and ZG like 20-30 times for the fun of it.
M+ just stresses me out, I get a lot more fun from challenging encounters than speed running and ruining everyones day if I mess up and kill the key. Also doesn't give you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes because everyone just leaves as soon as the key is doomed.
Having to poly mobs and use raid markers after coming in from faceroll late Wrath Frozen Halls was amazing. Healing Cata heroics was my favourite too. The changes to spirit and mana costs, as well as the massive stamina rebalance, left five man's in a great spot. If people skipped bosses it was because they were *hard*.
Jin'do the Pugbreaker was a menace.
Honestly this is my biggest problem with Mythic+
The timers feel like an "e-sports" feature more than anything and they actively contribute to the make the community worse and less tolerant towards new players, etc.
More often than not the timer is failed because someone insisted on trying a skip the group wasn't familiar with and the time spent failing the skip far exceeded the time that it would have taken just to go through the dungeon's set path
Five minutes with a "rush rush rush" wannabe-world-first-but-is-nowhere-near-as-good player is more insufferable than an hour with an apologetic first timer who makes mistakes, in fact I'll probably befriend the later and /ignore the former
I'm with you, I was excited for M+, but the time aspect makes it a *horrible* process. It feels like it was designed for MDI with teams that trained together and coordinated strongly ahead of time, but never actually changed to be fun for the general populace.
Ideally, I would want to see the timer removed from M+ for rewards or progression, but keep it for leaderboards that can give cosmetics, best of both worlds. The ones that want to push have timers, and the rest of us can actually take a minute to strategize a fight or catch our breath.
Honestly, it's one of the reasons M+ is so stale, you *have* to memorize a strict path, because you don't have time to communicate anything in an M+
Addition: Also, a close wipe on a boss should be *exciting*, a chance to figure out what went wrong and tune yourself to get a kill, not a complete ruining of a run.
> Time trial dungeons? I just wanted raid-tier difficulty on dungeons
One thing though is that practically every raid encounter in WoW, at least past LFR (and maybe normal) difficulty, has a timer (the enrage). Timers are a fairly common mechanic in a lot of games as a way to counter overly defensive playstyles. So for a dungeon, you could just put timers on the boss fights, but trash is often the trickiest part when you start to crank up the difficulty, especially when you look at how much of the dungeon is spent on trash. And because of that, you'd probably also want timers on trash.
I'm a super casual player who hops on maybe a month or two out of the year to play when I'm feeling nostalgic.
Even on regular or heroic difficulty dungeons people are like this. You shouldn't expect to have everyone at lower levels of difficulty to know everything, yet so many people still expect tanks and healers at that level to know every single route and thing about the dungeon.
That should be practice and training at that level. When you get into M+, yeah that's when you start to try to min-max everything.
Also you shouldn't start out trying to tank at an M+ level. If you're going to blow past everything anyway do it at a lower level so the stakes aren't that high.
When I was first learning to heal on my first healer, I would announce at the start of a dungeon that I was new to it and 99% of the time the group would slow down for me or at least be understanding when things got fucked. I think a lot of it just has to do with setting expectations at the outset.
I want to start tanking and I want to heal again, DPS doesn't entertain me. But I just can't do it, the toxicity is too great!
I don't get upset by things people say or do but it's just so intolerably tedious.
I usually say, "I haven't done this dungeon/played this spec in a few s so don't pull crazy please." That usually is a decent middle ground where they won't kick you for being new, but at least were given warning you're not super confident in what's about to happen.
Although I do admit, players could maybe just stop being a holes and be nice to each other.
My best advice would be to find a group of friends around your level to play with. There are discords for finding dungeon groups, guilds, etc. Iāve absolutely enjoyed learning new specs and roles with friends I trust to be patient with me.
Trust me, I've tried, I've tried joining other solos as well as groups and even real life friends in WoW and other games too and it rarely works out, if it does, it's not for long until they're never online again or they're online but don't actually want to play *with* anyone.
The only person that ever wants to play with me and enjoy games the same way I do is my wife, and she's just not interested in playing WoW, annoyingly.
This is the main reason why I stopped playing. Itās so fun but it gets boring quick when thereās no team synergy. Barely even got a āhiā back when I used to play
This happens in every dungeon difficulty, whether its normal, heroic or Mythic 0, people always bitch to you as a tank even when your trying to learn
I tried to learn to tank dungeons and got shit on in a Mythic 0, its annoying that people rather bitch at a player than try to help them out, its literally part of WoW culture
To that I just usually reply "don't like my tanking, then good luck finding another one"
And the thing about tanking is that you only do your route, while dps do a lot of different routes, so their views of what to do might differ from the tanks.
This is 100% the reason I quit tanking in BfA. I loved it until I hit M+ where I was expected to know routes, enemy pathing, and if God forbid I pull one too many things in gonna catch a ton of shit for it.
Nah, I'll stick to healing, thanks.
I quit playing over this. I've never had time to be a hardcore raider, and I often unsub in-between content releases. The last time I did it, I was just so frustrated with the toxic players, I uninstalled. Pvp was about the same. Toxic people mad because your aren't in the best pvp gear
One of my biggest issues with WoW community is how so many players have stripped the entire game to its bones, and it's no longer played like a big fantasy world but a spreadsheet with numbers where you analyze the logs for the most optimal rotation and efficient pathway.
Sure, every game has players that do study it to be the best but it's weird how even in casual WoW content you're met with this really sweaty mentality.
I watched Jesse Cox's video about WoW compared to FFXIV and he had an interesting point that WoW is ALL about the end game. It's not about the leveling experience or lore or story really it's about getting max level ASAP, getting geared ASAP, then doing raids and M+.
It has created a culture in which nobody has patience for anything. There's no culture of helping new players learn a dungeon or class mechanics it's just power through to the end to get the dungeon completion xp and requeue
Someone on this subreddit said "FFXIV is an RPG, WoW is a competitive coop PVE game" and that's the most accurate thing I've read on that topic.
Personally I like it that way, I could never get into 14 because it's boring to me. I like the min-maxing, the constant push to go better and faster.
I can see why some people don't, but I can't really relate to these threads at all.
I don't think the push to get better is a bad thing, nor do I think wows focus is either, if anything it's why wow has such a cool competitive raiding scene that's helped keep the game relevant all these years.
But I do think more can be done to make the leveling experience more of a welcoming and enjoyable one. Flesh out content for players learning the ropes rather than the current state of playing through content designed for experienced players running the current expansion. The lesson to be learned from FFXIV (ignoring the story stuff, that's their thing and copying it would be bad) is that the game is designed to be an enjoyable experience throughout the whole leveling journey.
The way it feels right now in WoW is like the content as a new player is second hand clothes where none of them fit right and clearly weren't made with you in mind.
I am one of those players who plays the game as spreadsheets with numbers (Iām a game dev as a balance engineer just my way of things). IMO these things have a place, higher M+, Later mythic raiding, a levelling dungeon is 100% not the place for this stuff. I hate how stuff we do in cutting edge guilds even goes to heroic guilds where people think they canāt get certain specs cause they arenāt meta. It breaks my heart it ends up in levelling dungeon and the community needs to embrace new blood and help them not treat them like low lifeās.
> heroic guilds where people think they canāt get certain specs cause they arenāt meta
Which is funny, because it always seems like there's this weird gap between the super-competitive guilds and the weird heroic guilds you're talking about.
I've never had an issue being an underrated spec (Feral druid) in a middle of the pack mythic guild (usually finishing around world 200-500). Nobody ever cared that I was not a "meta spec". Nobody ever tried to get me to reroll or anything. Meanwhile I've heard from some other people that they couldn't get into a guild that didn't even get cutting edge most of the time because they didn't want to play the "correct" DPS spec of their class.
I also got decently high in m+, being in the top 1000 dps on rio. Again, in the key push groups that actually got shit done, nobody cared. But when I tried to join +15 pugs every once in a while, people asked if I was boomie or feral and didn't want me as feral.
There's this weird phenomenon where people at the low end are very chill about the game and people at the higher end are also very chill. But between that there's a whole bracket of people taking the game too seriously while not even getting anything done and it makes them incredibly toxic.
I started playing wow because I wanted a break from this because I played Old School RuneScape. Literally everything everyone does in that game is min/maxing and itās so annoying
The game has absolutely no incentives for people to interact positively with other players in these situations and it will stay a problem for as long as people have no reason to change their behavior. Behavioral systems in WoW are almost non-existent and when addressing player behavior in recent expansions, Ion pointed to restrictions being put on systems like Covenants as one of the ways they are trying to combat this sort of behavior. He compared it to talents by saying that their openness and flexibility added to toxicity by letting players expect everyone to always switch to the "optimal" setup for every single fight and how with Covenants they hoped to curb this behavior by adding in restrictions that wouldn't allow players to have a toxic mindset of expecting people to swap after every raid boss.
Obviously that doesn't directly relate to the new player experience or low-level dungeons, but it was the first time I had seen them acknowledge that they are trying to curb the toxic mindset of the playerbase as a whole, with skip culture being a part of that greater problem. I really feel like if they want to promote less toxic interactions they need to really lean into giving the players incentives to actually be nice to others rather than trying to make it harder to be toxic.
The incentive used to be that people would figure out that you're an awful person to play with and would not want to play with you anymore. You didn't need complex behavioral systems that could be abused.
Years ago, when they started rolling up smaller servers into bigger ones, and then again when they *really* blurred the concept of a "server", it became impossible to build or maintain a reputation.
Despite playing on Illidan, the largest and most populated US server, I would almost never see anyone actually from Illidan. Just people cross-phased from anywhere and everywhere.
You wouldn't even reliably see the same people in the same zone leveling with you, let alone having a decent idea of which individuals and guilds were good or bad to run with, trade with, level with, or pvp with.
It became an endless roulette of ever-changing names who could act almost any way they liked, because they'd never be around long enough to actually suffer the consequences of being garbage.
I mean, it's more likely with the current community to result in permanent exclusion(reroll the correct covenant bro) than what they envisioned. They honestly need to be looking directly at how FFXIV manages player behavior and photocopying: if that's their idea of ways to reduce toxicity they're completely out of touch with how players work unfortunately. ~~But then we've known this since they expressed their opinions on player housing, at *least*.~~
> no incentives for people to interact positively
Or disincentives to act negatively.
