Stop forcing players to do dungeons

Community General Discussion
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I generally enjoy WoW. Despite all the nay-sayers, I have fun in BfA just like I had in Legion or earlier expansion. And by that I mean I mostly have fun. But occasionally I find out that someone in Blizzard has decided that I have to engage in a content that I despise if I want to see major part of the game.
This was especially prevalent in Legion, when we had to finish dungeons in order to complete class campaign or even get basic profession recipes, we had to kill final raid boss to complete Suramar story and even had to get into PVP-free-for-all zones in order to get some recipes / parts of the campaign.

It’s fine when those things are optional, minor and/or prestigious such as specific mounts (hivemind or any of the mythic kill ones) or just make things more effective (Anchor Weed is great example. Dungeon quest is needed to get rank 2, but you can always get rank 1 and gather it anyway).
It’s not fine when story is locked by group content that is not convenient (like Xavius kill for Suramar storyline - sure, you could get it via LFR, but eventually less people were interested in it and queue time was increasing).
It’s far from fine when you are forced to do a specific type of content in order to unlock something that is a major part of the expansion and was advertised as one of its key features.

I’ve just read this
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/zandalari-kul-tiran-allied-race-testing/73737

And now I’m really irritated, to say the least. Horde needs Zandalar Forever achievement which requires a single-player scenario, but Alliance has to do A Nation United - a long quest-chain that involves several dungeons including one that is only available at mythic difficulty?
I don’t get it. Who thought that it would be a good idea? You don’t force people to do pet battles to get the story, right? You don’t tell people to get a mythic difficulty raid kill. You don’t make engaging in PvP and winning in Arena a requirement for major parts of expansion, right? So why are you forcing us to run dungeons and some of them can’t even be accessed via the automatic group-finding tool that you gave us back in WotLK?

I hate dungeons. I hate them with a passion. I can’t stand the go-go-go attitude that so many other players show and which is even encouraged by M+ timers. And I’m not the only one. I remember other people complaining about locking World Quests in Argus behind a dungeon. I know people who back in Legion were running M+ and this expansion they just don’t bother, they’ve lost interest.

I could ask some people to help me, friends or guildies, sure I could. But I would have to ask them to either do something they don’t enjoy or something that gives them no reward just to run a dungeon with me just for the sake of completing it. Then I’d have to do some single quests and ask them for another dungeon run. Some more quests and another dungeon run. I’m not sure how many dungeons are needed for Nation United, I know it’s at least three though, separated by other requirements.

But I’m not going to. I will not ask people to pull me through content I despise. I just don’t want to waste their time and mine. Because even if I do it now, spend time looking for people then force myself to complete it all, Blizzard will pull it again for something else.
Instead I will reconsider if I’m getting my money’s worth out of this game.

I know that some people will come with argument that this is MMO and I should expect group activity. That is true. But I don’t expect forced specific type of group activity. I choose where and how I play with people and if I like raids or PvP I want to engage in that. We don’t force PvP even though it is faction war expansion. Raids and PvP are optional. Dungeons, as it turns out, are mandatory.

And if you compare how much time and effort it takes to get those two achievements on both sides, Horde one is just so much player-friendly, while Alliance one is just a chore.

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you are not forced. you dont want to run a dungeon. it’s ok. BUT you dont have the prize.
Nation United need to be mandatory to have kultiran race unlocked. C’mon is a M0. I dont like lately to run dungeon… but warfront are much difficult today than a M0.

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There was a time in World of Warcaft when being part of a guild was a social thing. Where you could get help towards your goal even tho it meant that 4 others were “wasting” their time.

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You do realise that the Mythic only dungeons are now also available as heroic dungeons and can be accessed via the random group finder? I’m not sure how that affects the achievement requirements. If that means they still want you to do the Mythic versions.

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You can also do siege of boralus on heroic difficulty now.

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i think not :wink:

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Did it in one day. And it was Mythic. Now you can do it Heroic.

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My Paladin got the achievement via heroic so it certainly does not require the mythic version in order to complete A Nation United.

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So you want the rewards without the effort? That’s really dumb.

This attitude is not prelavent in LFG and is rarely a thing in +0’s. Make your own group and set the pace yourself.

Don’t know of alliance but the Horde side Vol’Jin questline has a part where you have to kill G’huun.

No this thread is just a perfect example of your assonying entitlement and zero willingness to include any effort into the things you want.

Yes it’s an odd choice that Alliance requires a bigger storyline than Horde but that’s a tiny amount of extra effort that you need to do -ONE- dungeon.

You just refuse out of principle to put the slightest amount of effort in, why are you even playing this game if you hate it.

