Came back after several years and am now trying out the trial acc. What happened? Did they change the game type to a mobile game? Where have the RPG elements gone?
I joined a dungeon (couldn’t find the low level dungeons in the DF) and got grouped with two level 50s, a mid level and another around my level 15. I queued as a healer and could barely keep up as we were running from one engagement to the next AoEing everything down like trash. The bosses got downed so quickly as if they were normal elites. They seemed to have some mechanics but they were irrelevant as they barely did anything and I didn’t even have time to grasp what they were because the boss was already dead and my party was halfway across the map already.
I can’t find a point to dungeons then - is it normal to just be able to steamroll everything? Where’s the challenge, the adventure? How am I supposed to create relationships with others if they just pop in, AoE the whole dungeon in 5min and pop out, without saying a word? Where comradery?
Then there is solo leveling. The mobs seem to level up with me and I get gear but I tried running around naked and I could still kill every mob within a single Holy paladin rotation. That seems like a bug in the mechanics. If I get new gear and abilities but everything scales with me then what is the point of getting new gear and abilities if they change nothing? This seems strange to me.
Is this what the game has become now? It seems so…bland.
But when were you playing that you don’t remember AoEing down dungeons? It’s been that way since late Wrath, with a brief attempt by Blizzard to pull it back at the start of Cata. To be fair to Blizzard, their hand has been forced by players. The people who enjoy dungeons enjoy them only when they can do big pulls.
The rot of scaling was introduced to the game in late Legion. The inconsistencies and reality distortion of scaling that you note are inevitable.
I played a bit of MoP and if I remember correctly, never started WoD. As far as I remember, AoE was used for trash mobs but even then there should have been a bit of a setup with at least the healer be warned of the play.
The mixed in high levels in ‘‘low level’’ dungeons just feels off to me. But I suppose, the game began its change with the very first expansion, as it just stretched out world too much and then came the cross-realm queue-ups - can’t make friends as easy if they pop out of existence right after the dungeon.
In any case, thanks for the reply. I guess I’ll wait for some other mmorpg to come out.
Current expansion is EVERYTHING. The devs want you in the current expansion ASAP. Levelling has been squished almost to nothing. World record levelling time now is around 3 hours, and it’s not actually possible to make it consistent and with a sense of progression when it’s so telescoped.
Chromie Time and the mixing of levels is a mechanism to make that reality work.
Dungeon mechanics are driven by the people who like to run dungeons. Seriously. The devs keep trying to restrain the AoEfest, and the dungeoneers keep telling them where to stick their restrictions.
If you want a traditional WoW experience, take a look at Classic Wrath. It is very popular.
No, that isn’t what the game has become now. What you describe is the levelling process, which is getting ready to play the game, which really begins at max level.
And this is nothing new. The game has always ‘begun’ at max level. (I remember people telling me exactly the same thing when I started playing back in Wrath.) What has changed is that the devs fully acknowledge that now and have made getting to max level much faster and easier so that we can spend more time actually playing the game.
I doubt we disagree on facts. We do disagree about what we like.
The playerbase is split into about half and half, if we exclude the all-PvP all-the time minority.
About half of players enjoy the “Dungeon Life” end-game at max level. About half of players avoid it. I’ve done the numbers lots of times, in Mists. Warlords, Legion. BfA. Shadowlands, and now Dragonflight. It varies - could be 60:40 one way or the other depending on the phase of the expansion. But it’s always about half and half.
The greatest disappointment I always have when I talk to new players is when they love their levelling experience, and than discover what end-game is, and nope out. And I understand that, because I can’t understand why people enjoy running the same dungeons again and again, faster and faster. It eludes me. Like I can’t understand how people can eat coffee ice-cream. It’s just not my taste. I’m not a good player - there are only a few thousand of those in the world - and I’m probably below average as well, but I know I could keep up with Normal and +10s, and maybe join the upper middle class with Heroic and +15s if I found a guild and made an effort. But it just doesn’t appeal to me. Raids, maybe, yes, but nowadays you really have to do the M+ grind as well, and I’d rather be waiting at a bus stop in the rain without an umbrella to go for a dentist’s appointment than spend time in M+.
And about half of all subs agree with me on that.
Now, I’m glad you posted, because it’s always good to have more views, but when I see a new or returning player posting here about something like scaling, I have a pretty good notion that they are of this view as well, because the dungeoneers simply seem to not-notice such things. Or insofar as they notice, they don’t mention it, because it’s not important to them. They know what they’re heading for, and they’re not much fussed about the preliminaries.
But you do the same dungeons at low level again and again (presumably), and do the same quests again and again. I’m genuinely curious about what the difference is.
The last time I did levelling dungeonS (plural) was in Legion, when I decided to try levelling a healer. No doubt I’ve done maybe five or ten since then, when I was in a particular mood, but never again and again. Generally, I do them only when required to unlock something - and even then I tend to put off doing them for weeks.
Quests, yes, but quests are different. There are more than eight quests to cycle through. I am not tied to someone else’s sense of time. I can tear through them, or afk halfway through, or do some gathering along the way. They’re not as … interesting? stimulating? but they are a reliably more pleasant way to spend time.