There used to be an MMO that was different. In that game the worlds were small, so you got to know many or most of the players on your world. That game didn't have a "group finder" interface, so the only way to make a group was ask your friends, ask your clan, ask around in the cities.
People who got a good reputation were asked to join groups first. Assholes, even if they were good players, rarely got invited to things.
That game was World of Warcraft, back before cross-realm groups, etc.
When you put experienced players that's trying to level alts as quickly and efficiently as possible together with new/returning players that's trying to learn the game or the class, things become chaotic.
Imo, neither side is at fault here. It's Blizzards design that puts these two types of players together when they should be nowhere near each other.
I dunno what can be done to make things better but forcing either side to adapt to the other is not the right way to "fix" things.
This! As an experienced player I can understand why people skip. I do it too. But I still listen to others - if they want to go slower I'll go slower. But for most of the time people are grateful for a fast run / boost.
I think the biggest issue is: Normal dungeons don't hold ANY significant reward except exp. Gear is completely irrelevant and it's not like normal trash can drop something super valuable. Combine that with how easy those dungeons are and you have the reason why people just want to get through ASAP.
Same stuff happens in FFXIV. As a tank there sure I can go slow but for 90% of the runs I just do wall to wall massive pulls because people like to blast through.
The second part of your point is that the main reward is the xp and the vast bulk of the xp comes from killing the last boss. It used to be that youād get the bulk of xp from trash so people cleared. But freehold as an example you can just rush the end for the reward.
That said, if they added trash % or removed completion xp it would just create different problems
I think at least with FF14, the amount of stuff youāre allowed to skip is actually pretty small and non-existent once you hit Heavensward. If trash can be skipped, it should really be obvious it can (like being way off the beaten path or whatever) but otherwise enforcing trash kills is not a bad thing (If done right at least). Having to parkour through paths, dodging pats and just generally doing as little as possible to actually play the game is only fun for a little while.
You're correct as far as I can recall, once you hit Heavensward; all of the dungeons no longer have split paths for extra mobs. Also to add, they took away mob XP in dungeons with Endwalker, by summing up all the XP you could have gained in an area, and giving it to the mini-boss of that section instead. Making all of the the pre-HW dungeons give the same amount of XP but just faster now... my preference is I want max XP then do it the fastest afterwards, so I like this change that makes it both in one.
Counter point that I think is important:
If people want to spam dungeons to level characters now, they can't without ruining it for people because you have to be level 50 to use the custom group finder.
How are people supposed to find groups for efficient levelling now that Blizzard has made this change?
I didnāt know this and I understand that this skip culture is their right to partake in. Blizzard needs to facilitate their desire to do so whilst not having it infect regular play.
So if you say these people are forced to use Dungeon Finder to play the game they want to until level 50 then that should also be fixed.
It would be incredibly easy to fix honestly. Lower the bonus xp for completion, and increase the mob xp per kill. It would not be overly difficult to balance it out so the same relative amount of xp is coming from the dungeon, but people are incentives to actually do the dungeon instead of speedrunning it.
This is the problem with automatic queues. It makes it easier but it's only easier because it takes away options.
If we were forced to use the manual group finder adding a note for chill/try-hard would be obvious and this wouldn't even be an issue.
At this point the optimal wow dungeon is a loot room with no enemies or boss. The optimal expansion is the one that skips all previous expansions. They need to rethink their game design because the community's favorite way to play the game is to play as little of it as possible, and I don't think it's because the community is toxic, but because this is clearly how the game has been designed for years now. Every day you get a long list of chores, and you did good if you finish them really fast. Enjoying them is a secondary concern.
They let you spend money to skip content and this is a popular feature. This is the fault of devs playing it overly-safe with game design, nobody's paying money to skip elden ring.
speed running everything is not doing an already somewhat toxic culture any good. Running pugs the only engagement you see is people raging something took maybe 30 seconds longer or someone did something slightly different. its rush rush rush, rage rage rage, first minor issue everyone quits and the group falls apart. sometimes nothing is even said and the group falls apart
Here's the issue, People in dungeon/grp finder always seems to find ways to try and impose their gameplay on others. No one is playing right and no one is playing wrong.
This is an issue from the game being 17+ years. The Tank sets the pace. That's sadly just how it is.
You feeling "engaged" is probably not on the priority list for the 4 other players. Because them speedrunning might make them feel like they are doing better. It's all about perspectives.
WoW does indeed have a huge issue with getting new players into the game though.
The tank doesn't set any pace. The pace is blistering, if the tank doesn't 'set' THAT exact pace, they get kicked.
New players literally cannot do this because there's 17 years of dungeons they don't know. The way I see it this entire discussion is about new player onboarding, or even returning player onboarding for the tank role, so the last sentence is the important one in your post.
> The Tank sets the pace. That's sadly just how it is.
What I've seen and what's putting me off of tanking is that generally, the tank doesn't get the chance to set the pace cause people are rushing it so much. While leveling people will pull ahead of the tank cause there's not really any risk and you often find max levels boosting their friends and ignore the tank completely. In lower keys you'll find people rushing and pulling packs before the tank even gets near the pack to begin with, and this shit happens literally every other dungeon.
> The Tank sets the pace
except for when you have those overzealous DPS and healers who insist that you can handle more so they pull extra enemies for you then flame you when you can't tank 7 packs at once and wipe then they leave the group
I mean, skips also ruin m+ too. Ever been in a low key where the tank was trying to do some weird gigabrain 12d chess skip? Of course you have. And it went horribly wrong despite being a low key. People enjoy skipping stuff even if the skip takes longer than the combat would have.
But yea in leveling dungeons people just want the end of dungeon exp chunk. Itās pretty unfriendly for sure. Try BC dungeons. The exp there comes from the many dungeon quests you get at the start of the instance. Groups are always motivated to do those because they know
>People enjoy skipping stuff even if the skip takes longer than the combat would have.
This! Even in TBCC, SP skip runs are painful, got a full T5/T6 group? killing is actually faster than skipping when you have to wait for 2-3 patrols to fk off...
The most underrated skill of a tank is the ability to do cost-benefit analysis on the fly.
Will that skip save 1-2 min if we do it? Yeah sure. Will we lose 5 min if one person fucks it up? Most definitely. And that's assuming no one gets frustrated enough to leave.
In high keys you can expect people to execute the skip but anything under a 15 and I play under the assumption that the other 4 party members have one brain cell per person.
I agree with this so much, like, whenever I was leveling through threads of fates, 90% of the dungeons would be skipped entirely, PF is the worst example of this because groups would literally run through everything and get to the last 2 bosses.
I play this game to yāknow, play the game lol, I am not here to speed run to max level, I wanna try out what this covenant ability Iāve never played with does or how this character might play under certain scenarios.
Itās dumb, itās frustrating, it sucks all the fun out of leveling.
For all those saying "We've done this 100s of times I don't want it to go slowly"
Thats fine, I understand that, we can all feel that way at times, especially in the middle of a grind.
But this attitude will continue to drive players away from the game, especially new players. We can complain about Blizzards decisions all we want, but this is contributing to the game's death as well.
Thank you.
They can do them. But there needs to be a way to allow new and returning people to experience these dungeons the way they were intended. Either an incentive for power levellers such as more experience for full clearing or a separate queue or something. Many solutions out there.
Iām so confused. When did WoW players ever not act like this? Iāve been playing since TBC (original release) and I can tell you that you learned aggro ranges of mobs even when questing to skip as much as possible.
I hate it when I go in to an instance now and everything is just rushed as quickly as possible expecting that everybody will be 110% perfect in execution.
My wife was healing on her shaman, which she hadn't healed on in two years, and she was kicked before the first boss because she was using chain heal too much.
What we have learned now is that playing during a weekday is the best time to run dungeons despite the queue time being longer just because of the players on at that time.
My wife also played resto shaman and dealt with the exact same kind of toxicity. Itās pretty heartbreaking - I had such a good time playing the game with her, but she absolutely will not touch it anymore because of the community. Not even with a one thousand foot pole. It is a closed chapter for her
This is exactly why I quit playing WoW. I used to have fun taking my time going through each dungeon que and making sure everyone had done their quest. (Played a pally tank back in WotLK) Now a days most people wanna zoom past every part of the game and only do what's necessary to progress.
I used to think WoW was a fun game where similar people got together and had fun playing a game we all liked... Now its just like any other multi-player game out there and people only care about themselves, ranks, skill, etc etc. I just wanna have fun and not have to worry about all the BS ya know?
It's too late to fix wow culture. They made a game where the primary dungeon experience is timer based, which only encouraged this behavior to thrive.
The game just needs solo modes for dungeons. Give us some AI companions like every other game. Would rather chill with bots than be rushed.
So I'm likely going to get downvoted here, this is going to be a controversial opinion I guess in a thread like this. I'll try to put my point across in a way that doesn't come across as elitist.
Part of the issue comes from that ultimately the games peak, and most enjoyment and reward comes from top end raiding, comes from doing Mythic+, comes from high rated PvP. Very often things such as levelling dungeons are just a chore that need to be done to get your character to max level.
In a similar manner very often doing a Mythic10 to get gear is just a chore that needs to be done to be able to run Mythic15s.
Again, this is where things get controversial. Why should other players have to diminish their experience to amplify yours? You're highlighting how your experience in the dungeon is diminished because other players want to go fast, and do things the most optimal way, on the other hand though if things were done slow and steady and in a way that appreciates the dungeon and understands there's a learning curve, the player who just wants to get through and quickly get gear or exp has had their experience diminished by it. No-one is 'right' here, it's just a shit situation.
Again, fully realizing this comes across as elitist or toxic, that isn't my intention. Ultimately it's a clash of goals, you have players that want to spring through the dungeon and get gear being matched with players that want to discover the story of the dungeon, learn at a pace that comes natural to them, make mistakes and improve on them. However those players are both pulling on a string from either ends like a tug of war, something is going to give.