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To be fair, whilst I do actually concur with your overall sentiment, the Jaina storyline involves Freehold, Tol Dagor, Shrine of Storms, Waycrest Manor and then Seige of Boralus… so it is not one dungeon.

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I am bit sad it has to go that way. I lost so many friends from WOW during Legion who were earlier happy doing their professions, quests and story who were then blocked out of these things because they do not enjoy doing dungeons. One of them put it well when i asked about leaving: “This is not encouraging me to do other content, this is blackmail. Not gonna pay for this anymore.”.

Usually arguements here flow in themes of “these dungeons are super easy” and “not willing to give effort” which sort of nullify eachothers. I think for most people who don’t want to do dungeons it’s not about something being hard anyway but more of personal preference of enjoyment or other reasons.

Biggest problem i see in this system here is that players who are happily paying sub and enjoying game on their own way are prevented from doing things they like and were used to do if they don’t do content they don’t enjoy. Some will just suffer through but some will stop playing, not out of spite but because they have less and less things they can actually do in game anymore. We have already lost so many players and i don’t want WOW to end up like Wildstar.

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Oh no, someone has to “grind” in an MMORPG?

It’s not that the game changed in that manner, in Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK all of the “stories” were locked behind dungeons and raids and recipes for certain things only dropped in raids.

I don’t enjoy Islands, Warfronts or WQs but i still do them cause they’re required if you want to raid, just man up and do it.
If you enjoy the story, maybe just man up and do the stuff required for them, it’s not hard or time consuming.

Furthermore, it’s just part of the story to complete some of those dungeons/raids and it’s also part of the story, that you kill those in a group.

On behalf of the allied races i agree, they should be available without any work, but for certain aspects of the story, it’s important that your character kills certain evils.

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I’m actually really confused by posts like this. So far the bulk of BFA for the horde is built around uldir. And for alliance all the dungeons are built a round the main story quest. That’s the whole point of them. I get people don’t like dungeons, but it’s a one off 20 min thing to do? You can solo a heroic dungeon on a 370 chara now, it’s extremely low difficulty content now.

I hate islands, but need to do it to get my alts neck 36 ready for uldir. I wouldn’t make a post stating blizz is forcing me into islands.

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Wow, im impressed of what people are complaining about these days. I remember back in the days where almost everything was gated behind some kind of content.

Blacksmiths had to go to BRD to craft certain items, you had to farm a specific cloak to fight bosses in BWL, some keys to dungeons required a long quest chains. And I could go on.

These day people just want to be able to cherry pick exactly what content they want for the story part. But can you do that in other storydriven games? doubt it…

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and the key in Tol Dagor? :thinking:

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It was in the back of my mind I was missing something!!! DAMMIT! :slight_smile:

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I completely agree. I was extremely annoyed with the Jaina questline, dull as dishwater doing dungeons over and over again for different stories. It makes 0 sense lore wise to do the dungeon at a different time. I got boosted through the M0 by my partner and hated it. If this is a hint to forcing you to complete the raid (even if it is LFR) to unlock either of them, I will truly be a fury warrior irl.

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I can agree on this bit. Just when I had got a dungeon done for a quest I had, another questline then came up in the same dungeon I had just done… that is irritating :slight_smile:

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[quote=“Punyelf-draenor, post:4, topic:20345”]
You do realise that the Mythic only dungeons are now also available as heroic dungeons and can be accessed via the random group finder?[/quote]

No, I didn’t. Thank you, that is a constructive feedback. I’m still not happy about doing dungeons, but at least LFG makes it a bit easier.

No, I don’t. I want rewards for effort that matches them. I have all reputations on exalted. I did everything in war campaign up to this point and I’m waiting for the last part to become available. I did it on both Horde and Alliance side. The one thing that’s different is that I’ve had Zandalar Forever and I consider it a nice and interesting way to get familiar with the story. But I don’t have and don’t expect to have A Nation United because I avoid dungeons. It’s the type of content that I’m keeping away from. Would you claim that someone wants rewards without effort if the requirement was to kill a raid boss on a difficulty higher than LFR? Or winning an RGB? Winning some pet battles?

The dungeons themselves may not be hard and they may not take much time. But finding people to do them, risking that someone will want to rush, someone will over-pull, someone will assume that everyone knows tactics and all those optimization shortcuts that those who run dungeons already have found out and we’ll wipe several times, then someone will rage-quit, then we’ll spend more time looking for missing role (probably a tank), another person will quit in the meantime…
I tried a few dungeons this expansion. I really gave them a try. Some weren’t that bad, but it happened often enough that I just want to have nothing to do with this part of the content. Is it so hard to understand?

