New types of dungeon

Evolving, or changing dungeons. As you venture deeper into it, your group can choose which door, gate in a castle, left or right in the tunnel caves. As you continue the way behind closes, or some rocks are falling and seals the other way.

What do you guys think of a new way to make dungeons? They have always been the same formula over the years. Run straight forward and kill the end boss.
What if there were ever evolving ways to complete the dungeons. Surprise enemies coming from some portal, or puzzles that changes everytime. Finding keys to unlock different doors, not knowing what coming ahead.
Your group can choose multiple ways to do the same dungeons. This opens for more social and enganging, using the chat to discuss, plan your unique venture to complete it.

Maybe you have some new ideas to make dungeons more interesting?

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tried it with thorgast, and it sucked.

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Tried it with Torghast, and it sucked for me.

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for most people thorgast was a boring chore.

it was fun in the beta and 2 weeks after release.

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The same 8 M+ dungeon and the same bosses aren’t a boring chore for most people now.

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nah its not.

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Good, then the people who are harshly criticising Torghast are nothing but a vocal minority.

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some would enjoy it, but the vast majority wouldnt like it. thats why i said they tried it with thorgast, it was ill recieved. Why would they bother again.

could argue island expedition was another attemp aswell, was also ill recieved and died out really really quickly.

My biggest gripe with Torghast design was that it had the same look all the way through. It really doesn’t help that the routes change, when the scenery is the same theme no matter route.

Also, another example is the “secret dungeon” to get the nightmare steed, or whatever the name was. I never got it myself, but my ex did. That had an ever changing route concept too, sort of at least.

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As I understand it, learning Torghast’s trash and boss mechanics was difficult for the community because it was solo content and there weren’t many people around to teach them.

However, almost from the first week, WoWhead had special guides for every trash pack and boss mechanics, for every specific class, which powers to choose, and how to play around with its RNG. It was a pure strategy based on RNG. And It was a wonderful idea.

I should also add that, Twisting Corridors and Jailer’s Gauntlet were kinda overturned in the first weeks with a low gear. Trying to reach certain powers (or trying to stack them) to pass the first 3 floors was hard and required some skills that not the majority of the community have. But after reaching them, after the correct strategy with good RNG, it was easier.

This kind of content fits WoW better than Myritt Digs or snail racing.

The community doesn’t like to learn new things, they want someone to come and teach them, tell them what to do. They like to play around the same 8 - 9 bosses or 8 dungeons the whole season because it is easy to learn that limited numbered bosses or dungeons. Just because it was solo content, they couldn’t find this for Torghast. This is why they didn’t like it.

We always fear and hate what we don’t know.

I really liked the slight randomness in Waycrest Mannor. In case you don’t know, there are different open doors at the start which determine the general route you need to take. However, back then I did not push hard in M+.

Random dungeon events would have some impact on the difficulty or time to complete dungeons, which would suck for M+. And M+ in general is a great gameplay mode - I don’t that needs fundamental changes.

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Options like that would simply result in the same ones being taken every time, and RNG breaks the concept of M+ in it’s current state.
Decisions only matter when it’s about risk vs reward. For example the group looks at the timer and have to choose: “Do we want to go left and kill one more boss before taking on the final one, or go straight to him?”. The risk being either running out of time, or maybe killing optional bosses gives you buffs that help against the last one so skipping them makes a wipe (and failed key) more likely.

While I’m not a huge fan of M+, seeing the effort people put into leaderboards and pushing it’s undeniably popular in it’s current state. So blizz probably wants to be careful about major reworks.

Torghast when first done on beta, players were happy with it,

Torghasts issue is they tied player power to it, which means it had be made mind numbingly easy to allow everyonr to manage it.

If torghast was developed as a deep dungeon without power progression, it could have been alot wilder then it was.

As all new dungeons are also mythic plus dungeons that would be a nightmare, however as an RPG game it would work. Not really something for an MMO.

Torghast was rather an approach to roguelike than being an “adaptive dungeon”.
How would you implement it anyway? Like, if you’re doing a lot of AoE damage then mobs get Avoidance (aoe dmg reduction) or what? Or make different segments of the dungeons have different m+ affixes?
With the AI being on the rise, it’s certainly possible, question is how the game can handle it.

That’s the corner Blizz painted themselves into when releasing Mythic+, every dungeon has to be suitable for it, which means no random events can happen, no complications beyond fight mechanics, i understand why that is, but it does limit the options to make dungeons a bit more interesting for multiple playthroughs.

Besides, WoW-players being the way they are, they’d figure out the “optimal” choice for any choice given to us and do the old “Do it this way or you suck!” on it, and that would pretty much defeat the whole point, really.

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What sucked wasn’t the idea, what sucked was the mechanisms attached to it, the mandatory resource grind, the legendary acquisition etc.

If you took Torghast and filled it with cool cosmetics, collectables, mounts etc, people would be swarming to it.

Now back to OP, the idea is fun for sure, as always it would come down to implementation and ironing out details. For example, imagine loot wise for a moment, not only would we have to deal with RNG of loot to begin with, but on top of that you’d add the RNG of that boss potentially not being there to begin with!

I do like the spirit of the idea though. I’ve long maintained the idea of completely separating regular dungeon design from M+.

Standard Dungeons

  • Great for lore and character development. Actually spend time doing relevant stuff with important characters, as opposed of them sitting around in a city ordering us and then conveniently afking or being dazed during a boss encounter.
  • Fun mechanics that are give a sense of adventure and exploration
  • mini-games, puzzles, platforming.
  • Design can be quite liberal and serve the story it’s trying to say.

M+

  • Endless challenging gameplay. Scoring system
  • Directly tied to player power, with must have loot.
  • Trophy like rewards, unique mounts, titles etc.
  • No lore needed whatsoever, fully gameplay focus. Evergreen modular design.
  • Fun affixes, kiss/curse, allowing for very large variety of comps a play styles (look at the game HADES for reference)
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I assume you’re referring to variant dungeons/torghast/zskera vaults. As long as this stays far away from M+ people will like it. If anything it could be the same way that variant dungeons and torghast/visions, etc work with the scaling group difficulty of 1-5 players.

They should learn from hades. I haven’t touched most affixes but there were ones like ‘‘add an additional mechanic’’ to the bosses which I immedeatelly picked because that’s the fun part!

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I disagree. Thorgast didn’t fail because of the variable dungeon design, it failed because it was implemented as a boring chore that you had to do dozens of times for the legendaries and gave you nothing else. If it had been implemented as singleplayer dungeon with loot (for example turning it into an alternative way to gain entry gear for M+ or raids) it would have been a blast.

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Snoreghast w/o powerups.