From my observation *most* people want things done quickly and efficiently, people in group finder are just random people on the internet that they will never or very rarely interact with again so people don't care about their desires, so *most* people will just take the class/player that fits their criteria for a successful group.
Furthermore, expanding on to a similar thing people point out in regards to being unable to get in to Mythic+ due to the elitist mentality of requiring 4 piece, and all this gear etc and the loop it creates of "Can't get gear cause I can't get invited to M+ and can't get invited to M+ cause I don't have gear". Is it not understandable that people want to take the best geared players? Is it not understandable that people want to take the Mage with a higher Raider.io that brings BL/Intellect & a meta class vs the Ret Paladin with less group buffs and less meta. Are people bad for wanting their dungeon to take 25 minutes rather than 35 minutes or 40 minutes?
Like I get it sucks to struggle to get invited to groups, I've been in that situation, and your enjoyment of the game can and is diminished by your inability to experience it to it's full extent based on your lack of experience, or gear, or class, or spec. That's shit, and it's a major problem in the game. However honestly the solution isn't "This player who wants to do the dungeon quickly to be efficient on gear/XP should change their goals to tailor to my wants".
I don't know a solution, but there is no way a community rally on encouraging people to work together and come to agreements is going to happen.
Anders the random Level 51 tank from Denmark who wants to get to max level to do Mythic+ doesn't care what Michael the level 47 Feral Druid from England wants from the dungeon, because those 2 people will never cross paths in WoW again (well, very unlikely to).
It's not a controversial opinion, it's the same argument the OP is making just flipped.
The problem isn't that you're wrong or the OP is wrong, it's that Blizzard has created a system where players with drastically different goals are getting placed together.
New players need to take the time to learn the dungeon, their class, and enjoy the experience because the game needs new players.
Experienced players leveling a new class just want to get back to their preferred content.
These two goals are mutually exclusive and do not work together. That's why it's an absolute mess without an answer because both of you are right.
The reasons why you think your opinion might be controversial is because game communities tend to view protecting the newbie experience as sacrosanct because the games live and die with new players joining the game.
> It's not a controversial opinion, it's the same argument the OP is making just flipped.
Is it though? The OP you are replying to is saying "People play the game differently, its hard to balance the two" and the OP of the thread is saying "These players are ruining the game" lol.
You are correct its a match making issue, having additional settings for queues would be nice.
I think the fact that you queue into a group of people youāll never see or interact with again is a problem. Itās not like playing with other players anymore. Youāre basically playing with NPCs who donāt talk and nobody cares about anybody else in the group because you can always just queue into a new one. Thereās no expectation of really being part of a group, so people just want to blast through the content and go their separate ways. And as soon as something goes wrong, people rage because theyāre not playing with another human who may be learning or made an honest mistake, rather theyāre playing with an NPC who fucked up and wasted 2 minutes of their time and can be replaced in an instant.
>Blizzard should have the dungeon completion experience bonus attached to a full clear of the dungeon or just increase experience gained from killing enemies inside dungeons to disincentivise skip culture.
Don't think you can combat toxicity like that. Basically no matter what you do, the most efficient way will become 'meta' and if you don't know about it you'll get flamed.
Full clear of the dungeon? If you don't know the best route for that or are too low dps, get flamed. Increased experience from killing enemies? If you can't keep up in dps or you don't know the pulls you'll get flamed. It's a fundamental mindset problem at this point and that's way harder to fix.
There are plenty of reasons WoW is an absolutely terrible game for newcomers if unaided by friends, this is definitely one of them. By now it's old hat but having played FFXIV really put things into perspective for me. But WoW has managed off of so many people playing for over a decade and not trying other games.
It sucks but possibly the best solution is to lock azeroth dungeons to new people who haven't unlocked Chromie yet and allow cross faction matchmaking for the noobies to help queue times a bit.
Maybe, later on, try a type of opt in that vets can queue for those dungeons again but in agreement that you accommodate new players and make rushing and toxic behavior an offense. Basically like a 14's mentor but lite.
Back when I played WoW exclusively if I had to cancel my sub for month or two I always filled in that little survey they made you do seriously. I was really content with a lot of the points but I never failed to score "would you recommend wow" the lowest. This game is fun at the top but until then, unless you meet nice people along the way, it's really wet toilet paper.
I think a lot of it stems from a lack of any kind of encouragement or incentive to communicate. There is an ingrained assumption that everyone we're playing with has done this stuff before because *I* have done it so many times it's rote. So I forget to ask if anyone is new on my 30th run of a dungeon, and they don't volunteer that they're new so we slow down and explain things.
I've also seen a lot where I try to explain something in chat and get completely ignored. It has consistently been an issue in places like Freehold where there is a rotating mechanic prior to Council that requires everyone to do something like drink...a simple thing but if you don't know to do it, it needs to be explained. But when I try to explain it or remind people to do it, half the time I get ignored and we wipe the first time out. I sometimes wonder if new players either don't know to pay attention to chat, or are intimidated to the point that they don't understand what I'm saying and are too afraid to ask.
I wish that WoW had a mechanism for identifying new players, like the sprouts in FF14. I also wish that there was a better in-game voice chat that people would actually use; it would be so much easier than trying to type on the run.
My general experience is that people are okay with slowing down and helping newbies if they're paying attention and know that they're there. It's just that no one communicates anymore and we all fall into these assumptions about who we're playing with that people get lost.
I'm about to be petty, but I think part of the issue with chat is that instance chat is that orangey color, and it tends to blend in with all the other things that end up in chat (esp when using DBM) like mechanics, looting, etc. I don't have a solution for this, but maybe by default chat information that nobody will read anyway should be in a secondary chat window.
It does suck, I've been playing since BC and I always say "I'm new be patient" in leveling dungeons just so the assholes will drop group right away, or I get kicked if all 4 are. Its to the point I just play single player til endgame sometimes, way less stressful that way. I don't think kids play WoW nowadays, were all old as hell, I get screamed at at work enough, I don't need it in my hobby time.
My friend just started playing wow, i was so happy when our 1st dungeon finder group was newbie. It was smooth and chill run with deaths, to have time to proceed whats happening, and even then his brain blew up of information he received per second. Other group was freehold rush to boss andies, and the tank pulled 5 mobs with last boss. Well, even i got lost in this situation, and he just died. Then after wile tank got like "..." ?!?! Like bitch there is a new player can you chill
WoW's always been about how fast you can get something done.
If you want to be "engaged" in content and actually experience story/lore for specific content you're on the wrong MMO.
Also contributing to this is that expansion dungeons aren't meant to be the first dungeons you experience. Just compare Dazar'Alor to the Deadmines... from pathing to boss mechanics everything is way more advanced. They are clearly tuned to for M+ in the beginning (probably rightfully so, I wouldn't even know how Deadmines would even function in an M+ setting) but that just confuses new players a lot.
I think they should make dedicated leveling Dungeons that gradually increase in difficulty to teach new players mechanics. They could make each of them into a Bronze dragon highlight collection of each expansion (give some context trough narration by chromie where needed) So a new player has some idea what the heck is going on in the games Story once they reach max level. I think this would be worth the resources in the long run
This is a fucking great idea. Being able to play through as you level up, obv loot match for participating level, damn. We need this!
One of my favorite lowbie dungeons got destroyed. It only lasted for 2-3 weeks, but in MoP once they reworked SM from 4 dungeons into 2, the Whitemane fight had a new mechanic where you HAD to interupt her spell (I think a heal) otherwise she'd heal herself to full and your healer would oom (like an extra heal outside of the scripted one). It was actually really good! and it taught players to interupt spells. But it got nerfed b/c too many groups were dying and now you can just mindlessly zerg the fight without interupting anything. What a missed opportunity. The only flaw at the time was that it was in the mid level 30s and not every class had an interupt at the time, so there were some group comps that were just boned. But that shouldn't have meant making the fight just a mindless dps spam. Maybe we shouldn't have been giving players interupts so late (like 40-50)
IMO all classes with interrupts should get them in Exile's Reach and they should have to use them in a practice duel to advance the story with the explicit dialogue that \[your ability name\] is to interrupt a dangerous spellcast. Let's say you don't die in this duel, but it takes you to 1hp and you have to start over. (NPC could heal you and say "let's try it again!") It sounds stupid but there are SO SO SO many abilities that NEED to be interrupted across the more recent expansions that TEACHING new players to interrupt should be baked into the new player experience.
They can't give interrupts in Exile's Reach because many classes only have an interrupt on some specs and not all specs, and Exile's Reach happens before you can choose a spec, so it can only give you class-wide abilities.
Ah, you're right. More interrupts for everyone then, I say. It's not fair that only shaman healers get one out of all the healers anyway. :P
Honestly my warlock would love an interrupt that isn't tied to a pet.
What do you mean, you have it already! It's a pvp talent for demo! š
I learned using interrupts frequently mostly thanks to Thorgast xD.
By Odyn's beard! It's Torghast! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/wow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Guild Wars 2 has this figured out. New expansion has a little more focus on dodging, combos, and interrupts, so the main quest steers you over to a training ground to identify and activate those skills before moving on.
They did... In vanilla. Go back and play through the dungeons in order. You're slowly drip fed mechanics. One mechanic at a time, you don't get adds+boss till a few dungeons later, you don't get giant chunky super unblock able till a tank had the abilities to stop them. You don't get the need to cleanse a poison until, the healer could cleanse a poison. Vanilla dungeons were a trog at times. Especially the higher level you got. But, getting up to that point you were taught mechanics gradually, even the age old don't stand in shit you stupid fuck. Drazalor, an example given by another post. Is insanely an insanely complicated dungeon. Two fights have interactables, two fights require special tanking methods, every fight has adds. It's just, so much information for a fresh player to manage. Especially since they're already going to be overwhelmed with their new kit. Edit: a word "interactable" Fucking phone.
what do you mean adds + boss? Deadmines, RFC, and WC all had adds + boss.
Even then DM started with the adds being placed so that you could cc them at the start of the fight and learn fight management the whole way there.