[quote=“Mojomane-blackhand, post:12, topic:20345”]
I don’t enjoy Islands, Warfronts or WQs but i still do them cause they’re required if you want to raid, just man up and do it.[/quote]

No, they are not. You don’t have to do a single Island Expedition in order to raid. You don’t have to do warfronts either. The only thing they help you with is that one high ilvl item you get once per cycle (and a catchup for alts, although not amazing one with 320 requirement and 340 rewards).
Islands and Warfronts will speed you up so they may be important if you want to play at the top level. Anyone else can safely ignore them (or play them a lot if that’s what they like).
And I don’t have a problem if I’m handicaped by not doing dungeons. I’m fine with only having rank 1 for Anchor Weed harvesting. I have a problem with a roadblock that dungeons are. You can choose not to raid or PvP. You can’t choose to stay away from dungeons.
WQs are the only thing that could be compared. And I’m not going to defend that. Locking reputation gains purely behind quests is also a bad design decision. Being able to gain reputation thanks to tabards was a good thing for those who liked dungeons.

[quote=“Mojomane-blackhand, post:12, topic:20345”]
On behalf of the allied races i agree, they should be available without any work, but for certain aspects of the story, it’s important that your character kills certain evils.[/quote]

Yes. And I said it - I have no problem that I won’t see or get some parts of the game. I can live without a bit of story progression - I can see cinematic elsewhere. I can live without specific mounts/toys/recipes/etc - there are lots of them and they are varied and it makes sense to make some of them available from one source, others from another and so on.
What I don’t like is when some important part of the game are blocked by a single type of content. And that type of content is almost exclusively dungeons. How many things comparable to a whole allied race can you name that are locked by PvP/raids/pet battles?

[quote=“Stalkerkgs-boulderfist, post:14, topic:20345”]
I remember back in the days where almost everything was gated behind some kind of content.[/quote]

Except we’re not living 15 years ago. And people who miss those times will soon have their vanilla experience, which is fine by me. I’m not going to go and say that several things there are archaic and from the stand point of modern game design simply bad. You want to play game like that? Be my guest. But modern WoW is not that game. There are reasons why it has changed so much.

[quote=“Stalkerkgs-boulderfist, post:14, topic:20345”]
These day people just want to be able to cherry pick exactly what content they want for the story part. But can you do that in other storydriven games? doubt it…[/quote]

I don’t want to pick my content for the story part. I was fine with not seeing part of the story in a game by refusing to do dungeons, because I understand that doing some things in game are a necessary part of the narrative.
What I have problem with is that players are forced to run a specific type of content to get certain major rewards, when no other type of content is required for similar rewards.
I have Horde equivalent unlocked already because it didn’t force me to get into this specific type of content that makes me sick.

Not everyone likes everything. If we don’t force people to do raids or PvP why are we fine with forcing them to run a type of content they don’t enjoy?

It’s not about access to the story. It’s not even just about access to the one allied race, even if the difference between Horde and Alliance is ridiculous.
It’s about the fact that no other type of content locks you out of so much if you want to avoid it!
Did you see what professions looked like before 8.1? At some point if you wanted to craft things you needed Hydrocores available from dungeons only. You could step into a raid, get a load of Sanguicell and have nothing to do with it because a) only a few professions used it at all and b) even those recipes were locked behind Hydrocore ones. So you literally had to do dungeons in order to use the thing dropping from raids.
Now if there was a vendor that allowed you to buy Hydrocore with Sanguicell that would be different. But there wasn’t, so if you didn’t get enough hydrocores, or if you had professions which didn’t use Sanguicell at all, it was useless. And it sold for less than grey trash you get from fishing. It wasn’t until 8.1 and new cooking recipes that this became useful to a lot of players. And it’s still the only use many people have for it.
Now compare it to what we already had in Legion, when you could buy yourself some other resources with Blood of Sargeras. You had some BoS and no use for it? Go, get some flowers, sell them or donate to guild bank for flasks. That is an example of game desing that takes into considerations that players will have many different approaches to the game. They got it right towards end of Legion and in BfA have lost it again.

Granted, BfA is not as bad as Legion was in this regard initially. In Legion you had even basic profession recipes and whole class campaigns locked behind dungeons. But that’s why it’s so irritating now. I thought we have moved away from this outdated concept.
It’s ok if minor rewards like titles/items/looks/mounts are only available from specific activities. It’s natural, they make a selection of rewards after all and are distributed between all of those activities.
But locking major rewards behind one specific kind of activity is bad. Especially if it could easily be solved in a way that would work.

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stop forcing players to move