Scaling must go, deaths must be punishable

Community General Discussion
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Let’s start with the obvious:
Of course 5 people with no experience in Vanilla WoW, who leveled up to level 15 and then entered RFC, would’ve been able to clear RFC. Vanilla RFC has zero mechanics. It’s literally just mobs with more hp. You could clear it with 5 dps if you tried.

I mean I used this example beforehand, but I played WoW for the first time when I was 12-14 years old, while clicking abilities and auto attack with my mouse, yet somehow my first character, a hunter, together with two real life friends who played the game just as much as I did and two random people we picked up from somewhere, were able to clear deadmines when we first went into it.

Second:
I believe people who started in vanilla at level 1 and leveled up to level 15 would most likely have more playtime in the game than a person who leveled from 1-30 right now, thus gained more experience in how the game functions.

If people who didn’t play WoW beforehand were unable to clear dungeons in vanilla, no dungeon would’ve ever been cleared, because, well you were unable to play WoW before WoW was released.

The first dungeon you entered was always a very simple dungeon with little to no mechanics. RFC for horde, maybe Wailing Cavern. Deadmines or Stockades for alliance.

You can gladly compare vanilla RFC, WC, Stockades and DM, or cataclysm RFC, WC, Stockades and DM with Atal’Dazar and check how many abilities the NPCs in the dungeons have. Then you’ll have an objective comparison between the dungeons and can come back to argue about how you didn’t beat RFC on your first try and thus Atal’Dazar is a good beginners dungeon.

Yeah that’s pretty much the issue. It makes sense from a lore point of view to give new players a “what happened last” summary, but the dungeons are simply not beginnerfriendly whatsoever.

2 Likes
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Deadmines?..had plenty pug groups rage quit after repeated wipes to mechanics on Sneeds Shredder in TBC…the ‘entrance’ was a warren of passageways full of mobs, where newbs could get lost/die…etc

Ragefire Chasm mobs hit like a truck if you were under-geared and squishy.

Your rose-tinted specs are showing.

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Hard hitting mobs and getting lost seem like a walk in the park compared to Freehold or Atal Dazar, that, mind you, have these complications too.

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what i d like to add is, bfa dungeons are apparently the way to speed level because you can skip a huge part of bosses and trash and finish the dungeon in like 5-10min. i leveled a mage earlier today and my queue time as dps was like 2-5min max.

this is another huge problem in my opinion because what could go wrong if you put completely new players and speedrunners in one group? a lot of frustration and toxicity, thats what you get. :confused:

5 Likes
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Sure, let’s get into this. Have a direct comparison between RFC and Atal’Dazar.

RFC:

  1. Bazzalan. Abilities: Poison. Sinister Strike. Poison: Heal the target that gets poisoned. Sinister Strike: Heal the target that tanks Bazzalan.
  2. Jergosh the Invoker. Abilities: Curse of Weakness. Immolate. Curse of Weakness: One target deals less damage. Use decurse or ignore, doesn’t matter. Immolate: Heal target that gets immolated or dispell it.
  3. Oggleflint. Abilities: Cleave. Cleave: Do not stand in front of the boss.
  4. Taragaman the Hungerer. Abilities: Fire Nova. Uppercut. Fire Nova: Heal targets damaged by Fire Nova or run out of Melee. Uppercut: Run back into melee after getting knocked away.

Atal’Dazar:

  1. Rezan: Abilities: Pursuit. Terrifying Visage. Serrated Teeth. Pile of Bones. Pursuit: Move away from Rezan after he focuses you or heavily heal the target after it gets caught by him. Terrifying Visage: Line of Sight Rezan as soon as he starts casting the fear. Get feared and you’ll probably trigger pile of Bones. Serrated Teeth: heavy heal tank after he gets hit with this dot. Pile of Bones: Don’t stand in purple bones.
  2. Vol’kaal: Abilities: Reanimation Totem. Toxic Leap. Rapid Decay. Noxious Stench. Toxic Pool. Reanimation Totem: Kill totem before you can properly damage boss. Toxic Leap: Boss leaps to target player and deals damage. Move out of green swirly. Rapid Decay: When all totems are dead, group takes periodic damage. Noxious Stench: Interrupt or get a stacking dot on every party member. Toxic Pool: Do not stand in green goo that spawns under you (notice the rhyme?)
  3. Priestess Alun’za: Abilities: Tainted Blood. Transfusion. Molten Gold. Gilded Claws. Tainted Blood: Blood pool on ground, don’t pick it up unless… Transfusion: When this is cast, pick up the blood pool on ground, one each player, otherwise boss heals itself (literally a mechanic from a vanilla raidboss btw) Molten Gold: Heavy ticking dot on random players. Dispel or heavy heal. Gilded Claws: Buff on boss, purge it or heal tank more.
  4. Yazma. Abilities: Soulrend. Echoes of Shaedra. Wracking Pain. Skewer. Soulrend: One player gets targeted and needs to move away from Yazma, then spawns an add that needs to be killed, when it reaches Yazma it puts a heavy ticking dot on the entire group. Echoes of Shaedra: Spooky Spider Spawns that leave pools behind and hurt if you run into them. They also occasionally become big and chase you. Wracking Pain: Interrupt or heavy dmg and dot on player. Skewer: Heavy tank hit.

And those are just the bosses, every single trash mob in Atal’Dazar has probably just as many abilities as the bosses in RFC have had, if not more.

But let’s be real, this entire paragraph is a waste of time, because you have your opinion that you’re not going to change, no matter how many facts there are.
I mean you’re currently literally arguing that Atal’Dazar is just as beginnerfriendly as RFC is.
Mate, get a grip.
I’m not even trying to trashtalk classic or TBC here, which is probably what ticked you off, I’m saying they were much better regarding the learning curve for new players.