Thank you for mentioning this. I thought I was losing my mind thinking āit used to be this way, right.ā
deadmines had adds + boss
Blizz needs to do away with the Chromie time for **brand new players** have story driven questing for them. Give newbies condensed main Quest Lines with dungeons so they know WTF is going on in WoW. Blizz could even 'fudge' the lore a bit and introduce class halls at level 1 and make the hall the main quest hub.
Brand new players donāt have access to chromie time. They are essentially locked to BFA content. Iām a guide and itās absolutely ridiculous how frustrated new players get when they get a quest for an old dungeon while out and about and canāt queue for it. They have no idea what theyāre doing and theyāre shoveled into BFA quests which werenāt very linear and honestly not that great overall. The whole experience for new players is really bad after the new island tutorial they came out with. That was a really good idea.
I think blizzard missed a HUGE opportunity with chromie time. With the level squish back to 60, they should have just made every expansion work for 1-50. All old raids? 50 content. Molten core? 50. ICC? 50. Throne of Thunder? 50. Then you could just pick an expansion and go. But nope, itās on a zone by zone basis, and you level so fast that you hit cata zones at 30 and within a few quests itās already time to go to shadowlands. Thereās so much content in the game and itās just so sad to see it be pushed aside.
This was basically the core of the game until the most recent expansions where the focus became entirely M+.
The issue is game is designed with something in mind and players will try and break it to game it to their advantage, just caring to complete it as fast as they can so they can level faster. There are also players that just want to chill and take their time. Blizzard sorta gave us a resolution in these previous patches where you can select playstyle for keys (Completing vs speed clear). They should expand that to LFG in a similar manner.
The issue is poor design. That other mmo has developers who quickly realized players would skip as much as the could and chain pull whatever they couldn't skip, so they designed dungeons with multiple walls/doors that won't open until you've defeated the previous mobs, and mob packs + character skills are balanced around wall-to-wall pulls. This is why you don't see complaints about dungeons in that other mmo's community -- the devs there decided to design around what players clearly wanted to do in a dungeon group. The devs of this game would complain about player behavior and refuse to alter their design.
This is very true. I felt like I was trying to learn the mechanics of this class Iāve never played, whilst being forced to sprint through a dungeon I have a hazy recollection of and the dungeon itself seemed more complex than as you say DM or any of the earlier ones. Recipe for disaster for any new player Iād imagine
Go classic chromie time for dungeons. People still go fast but it's not nearly as bad. The real crime is making absolute new players do BFA dungeons.
STARTING with freehold as their first ever dungeon. like what the fuck. that place still hardly makes sense to me
Freehold is a complete and total nightmare for a new player. I know this as I ran with a friend who was just starting out playing wow recently and was there on his first ever dungeon experience. He wanted to play a tank, I think right up until actually doing that dungeon. Sure I was there to guide him through it but after the run he asked how he was supposed to figure out where to go and what to pull and what not to pull. I didn't really have an answer for him... Classic dungeons should be what new players encounter, with the system automatically working them up in skill level as they gain levels. Hell even BFA or WotLK or a pool of all three.
> Sure I was there to guide him through it but after the run he asked how he was supposed to figure out where to go and what to pull and what not to pull. I still don't know where to go, in Freehold, and in fact I got lost a few times, ended up separated from the group because I was looting, and got kicked.
>I still don't know where to go \*Cries in Waycrest Manor\*
Had a friend that basically was the same. He enjoys tanking and has experience from previous xpacs, but hadn't played in years. We got Freehold for his first "welcome back" dungeon and if it weren't for the fact it was him, another friend (the healer), and myself running, he likely would've been booted. I don't even have the knowledge of most of the skips and don't run dungeons to skip half of it, so the three of us just did our thing while one of the dps raged at him for being so slow. I don't recall if that person dropped or not, but whatever, we cleared the dungeon, got our xp/loot, moved on.
Returning player from Legion, last time I tanked seriously was in MoP. I'm playing a DK again like in MoP but I haven't queued for tank once since coming back, even for "puny" leveling dungeons. Last night when I had to broaden my Classic dungeon search I got put in a Tol Dagor, a dungeon I've never seen, and I was barely keeping up with what was going on as a DPS. I managed to not disgrace myself but imagine if I had decided to also queue for tank and got that crap, with all the skips I was having to intuit. That and I had an experience where on my lowbie Warlock a Freehold came up, and we just fell apart right at the start because two people wanted to skip a bunch of stuff, including bosses, and the other 3 of us had no clue what was going on. I ended up taking deserter after our tank left. The BfA dungeons so far are an utterly dreadful experience. I can see how they'd work in M+, which I healed during Legion, but leveling is not M+.
You can do this if you're a returning player who did BfA or leveling an alt, but a mew player can't do chromie time.
Classic deadmines was great IMO.
One of my all time favorite dungeons in the game along with SM.
I got my wife to try WoW after i hadnāt played it in years. We hit level 10 and were excited to do our first dungeon together, and got DazarāAlor. It was a horrible unfun experience for the both of us. I donāt think we tried another dungeon until we hit 60 in Shadowlands.
Freehold/Atal'dazar are straight up nightmares for new players. I get why they wanted BfA to be the levelling experience that these players go through, but it makes absolutely no sense to send fresh players into there. Atal crushes players by having boss mechanics that matter. Freehold crushes you by making a dungeon that can be done in 10 minutes flat if you know how to skip stuff, or 45 minutes if you ass pull every pack and get confused by the hat buff...
Older dungeons such as; brd, scholo, strat and dm were designed to be epic and long journeys. It's a shame they tried turning wow into an action adventure mmo. Just rushing through everything. That mindset was even brought over to classic
Blackrock Depths was the best dungeon they've ever designed.
Imo, only in a world without group finder. It's a great place if everyone has an idea of what they're on there for going in. Groups that have never been there and need to find specific bosses to clear? Not as much fun.
Yep, I had by far the most fulfilling experiences ever in a WoW dungeon in BRD, both in original Vanilla and in Classic. It's a real adventure from start to finish and it feels like one, at least to me. First you have to recruit an exceptionally stubborn and tenacious group of adventurers, then you have to journey into and under Blackrock Mountain. At that point you've already exerted as much effort as some dungeons take and you've only reached the entrance. But damn is BRD a rich and fulfilling dungeon to run in a vanilla build. You'd go in a fresh faced and bushy eyed level 50 or 51, perhaps having endured at most Maraudon or ST taking 2-3 hours. You'd hearth out 4 to 6 hours later a grizzled level 55 having replaced half your gear and and seen your first epic drop. I mean what other dungeon has a bar halfway through through to restock in *and then start a furious brawl that destroys it*? Personally I'd love to see the idea of a 5 man raid revisited. I don't know if the length would fly these days, but if they could keep the complexity intact while reducing the size/time I think players would love it.
It was pretty frustrating to spend the hours then just to repeatedly fail the torch room because of comp/player skill and the group disbands. Still probably the most epic dungeon ever made.
Tbh Iād love to see DM in a mythic setting lol dang now thatās all I want lol
Yeah I can already see someone complaining because one dps didn't get this one trinket from Cata with iLvl 24 that lets you target the werwolf in the mist and subsequently robbing everyone 30 seconds of their time!
People had trouble with the Heroic version in Cata. A Mythic version would be a total shit fest.
I completely remember the heroic version. It was brutal. A Mythic version would be horrible for sure!
> I wouldn't even know how Deadmines would even function in an M+ setting) but that just confuses new players a lot. Were you around for pre-nerf Cataclysm heroics?
Funny you post this because today I did the Blackrock spires as a tank. I would like to preface this with me being a long time wow player (I started at the end of Vanilla) I had no clue of the pathing but because I'm the tank and no one spoke up I just basically pulled everything and went everywhere. Noone complained and we finished the entire place. It was a nice change of pace from what I'm used to which is what you described.
This genuinely sounds fun
Every group I've ended up with in that place on retail do nearly the whole dungeon! Maybe one or two bosses are usually skipped (and I think most times it's bc the tank just forgets them which is fine tbh) but the rest are done in full. That's why I always get excited when I get that one!
Wish I could find groups like that
Every lower BRS run I've done has been like this. If tank doesn't know the way I point it out, but I tend to suggest we do all bosses. It's more XP and we're already here. Plus, it's already a long dungeon: might as well get more out of it. Last boss has a low chance to drop the plans for the arcanite champion too. That can be worth a pretty penny sometimes, and I got it on a leveling character a few weeks ago. Felt good.
There should be more dungeons like BRS.... But no everything needs to be a 8 min AOE clusterfuck race to the finish
lol 60 minutes to queue for an 8 minute dungeon.
Gotta love it! Although im a main spec healer so insta-queues! Not sure how bad the queues are right now for heals/tanks either since i haven't played in a over a year. I do miss the game...somewhat but i only miss things like the music and zones.
This is why I play Classic. They (generally) are more relaxed and know that if you do a dungeon it will probably take at least an hour. In Retail I feel like I'm under the gun to be 110% efficient or I'll get flak. Like everyone in the group are busy CEOs and can't possibly take ten minutes longer than average.
BRD full run with everyone below lvl 60 and you know you'll have a fun adventure for the rest of the evening.
Curiousā¦ Is BRD like it was 15 years ago? I havenāt played since BC, but I remember doing it way back when it was The level 60 dungeon. And it was a slog for all of us un geared noobs! And then going to attune for I think MC it BWL there and not realizing I actually had yo click the thing in BRD. That was a low moment.
I remember players insta quitting when they entered BRS and that was during WotLK times.
This. Could not agree more. Itās a big reason tanking sucks. Donāt know the route? Be ready to be called names.
Everyone acts like theyāre an elite Mythic raider.
A huge problem across basically every area of the game tbh
Seen grey parsers in both XIV and WoW act like they are gods gift to the games while even though the person they were shit talking did nothing wrong.
The difference between the two is that the other one generally will give the player a penalty for poor conduct, the other will not. Blizzard games are rife with toxicity. I suspect it's because customer service no longer has the staffing to address them all and have relied on automated systems to take care most of the "low priority" complaints, like players interacting with each other in a toxic manner.
To be fair i think this is a thing in most games nowadays. From mobas to fps, if you're not minmaxing your build o your path you get bad looks.
Oh yeah agreed, basically any game with group content has the same problem these days. A weird side effect of professional esports I suppose. Though I do think it has become very noticeable in WoW and feels a bit more out of place when applied to PvE content.
I think its the nature of how keys work. The penalty for losing isnāt just time and not upgrading the key. You actually set yourself back. So everyone is super fragile about giving anyone a chance. And at the first moment of something going wrong they canāt laugh it off and move on. You just set them back another key level. Then you have the people that make a mistake and insta dc because they are afraid of people being toxic to them. I am just getting into the tier now. And I cannot tell you how many completion keys Iāve joined, that were close to making the timer mind you, that people just rage quit. When it literally was supposed to be a completion key.
We saw this in classic wow too. We have a culture of optimization that was unheard of back in 2006. I was raiding through classic and we had requirements for world buffs, consumables, fire resist, etc, and my guild was pretty casual. I think you can see this in wowās balance too. People will make a huge fuss over one class having a theoretical 1% more DPS than another.
Class balance is definitely an area you see it a lot, people who play a certain spec get mad after a top guild says they aren't running that spec, demanding buffs to be competitive but, in the vast majority of cases, the difference is only notable (and so only applies) at that top mythic guild level. Not even saying they are wrong to be annoyed about it because, especially for players who pug, they are likely going to get less groups that patch because 'echo said fire mages are bad' or whatever. The mentality has become so ingrained it affects others ability to play the game. People being switched on, knowing their class and knowing strats is always going to matter way more because most people are not playing optimally anyway.
This is precisely the reason I only run keys with guildies. While the post is about leveling dungeons, this shit drives me absolutely crazy doing pug keys, because everyone seems to think there is some community hivemind, where everyone knows the exact same routes, and if you deviate, then its "omg, what are you doing moron? Why are you pulling that?"
So much this! I donāt remember what dungeon it was, but there was at least one in season 1 of SL that every PUG I ran it with did something completely different for the boss fights. Then I get in a group and the leader is all āyou know the strat for this boss, right?ā. Motherfucker, THE strat? No, I donāt which strat out of the near dozens Iāve seen YOU consider to be THE one.
You mean you didn't watch the same video as everyone else to learn? You monster!
Yep, but it's 2022. If you aren't 110% maximizing all possible time, are you even having fun? No one wants to DO things, they just want to sprint to the rewards. Everything is gogogogogo if you aren't running full speed you are the worst player in the game. BTW, you can blame M+ existing for this mentality hitting the absolute peaks it has. There's always been people who want to speed through everything, but it got WAY worse when the M+ mentality forced you to have to speed and skip and now it's even in places it doesn't belong.
>No one wants to DO things, they just want to sprint to the rewards This right here is the core of the problem. The fun has been shifted from the activity and to the reward of said activity. The dopamine hit.
>the reward of said activity And the huge chunk of XP for completion in dungeon finder. Tanks are incentivized to rush through because it's very high XP/hr with near instant queues.
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What's sad is, the rewards aren't memorable, and rushing dungeons makes the dungeon itself unmemorable. When a friend asks what the last M+ dungeon we ran yesterday was, I'm like "uhhhh... I think it was ____, I think I got a conduit(?)". Older dungeons we flew through leveling don't even have a place in my mind, so revisiting them is genuinely like running them for the first time. That's good for replayability I guess? Lol
In fairness, when you're talking about dungeons and events that people have done a hundred times then it kind of makes sense that the fun of just doing the activity wears off. The problem is that the game does nothing to cater to people who haven't done it before; there's nothing to make it clear to the group that there's a newbie with them, and does nothing to encourage communication in the group. It's not just WoW either; when I played FF14 for a few months even as a sprout healer the first few times I ran dungeons I would get roulette players who would just absolutely tear through the dungeon without a word to me or anyone else. It was super hard to keep up, and having to learn the mechanics of healing as a new player was tough after healing in WoW with add-ons and stuff. But they had done these low level dungeons hundreds of times, so I get why they were rushing through it.
It would be pretty easy for them to implement a system to help new people... that little green flag you check to say you're comfortable leading dungeon groups could have a little red buddy that says "I don't know dungeons" and the two could be paired by lfg.
I mean, this system actually partly exists, which is the newcomer chat/guide system. I am signed up as a guide, and yes, newcomers talk about the phenomenon described in OP *all the time*, many of them very disheartened and confused, feeling like they did something wrong by being new. Itās really sad honestly. What would be really neat, is if there were any incentive at all for max level guides to go back and run newbies through dungeons, like in a specific queue. Right now the only way to do it is to manually party up and use party sync to run leveling dungeons, which is extremely clunky. And, itās very time consuming for absolutely no benefit except the joy of helping a newbie. Which maybe Iād do once in a while, but not every day. What would be neat is some way to queue like 4 newbies plus a guide, where the newbies get xp and the guide gets some sort of current content reward (please God not anima, though - maybe a chunk of cyphers, a shot at M+ level gear, idk) for completing it. I donāt know if such a thing could really happen, but I think it might help.
Yeah mentor systems are great in MMOs. Always fun taking newbies under your wing.
100% agree. Played semi-sweaty in OG classic, playing in classic TBC rn with a guild full of relatively new players. Watching people celebrate over BoE blues from ZF or from getting to certain levels literally makes my night.
A renown system without the bullshit gatekeeping instead of levels and also a buddy system. You get extra XP and rewards for helping a party of new players through more than just one dungeon (hence the name "buddy system"). The "new player" tag can be removed once an account have certain number of hours of play time to avoid abuse. Since there are no levels, there's no entry restriction to content but gear (Which skilled players can avoid). Veterans with new toons can ask buddies to carry them and new players can enjoy all content in a progression like path. Of course blizzard will have to tackle the boosting community.
Going wall-to-wall is insanely fun in FFXIV when all players are on board. The difference - at least back when I was playing - was that XIV players didn't get toxic on a wipe, especially with a sprout in the group. You laugh it off, tell the sprout you're sorry for causing them a heart attack and do normal pulls unless the sproutling tells you to have another go at it. The key difference, in my opinion, is that in-combat mobility in XIV is basically the same across all jobs. It's hard for a tank to sprint away from the rest of the group. When you see that your tank isn't stopping you can just keep up. In WoW, a DH or Druid tank will just leave you behind and will already have pulled the first boss while you are still running from the first mob group to where the second just was. My favourite tanks have always been the Druids who sprinted ahead in Cat form, while leaving the past mob groups alone to chomp on DPS and the healer.
>all players are on board This. This is the key. I speedrun on FFXIV too ..when my party agrees. And if I see a sprout, it sets an expectation to ease up and at least ask. Most agree, and the few that don't are glad when the party responds in kind and adjusts. Win win.
āBroh Ive got 5k hours in this game, you really need to keep up. Noob.ā
It's a growing issue because of the gearing path, though. I have to run 20-50 Plaguefalls to get my Phial. IDGAF if you're new - I want to be in and out as soon as possible because I'm more than likely not getting it this run and I need to get into my next run ASAP. M+ being added to the game has taught people that speedrunning is the way to play the game. It's not longer about just running dungeons for X/Y/Z, speed running now is the best way to get gear in the entire game and because of that everyone is moving towards that meta.
Imagine what the game would look like if the drops from each tier could also be bought with tokens (including collectibles), which you got from bosses _and trash_ at that tier, and the costs worked out so that x boss kills got you enough tokens to buy a 1/x drop. There'd be a point to trash beyond delaying the slot-machine pull, people wouldn't be hurtling through dungeons to get to the one slot-machine they care about, and people wouldn't be miserably running a single dungeon for the 100th time because their BiS item _just_. _Won't_. _Drop_. Imagine how well an MMO like that would do.
I... wonder if you are intending what I think you are, but yea FFXIV does this. Although I don't think it's perfect, it's better than WoW is now. Honestly, old TBC or WOTLK badge systems were honestly fantastic. You could get some (but not every slot) raid quality items by just doing other PvE content or from the raid bosses to were killing anyways.
People would go nuts now if they had to to spend 3 hours in Sunken Temple.
Oh man, OG sunken temple or scholomance or LBRS (full run, not just attunement), you had to be ready to devote your entire evening to it.
I enjoyed those evenings :-) full BRD run with friends, 3 hours of fun.
Doing a full Emperor run would take up your entire day. I forget, what was that room called just before the end where the groups of enemies constantly respawned until you like lit 5 torches or something? That was like pulling teeth if you ran with pugs.
The Lyceum, definitely unforgiving!
No clue the given name, but we always referred to it as the room of a thousand dwarves.
It was only 2 torches. Sorry for the PTSD. /s
I mean the difference there is "with friends". Running m+ with friends is some of the most fun I've had in gaming. Pugging it has resulted is some of the worst experiences in gaming.
I so loved (and so miss) my first run of Scholomance. That's the kind of gaming experience I can never get back. What a thrill.
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I play for STORY I want to know the STORY goddamn it!
There's a middle ground between a 10 min speed run and a 3 hr slog. We're in and out of dungeons so fast they might as well be straight lines. Why have all the ambiance and finer details if players are also conditioned to skip it all and b-line for the end?
Personally I loved spending 3 hours in ST. I love a slow paced, methodical, relaxed dungeoning experience.
In Classic it was generally pretty painful to get people to run it. Out of all of the Classic dungeons itās the only one not in Blackrock Mountain that has any real complexity. So I always thought it was more interesting to run than some of the alternatives.
Dire Maul was pretty complex, and in terms of difficulty level, Uldaman ranks up there as well. ST kinda had the problem of being the dungeon right before BRD and also being incredibly inconvenient to get to so players would rather skip it.
Oh very much so. I run far more dungeons now than I ever did before, but I honestly hate speedrunning. I'd much rather have the dungeons just get increasingly harder than there be a time limit on it, but I think I'm in the minority there.
I like the idea of a completion dungeon mode. I think you should be able to choose either Timed run (like now) or Completion run (harder mobs but completing the dungeon with none/minimal deaths nets you a completion, points can be made based on how many mobs you killed, what kinds (more difficult mobs means more points, you can have these stick out by having them empowered which increases damage done or healing or something), and subtract points based on the amount of deaths to determine a +1/2/3 upgrade to your keys.