But yeah, as I’ve said, probably a huge waste of time since no matter what I say, no matter how much sense it makes and no matter how many facts I cite.

So let’s just be happy about how Atal’Dazar is an insanely noobfriendly dungeon with no hard hitting mobs, no way to get lost or die, and RFC was the most difficult dungeon ever designed, that sound fair to you?

2 Likes
26

No, the point I was making is that for a complete beginner all Dungeons are going to present difficulties…that being the case logically they should indeed be a taster for endgame, not a faceroll… as some other peeps have pointed out if Dungeons are too easy then no-one will bother to do levelling any other way, making the storyline questing in a zone redundant and speed-runs mandatory for experienced players leveling Alts…this will not make either content more enjoyable for newbies.

A common rule in TBC was that your character should out-level the Dungeon’s recommended level by ten levels, to make life easier.

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Agreeing with the others, all those mechanics come all too soon with no chance of preparation. I don’t say it should be written on them that ‘hey, I fully heal back that trash mob with 1 cast’ but back in the day, if you watched the nameplates you could get used to such mechanics as you were questing, and you knew that even some normal mobs could kick your butt, let alone an elite.

The newer expansions were built on the base game so doing a Legion or BfA dungeon straight away is too big of a difficulty jump. Don’t wonder newbies die on the first pack, they haven’t the slightest idea how to approach the first difficult content yet. :joy:

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Are you out of your mind? If we compare vanilla dungeons, even the cataclysm vanilla dungeons and their difficulty curve you can immidiately see that its super easy on low levels and becomes bit more difficult later. By the time you hit TBC you already may know what caster mobs are, how cc works, and so on and yet in TBC the dungeons are still pretty simplistic.
Only in cataclysm they become really difficult mechanic wise. I’d come as far as to say that cataclysm dungeons during leveling are still not easy at all. And then the difficulty becomes higher and higher.
The issue however is, that a new player is now automatically led into BfA, with pretty much hardcore dungeons with very specific and non intuitive mechanics.
A new player who did the tutorial might figure out how to deal with RFC. But no way hell know how Atal Dazar will work.

1 Like
29

This is pretty interesting and not an issue I’d considered before.

I wonder if Blizzard should add some kind of “training wheel” version of BfA dungeons specifically aimed at the new players?
Featuring simpler mechanics, less challenging fights and signposting/visible warnings of things to look out for, but also lesser rewards to offset the lower difficulty.

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I had a group where we kept getting killed by Vol’kaal, even though the level 10 Orc Protection Warrior didn’t seemed to be a newb.
He was doing everything fine, but something was missing.

I asked him to switch places with my BE Warrior. She was level 40s something.
We did it on our first try.
The difference was the number of defensive abilities I could put out vs his limited toolkit.

After that we switched back again.
I returned to fury spec and he kept tanking.
I think he only had the shield and sword provided by the Exile’s Reach campaign.

To be fair I only experienced several wipes in a row with Rezan when I was matched with a full premade from one server.
I think it was from Pozzo dell’Eternità.

After multiple wipes they finally gave up and the group that was assembled did it on their first try.

I don’t think will ever get a group of “newbs only” in WoW as I believe this game is mostly played by veterans now.
I noticed, there’s always someone that knows what to do.
That’s the reason why BFA dungeons aren’t a bigger issue.

In Vanilla, I believe the problem was each dungeon was a gear check.
We didn’t had heirlooms.
Quest rewards would give you items that were under 4 levels of your current level.
Most people didn’t knew what they were doing that’s why we wiped a lot.
Also we didn’t had target dummies and we couldn’t dungeon spam.
Which meant your knowledge of dungeon running was also pretty limited.
I lost the account on how many times, I pulled mobs by just being in the wrong location or having a wide aggro radius because of being too low level.

Cheers.

1 Like
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I only queued up for BFA dungeons a couple of times with alts and it was always a clown fiesta because some new players didn’t understand the mechanics (how should they?) and the scaling was too extreme.

Compared to Classic dungeons (in Cata Chromie time), the BFA dungeons feel like M+ compared to Normal dungeons.

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You left out the part where everyone left the group after first wipe, cursing like grown men in a rap-battle!

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I have to agree with this sentiment. I also don’t really get why the playerbase of WoW is so unwelcoming of new players on the whole. Some find it no big deal to explain what is going on after a wipe and others seem to want to remove them from everything.

On my short Venture into FF a number of years ago. No one raged when you messed up mechanics in a dungeon because it was your first time there. After we failed to kill the boss, they asked if I knew what to do and then explained what I’d done wrong/not done in order to get the boss down. We killed it on the next pull because people had the patience to not treat newcomers as outcasts.

4 Likes
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The point I am making is that Vanilla and TBC dungeons are now easy, because gamers as a whole, have a much better idea of what to expect from the genre they are playing… and if not, the interwebz is awash with advice.

Those dungeons were not easy at launch, not least because in WoW, questing rewards frequently were not for your class/spec, also accumulating gold to purchase gear from the AH was very slow, so you had to be very careful what and when you made purchases.
As a result the mechanics were less of a focus, simply because the mobs could just steamroller under-geared and/or under-prepared groups.

There was uproar amongst the playerbase about Cataclysm dungeons difficulty level on release, a lot of it from existing players, not newbies…such an uproar in fact that the dungeons were nerfed…imho, that was a bad thing, dungeons and raiding should be tough, that not only helps give that content longevity, but it should make the non-instanced content and how it builds your character’s power to handle the instanced content, have increased value.

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