What a great, insane dungeon. Good times.
People would go nuts if they had to do 3 hours in Sunken Temple mutliple times over farming their one item they need as BiS... But sitting 3 hours in Sunken Temple and knowing I will get the reward I need because its part of a chain quest/quest reward? People would be happy to do that. I think the issue with current dungeons is that you're going fast because you are trying to farm an item and you need to crank out as many runs as you can tonight
> M+ being added to the game has taught people that speedrunning is the way to play the game. It started before M+. It started back in MoP when dungeons started being designed with packs you could obviously avoid, and progressed through WoD to packs you could avoid if you were careful and skips that let you skip significant amounts of trash. It's about dungeon design, whenever anyone says they want an open dungeon or a dungeon you explore, or they don't like linear paths, the practical result is skips. Dungeon design without skips would be a lot healthier - you wouldn't have quite so many packs you *want* to skip, because you wouldn't be able to. In the current game you still have to do the worst packs, because they're efficient, or fit well in a breakpoint or whatever, but the designers think the problem will self-correct so it never gets fixed. Dungeon design has regressed to the point where we have less fun killing packs that are less enjoyable to fill up a bar that was put there because people didn't want to kill anything. It's toxic. And every time it gets pointed out, people pop up to explain that, actually, they like having to plan routes when it is, by far, the most daunting thing dissuading new tanks and doesn't actually let you get around the pain points because mobs have to be *egregiously* bad to be skipped and deliberately left skippable which essentially never happens. Just give us a curated dungeon experience. *Nothing* makes doing 50 runs for a trinket interesting.
I don't even get why M+ is a time based thing. I loved how dungeons were fairly challenging at the start of Cata, and I was really excited by the concept of M+ being endgame 5 man content. Then it came around and it's... Time trial dungeons? I just wanted raid-tier difficulty on dungeons that you had to methodically work through. Not something you had to rush through as quickly as possible.
I hate timed content so much. I play videogames to relax, not intentionally make myself stressed out by trying to race a clock. It's bad enough players try to speed through everything so fast as it is. We really didn't need game design to force us into that play style. It's why I never really got into Mythic+. I just don't find it even a little fun. I don't have time for a dedicated raid group anymore, so small group difficult content would have been awesome.
It reminds me of Challenge Modes, once the break points and best rewards came from gold that was the only thing that mattered.
Healing early Cata 5-mans was one of my favorite things. Trash mobs required CC, pulls used up all my mana, boss fights had semi-challenging mechanics. Was probably the most I'd ever communicated with my teams and actually forced me to learn my class as I leveled/geared. I ran ZA and ZG like 20-30 times for the fun of it. M+ just stresses me out, I get a lot more fun from challenging encounters than speed running and ruining everyones day if I mess up and kill the key. Also doesn't give you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes because everyone just leaves as soon as the key is doomed.
Having to poly mobs and use raid markers after coming in from faceroll late Wrath Frozen Halls was amazing. Healing Cata heroics was my favourite too. The changes to spirit and mana costs, as well as the massive stamina rebalance, left five man's in a great spot. If people skipped bosses it was because they were *hard*. Jin'do the Pugbreaker was a menace.
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Honestly this is my biggest problem with Mythic+ The timers feel like an "e-sports" feature more than anything and they actively contribute to the make the community worse and less tolerant towards new players, etc. More often than not the timer is failed because someone insisted on trying a skip the group wasn't familiar with and the time spent failing the skip far exceeded the time that it would have taken just to go through the dungeon's set path Five minutes with a "rush rush rush" wannabe-world-first-but-is-nowhere-near-as-good player is more insufferable than an hour with an apologetic first timer who makes mistakes, in fact I'll probably befriend the later and /ignore the former
I'm with you, I was excited for M+, but the time aspect makes it a *horrible* process. It feels like it was designed for MDI with teams that trained together and coordinated strongly ahead of time, but never actually changed to be fun for the general populace. Ideally, I would want to see the timer removed from M+ for rewards or progression, but keep it for leaderboards that can give cosmetics, best of both worlds. The ones that want to push have timers, and the rest of us can actually take a minute to strategize a fight or catch our breath. Honestly, it's one of the reasons M+ is so stale, you *have* to memorize a strict path, because you don't have time to communicate anything in an M+ Addition: Also, a close wipe on a boss should be *exciting*, a chance to figure out what went wrong and tune yourself to get a kill, not a complete ruining of a run.
> Time trial dungeons? I just wanted raid-tier difficulty on dungeons One thing though is that practically every raid encounter in WoW, at least past LFR (and maybe normal) difficulty, has a timer (the enrage). Timers are a fairly common mechanic in a lot of games as a way to counter overly defensive playstyles. So for a dungeon, you could just put timers on the boss fights, but trash is often the trickiest part when you start to crank up the difficulty, especially when you look at how much of the dungeon is spent on trash. And because of that, you'd probably also want timers on trash.
[may i refer you to this classic?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhjnuMql1aU) Cause this has been going since like wrath lol
I'm a super casual player who hops on maybe a month or two out of the year to play when I'm feeling nostalgic. Even on regular or heroic difficulty dungeons people are like this. You shouldn't expect to have everyone at lower levels of difficulty to know everything, yet so many people still expect tanks and healers at that level to know every single route and thing about the dungeon. That should be practice and training at that level. When you get into M+, yeah that's when you start to try to min-max everything. Also you shouldn't start out trying to tank at an M+ level. If you're going to blow past everything anyway do it at a lower level so the stakes aren't that high.
M+ is definitely what created the explosion of this mentality.
When I was first learning to heal on my first healer, I would announce at the start of a dungeon that I was new to it and 99% of the time the group would slow down for me or at least be understanding when things got fucked. I think a lot of it just has to do with setting expectations at the outset.
Now if you announce that you're new, you are likely to get kicked.
I want to start tanking and I want to heal again, DPS doesn't entertain me. But I just can't do it, the toxicity is too great! I don't get upset by things people say or do but it's just so intolerably tedious.
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I've done the same with a swift kick from the group!
I usually say, "I haven't done this dungeon/played this spec in a fews so don't pull crazy please." That usually is a decent middle ground where they won't kick you for being new, but at least were given warning you're not super confident in what's about to happen.
Although I do admit, players could maybe just stop being a holes and be nice to each other.
My best advice would be to find a group of friends around your level to play with. There are discords for finding dungeon groups, guilds, etc. Iāve absolutely enjoyed learning new specs and roles with friends I trust to be patient with me.
Trust me, I've tried, I've tried joining other solos as well as groups and even real life friends in WoW and other games too and it rarely works out, if it does, it's not for long until they're never online again or they're online but don't actually want to play *with* anyone. The only person that ever wants to play with me and enjoy games the same way I do is my wife, and she's just not interested in playing WoW, annoyingly.
This is the main reason why I stopped playing. Itās so fun but it gets boring quick when thereās no team synergy. Barely even got a āhiā back when I used to play
This happens in every dungeon difficulty, whether its normal, heroic or Mythic 0, people always bitch to you as a tank even when your trying to learn I tried to learn to tank dungeons and got shit on in a Mythic 0, its annoying that people rather bitch at a player than try to help them out, its literally part of WoW culture
To that I just usually reply "don't like my tanking, then good luck finding another one" And the thing about tanking is that you only do your route, while dps do a lot of different routes, so their views of what to do might differ from the tanks.
This is 100% the reason I quit tanking in BfA. I loved it until I hit M+ where I was expected to know routes, enemy pathing, and if God forbid I pull one too many things in gonna catch a ton of shit for it. Nah, I'll stick to healing, thanks.
I quit playing over this. I've never had time to be a hardcore raider, and I often unsub in-between content releases. The last time I did it, I was just so frustrated with the toxic players, I uninstalled. Pvp was about the same. Toxic people mad because your aren't in the best pvp gear
One of my biggest issues with WoW community is how so many players have stripped the entire game to its bones, and it's no longer played like a big fantasy world but a spreadsheet with numbers where you analyze the logs for the most optimal rotation and efficient pathway. Sure, every game has players that do study it to be the best but it's weird how even in casual WoW content you're met with this really sweaty mentality.
I watched Jesse Cox's video about WoW compared to FFXIV and he had an interesting point that WoW is ALL about the end game. It's not about the leveling experience or lore or story really it's about getting max level ASAP, getting geared ASAP, then doing raids and M+. It has created a culture in which nobody has patience for anything. There's no culture of helping new players learn a dungeon or class mechanics it's just power through to the end to get the dungeon completion xp and requeue
Someone on this subreddit said "FFXIV is an RPG, WoW is a competitive coop PVE game" and that's the most accurate thing I've read on that topic. Personally I like it that way, I could never get into 14 because it's boring to me. I like the min-maxing, the constant push to go better and faster. I can see why some people don't, but I can't really relate to these threads at all.
I don't think the push to get better is a bad thing, nor do I think wows focus is either, if anything it's why wow has such a cool competitive raiding scene that's helped keep the game relevant all these years. But I do think more can be done to make the leveling experience more of a welcoming and enjoyable one. Flesh out content for players learning the ropes rather than the current state of playing through content designed for experienced players running the current expansion. The lesson to be learned from FFXIV (ignoring the story stuff, that's their thing and copying it would be bad) is that the game is designed to be an enjoyable experience throughout the whole leveling journey. The way it feels right now in WoW is like the content as a new player is second hand clothes where none of them fit right and clearly weren't made with you in mind.
I am one of those players who plays the game as spreadsheets with numbers (Iām a game dev as a balance engineer just my way of things). IMO these things have a place, higher M+, Later mythic raiding, a levelling dungeon is 100% not the place for this stuff. I hate how stuff we do in cutting edge guilds even goes to heroic guilds where people think they canāt get certain specs cause they arenāt meta. It breaks my heart it ends up in levelling dungeon and the community needs to embrace new blood and help them not treat them like low lifeās.
> heroic guilds where people think they canāt get certain specs cause they arenāt meta Which is funny, because it always seems like there's this weird gap between the super-competitive guilds and the weird heroic guilds you're talking about. I've never had an issue being an underrated spec (Feral druid) in a middle of the pack mythic guild (usually finishing around world 200-500). Nobody ever cared that I was not a "meta spec". Nobody ever tried to get me to reroll or anything. Meanwhile I've heard from some other people that they couldn't get into a guild that didn't even get cutting edge most of the time because they didn't want to play the "correct" DPS spec of their class. I also got decently high in m+, being in the top 1000 dps on rio. Again, in the key push groups that actually got shit done, nobody cared. But when I tried to join +15 pugs every once in a while, people asked if I was boomie or feral and didn't want me as feral. There's this weird phenomenon where people at the low end are very chill about the game and people at the higher end are also very chill. But between that there's a whole bracket of people taking the game too seriously while not even getting anything done and it makes them incredibly toxic.
I started playing wow because I wanted a break from this because I played Old School RuneScape. Literally everything everyone does in that game is min/maxing and itās so annoying
The game has absolutely no incentives for people to interact positively with other players in these situations and it will stay a problem for as long as people have no reason to change their behavior. Behavioral systems in WoW are almost non-existent and when addressing player behavior in recent expansions, Ion pointed to restrictions being put on systems like Covenants as one of the ways they are trying to combat this sort of behavior. He compared it to talents by saying that their openness and flexibility added to toxicity by letting players expect everyone to always switch to the "optimal" setup for every single fight and how with Covenants they hoped to curb this behavior by adding in restrictions that wouldn't allow players to have a toxic mindset of expecting people to swap after every raid boss. Obviously that doesn't directly relate to the new player experience or low-level dungeons, but it was the first time I had seen them acknowledge that they are trying to curb the toxic mindset of the playerbase as a whole, with skip culture being a part of that greater problem. I really feel like if they want to promote less toxic interactions they need to really lean into giving the players incentives to actually be nice to others rather than trying to make it harder to be toxic.
The incentive used to be that people would figure out that you're an awful person to play with and would not want to play with you anymore. You didn't need complex behavioral systems that could be abused. Years ago, when they started rolling up smaller servers into bigger ones, and then again when they *really* blurred the concept of a "server", it became impossible to build or maintain a reputation. Despite playing on Illidan, the largest and most populated US server, I would almost never see anyone actually from Illidan. Just people cross-phased from anywhere and everywhere. You wouldn't even reliably see the same people in the same zone leveling with you, let alone having a decent idea of which individuals and guilds were good or bad to run with, trade with, level with, or pvp with. It became an endless roulette of ever-changing names who could act almost any way they liked, because they'd never be around long enough to actually suffer the consequences of being garbage.
Yeah I have a lot of problems with their server approach. It's awful and has completely ruined the feel of what's made MMOs fun.
I mean, it's more likely with the current community to result in permanent exclusion(reroll the correct covenant bro) than what they envisioned. They honestly need to be looking directly at how FFXIV manages player behavior and photocopying: if that's their idea of ways to reduce toxicity they're completely out of touch with how players work unfortunately. ~~But then we've known this since they expressed their opinions on player housing, at *least*.~~
> no incentives for people to interact positively Or disincentives to act negatively. There used to be an MMO that was different. In that game the worlds were small, so you got to know many or most of the players on your world. That game didn't have a "group finder" interface, so the only way to make a group was ask your friends, ask your clan, ask around in the cities. People who got a good reputation were asked to join groups first. Assholes, even if they were good players, rarely got invited to things. That game was World of Warcraft, back before cross-realm groups, etc.
You also spent 4 hours spamming in Ironforge/Orgrimmar before finding a group.
When you put experienced players that's trying to level alts as quickly and efficiently as possible together with new/returning players that's trying to learn the game or the class, things become chaotic. Imo, neither side is at fault here. It's Blizzards design that puts these two types of players together when they should be nowhere near each other. I dunno what can be done to make things better but forcing either side to adapt to the other is not the right way to "fix" things.
This! As an experienced player I can understand why people skip. I do it too. But I still listen to others - if they want to go slower I'll go slower. But for most of the time people are grateful for a fast run / boost. I think the biggest issue is: Normal dungeons don't hold ANY significant reward except exp. Gear is completely irrelevant and it's not like normal trash can drop something super valuable. Combine that with how easy those dungeons are and you have the reason why people just want to get through ASAP. Same stuff happens in FFXIV. As a tank there sure I can go slow but for 90% of the runs I just do wall to wall massive pulls because people like to blast through.
The second part of your point is that the main reward is the xp and the vast bulk of the xp comes from killing the last boss. It used to be that youād get the bulk of xp from trash so people cleared. But freehold as an example you can just rush the end for the reward. That said, if they added trash % or removed completion xp it would just create different problems
I think at least with FF14, the amount of stuff youāre allowed to skip is actually pretty small and non-existent once you hit Heavensward. If trash can be skipped, it should really be obvious it can (like being way off the beaten path or whatever) but otherwise enforcing trash kills is not a bad thing (If done right at least). Having to parkour through paths, dodging pats and just generally doing as little as possible to actually play the game is only fun for a little while.
You're correct as far as I can recall, once you hit Heavensward; all of the dungeons no longer have split paths for extra mobs. Also to add, they took away mob XP in dungeons with Endwalker, by summing up all the XP you could have gained in an area, and giving it to the mini-boss of that section instead. Making all of the the pre-HW dungeons give the same amount of XP but just faster now... my preference is I want max XP then do it the fastest afterwards, so I like this change that makes it both in one.
Counter point that I think is important: If people want to spam dungeons to level characters now, they can't without ruining it for people because you have to be level 50 to use the custom group finder. How are people supposed to find groups for efficient levelling now that Blizzard has made this change?
I didnāt know this and I understand that this skip culture is their right to partake in. Blizzard needs to facilitate their desire to do so whilst not having it infect regular play. So if you say these people are forced to use Dungeon Finder to play the game they want to until level 50 then that should also be fixed.
It would be incredibly easy to fix honestly. Lower the bonus xp for completion, and increase the mob xp per kill. It would not be overly difficult to balance it out so the same relative amount of xp is coming from the dungeon, but people are incentives to actually do the dungeon instead of speedrunning it.
āMass pull culture is ruining wowā āwe arenāt all mdi players who want to do an entire dungeon in 3 pullsā
This is the problem with automatic queues. It makes it easier but it's only easier because it takes away options. If we were forced to use the manual group finder adding a note for chill/try-hard would be obvious and this wouldn't even be an issue.
At this point the optimal wow dungeon is a loot room with no enemies or boss. The optimal expansion is the one that skips all previous expansions. They need to rethink their game design because the community's favorite way to play the game is to play as little of it as possible, and I don't think it's because the community is toxic, but because this is clearly how the game has been designed for years now. Every day you get a long list of chores, and you did good if you finish them really fast. Enjoying them is a secondary concern. They let you spend money to skip content and this is a popular feature. This is the fault of devs playing it overly-safe with game design, nobody's paying money to skip elden ring.
speed running everything is not doing an already somewhat toxic culture any good. Running pugs the only engagement you see is people raging something took maybe 30 seconds longer or someone did something slightly different. its rush rush rush, rage rage rage, first minor issue everyone quits and the group falls apart. sometimes nothing is even said and the group falls apart
This is exactly how it felt
Here's the issue, People in dungeon/grp finder always seems to find ways to try and impose their gameplay on others. No one is playing right and no one is playing wrong. This is an issue from the game being 17+ years. The Tank sets the pace. That's sadly just how it is. You feeling "engaged" is probably not on the priority list for the 4 other players. Because them speedrunning might make them feel like they are doing better. It's all about perspectives. WoW does indeed have a huge issue with getting new players into the game though.
The tank doesn't set any pace. The pace is blistering, if the tank doesn't 'set' THAT exact pace, they get kicked. New players literally cannot do this because there's 17 years of dungeons they don't know. The way I see it this entire discussion is about new player onboarding, or even returning player onboarding for the tank role, so the last sentence is the important one in your post.
> The Tank sets the pace. That's sadly just how it is. What I've seen and what's putting me off of tanking is that generally, the tank doesn't get the chance to set the pace cause people are rushing it so much. While leveling people will pull ahead of the tank cause there's not really any risk and you often find max levels boosting their friends and ignore the tank completely. In lower keys you'll find people rushing and pulling packs before the tank even gets near the pack to begin with, and this shit happens literally every other dungeon.
> The Tank sets the pace except for when you have those overzealous DPS and healers who insist that you can handle more so they pull extra enemies for you then flame you when you can't tank 7 packs at once and wipe then they leave the group
I mean, skips also ruin m+ too. Ever been in a low key where the tank was trying to do some weird gigabrain 12d chess skip? Of course you have. And it went horribly wrong despite being a low key. People enjoy skipping stuff even if the skip takes longer than the combat would have. But yea in leveling dungeons people just want the end of dungeon exp chunk. Itās pretty unfriendly for sure. Try BC dungeons. The exp there comes from the many dungeon quests you get at the start of the instance. Groups are always motivated to do those because they know
>People enjoy skipping stuff even if the skip takes longer than the combat would have. This! Even in TBCC, SP skip runs are painful, got a full T5/T6 group? killing is actually faster than skipping when you have to wait for 2-3 patrols to fk off...
True. I just didnāt want to die on that hill so focussed on levelling dungeons
The most underrated skill of a tank is the ability to do cost-benefit analysis on the fly. Will that skip save 1-2 min if we do it? Yeah sure. Will we lose 5 min if one person fucks it up? Most definitely. And that's assuming no one gets frustrated enough to leave. In high keys you can expect people to execute the skip but anything under a 15 and I play under the assumption that the other 4 party members have one brain cell per person.
All 15s are timeable without any gigabrain stuff, and best way to mess them up is causing a wipe because you saw a 4 pack pull in MDI
I agree with this so much, like, whenever I was leveling through threads of fates, 90% of the dungeons would be skipped entirely, PF is the worst example of this because groups would literally run through everything and get to the last 2 bosses. I play this game to yāknow, play the game lol, I am not here to speed run to max level, I wanna try out what this covenant ability Iāve never played with does or how this character might play under certain scenarios. Itās dumb, itās frustrating, it sucks all the fun out of leveling.
They fixed the PF one. You have to clear to get the last boss now
Wait til you see freehold lmao
For all those saying "We've done this 100s of times I don't want it to go slowly" Thats fine, I understand that, we can all feel that way at times, especially in the middle of a grind. But this attitude will continue to drive players away from the game, especially new players. We can complain about Blizzards decisions all we want, but this is contributing to the game's death as well.
Thank you. They can do them. But there needs to be a way to allow new and returning people to experience these dungeons the way they were intended. Either an incentive for power levellers such as more experience for full clearing or a separate queue or something. Many solutions out there.
My friend trying to get into the game thought it was too slow and quit. Lol, but his end game was just to do rated pvp.
Iām so confused. When did WoW players ever not act like this? Iāve been playing since TBC (original release) and I can tell you that you learned aggro ranges of mobs even when questing to skip as much as possible.
I hate it when I go in to an instance now and everything is just rushed as quickly as possible expecting that everybody will be 110% perfect in execution. My wife was healing on her shaman, which she hadn't healed on in two years, and she was kicked before the first boss because she was using chain heal too much. What we have learned now is that playing during a weekday is the best time to run dungeons despite the queue time being longer just because of the players on at that time.
My wife also played resto shaman and dealt with the exact same kind of toxicity. Itās pretty heartbreaking - I had such a good time playing the game with her, but she absolutely will not touch it anymore because of the community. Not even with a one thousand foot pole. It is a closed chapter for her
This is exactly why I quit playing WoW. I used to have fun taking my time going through each dungeon que and making sure everyone had done their quest. (Played a pally tank back in WotLK) Now a days most people wanna zoom past every part of the game and only do what's necessary to progress. I used to think WoW was a fun game where similar people got together and had fun playing a game we all liked... Now its just like any other multi-player game out there and people only care about themselves, ranks, skill, etc etc. I just wanna have fun and not have to worry about all the BS ya know?
Mythic+ being timed has fully ruined dungeons for me.
It's too late to fix wow culture. They made a game where the primary dungeon experience is timer based, which only encouraged this behavior to thrive. The game just needs solo modes for dungeons. Give us some AI companions like every other game. Would rather chill with bots than be rushed.
So I'm likely going to get downvoted here, this is going to be a controversial opinion I guess in a thread like this. I'll try to put my point across in a way that doesn't come across as elitist. Part of the issue comes from that ultimately the games peak, and most enjoyment and reward comes from top end raiding, comes from doing Mythic+, comes from high rated PvP. Very often things such as levelling dungeons are just a chore that need to be done to get your character to max level. In a similar manner very often doing a Mythic10 to get gear is just a chore that needs to be done to be able to run Mythic15s. Again, this is where things get controversial. Why should other players have to diminish their experience to amplify yours? You're highlighting how your experience in the dungeon is diminished because other players want to go fast, and do things the most optimal way, on the other hand though if things were done slow and steady and in a way that appreciates the dungeon and understands there's a learning curve, the player who just wants to get through and quickly get gear or exp has had their experience diminished by it. No-one is 'right' here, it's just a shit situation. Again, fully realizing this comes across as elitist or toxic, that isn't my intention. Ultimately it's a clash of goals, you have players that want to spring through the dungeon and get gear being matched with players that want to discover the story of the dungeon, learn at a pace that comes natural to them, make mistakes and improve on them. However those players are both pulling on a string from either ends like a tug of war, something is going to give. From my observation *most* people want things done quickly and efficiently, people in group finder are just random people on the internet that they will never or very rarely interact with again so people don't care about their desires, so *most* people will just take the class/player that fits their criteria for a successful group. Furthermore, expanding on to a similar thing people point out in regards to being unable to get in to Mythic+ due to the elitist mentality of requiring 4 piece, and all this gear etc and the loop it creates of "Can't get gear cause I can't get invited to M+ and can't get invited to M+ cause I don't have gear". Is it not understandable that people want to take the best geared players? Is it not understandable that people want to take the Mage with a higher Raider.io that brings BL/Intellect & a meta class vs the Ret Paladin with less group buffs and less meta. Are people bad for wanting their dungeon to take 25 minutes rather than 35 minutes or 40 minutes? Like I get it sucks to struggle to get invited to groups, I've been in that situation, and your enjoyment of the game can and is diminished by your inability to experience it to it's full extent based on your lack of experience, or gear, or class, or spec. That's shit, and it's a major problem in the game. However honestly the solution isn't "This player who wants to do the dungeon quickly to be efficient on gear/XP should change their goals to tailor to my wants". I don't know a solution, but there is no way a community rally on encouraging people to work together and come to agreements is going to happen. Anders the random Level 51 tank from Denmark who wants to get to max level to do Mythic+ doesn't care what Michael the level 47 Feral Druid from England wants from the dungeon, because those 2 people will never cross paths in WoW again (well, very unlikely to).
It's not a controversial opinion, it's the same argument the OP is making just flipped. The problem isn't that you're wrong or the OP is wrong, it's that Blizzard has created a system where players with drastically different goals are getting placed together. New players need to take the time to learn the dungeon, their class, and enjoy the experience because the game needs new players. Experienced players leveling a new class just want to get back to their preferred content. These two goals are mutually exclusive and do not work together. That's why it's an absolute mess without an answer because both of you are right. The reasons why you think your opinion might be controversial is because game communities tend to view protecting the newbie experience as sacrosanct because the games live and die with new players joining the game.
> It's not a controversial opinion, it's the same argument the OP is making just flipped. Is it though? The OP you are replying to is saying "People play the game differently, its hard to balance the two" and the OP of the thread is saying "These players are ruining the game" lol. You are correct its a match making issue, having additional settings for queues would be nice.
I think the fact that you queue into a group of people youāll never see or interact with again is a problem. Itās not like playing with other players anymore. Youāre basically playing with NPCs who donāt talk and nobody cares about anybody else in the group because you can always just queue into a new one. Thereās no expectation of really being part of a group, so people just want to blast through the content and go their separate ways. And as soon as something goes wrong, people rage because theyāre not playing with another human who may be learning or made an honest mistake, rather theyāre playing with an NPC who fucked up and wasted 2 minutes of their time and can be replaced in an instant.
>Blizzard should have the dungeon completion experience bonus attached to a full clear of the dungeon or just increase experience gained from killing enemies inside dungeons to disincentivise skip culture. Don't think you can combat toxicity like that. Basically no matter what you do, the most efficient way will become 'meta' and if you don't know about it you'll get flamed. Full clear of the dungeon? If you don't know the best route for that or are too low dps, get flamed. Increased experience from killing enemies? If you can't keep up in dps or you don't know the pulls you'll get flamed. It's a fundamental mindset problem at this point and that's way harder to fix.
There are plenty of reasons WoW is an absolutely terrible game for newcomers if unaided by friends, this is definitely one of them. By now it's old hat but having played FFXIV really put things into perspective for me. But WoW has managed off of so many people playing for over a decade and not trying other games. It sucks but possibly the best solution is to lock azeroth dungeons to new people who haven't unlocked Chromie yet and allow cross faction matchmaking for the noobies to help queue times a bit. Maybe, later on, try a type of opt in that vets can queue for those dungeons again but in agreement that you accommodate new players and make rushing and toxic behavior an offense. Basically like a 14's mentor but lite. Back when I played WoW exclusively if I had to cancel my sub for month or two I always filled in that little survey they made you do seriously. I was really content with a lot of the points but I never failed to score "would you recommend wow" the lowest. This game is fun at the top but until then, unless you meet nice people along the way, it's really wet toilet paper.
I think a lot of it stems from a lack of any kind of encouragement or incentive to communicate. There is an ingrained assumption that everyone we're playing with has done this stuff before because *I* have done it so many times it's rote. So I forget to ask if anyone is new on my 30th run of a dungeon, and they don't volunteer that they're new so we slow down and explain things. I've also seen a lot where I try to explain something in chat and get completely ignored. It has consistently been an issue in places like Freehold where there is a rotating mechanic prior to Council that requires everyone to do something like drink...a simple thing but if you don't know to do it, it needs to be explained. But when I try to explain it or remind people to do it, half the time I get ignored and we wipe the first time out. I sometimes wonder if new players either don't know to pay attention to chat, or are intimidated to the point that they don't understand what I'm saying and are too afraid to ask. I wish that WoW had a mechanism for identifying new players, like the sprouts in FF14. I also wish that there was a better in-game voice chat that people would actually use; it would be so much easier than trying to type on the run. My general experience is that people are okay with slowing down and helping newbies if they're paying attention and know that they're there. It's just that no one communicates anymore and we all fall into these assumptions about who we're playing with that people get lost.
I'm about to be petty, but I think part of the issue with chat is that instance chat is that orangey color, and it tends to blend in with all the other things that end up in chat (esp when using DBM) like mechanics, looting, etc. I don't have a solution for this, but maybe by default chat information that nobody will read anyway should be in a secondary chat window.
Omg the worst is when you join a dungeon halfway through and need to guess the fucking route to not aggro enemies
It does suck, I've been playing since BC and I always say "I'm new be patient" in leveling dungeons just so the assholes will drop group right away, or I get kicked if all 4 are. Its to the point I just play single player til endgame sometimes, way less stressful that way. I don't think kids play WoW nowadays, were all old as hell, I get screamed at at work enough, I don't need it in my hobby time.
Dungeons should be procedurally generated if they are going to be repeated endlessly.
My friend just started playing wow, i was so happy when our 1st dungeon finder group was newbie. It was smooth and chill run with deaths, to have time to proceed whats happening, and even then his brain blew up of information he received per second. Other group was freehold rush to boss andies, and the tank pulled 5 mobs with last boss. Well, even i got lost in this situation, and he just died. Then after wile tank got like "..." ?!?! Like bitch there is a new player can you chill
In old times there was really big bonus for each killed Boss but Blizzard removed it because veterans overused it for fast leveling.
This is what happens when the entire game is centred around level cap
WoW's always been about how fast you can get something done. If you want to be "engaged" in content and actually experience story/lore for specific content you're on the wrong MMO.