I’ve still been having a blast in Legion over the past few weeks. Nithogg might have been unkind to me by offering me no loot on two separate characters, but that’s not going to derail my overall enjoyment of the game as I do world quests, group up for difficult targets, queue through heroics, head off through older raids, and so forth.
Unfortunately, World of Warcraft‘s dungeon situation is still kind of a hot mess. And with Mythic-only Karazhan on the way whenever 7.1 actually hits, I can’t help but think it’s going to get messier before it gets better.
This speaks to problems that have sort of rolled through WoW ever since the end of Wrath of the Lich King, so it’s something that requires a fair bit of unpacking. It also runs through some pretty long-standing misconceptions that persist in portions of the community, too, but those are also well worth unpacking. The short version, though, is the same as it’s ever been: The dungeon queue does not exist merely for bad players; it exists for a huge portion of the playerbase, and excluding it also excludes that same portion.
Unfortunately, it’s rough to find records of what happened when Wrath of the Lich King first rolled out the dungeon queues, but I remember what I saw at the time. Short version? Suddenly everyone was running dungeons. More or less at the drop of the hat, there was a huge influx of players running dungeons, completing things – even for the first time! – and otherwise enjoying what was some of the best content the game had on offer.
At that point, the boss design for both raids and dungeons was at a real apex, to boot. Fights were neither overcomplicated nor oversimplified, not too reliant upon one-shot failures but also willing to be unforgiving. I’m almost certainly seeing this through tinted goggles, as 10-person Four Horsemen remains one of my favorite fights of all time, but the point is that fights were tuned pretty well.
Unfortunately, they were tuned well for players at a roughly appropriate gear level for those dungeons, and the result was that players were quickly outstripping the dungeons. There was no sort of scaling in place to improve the challenge, which meant that you frequently wound up with groups that could utterly annihilate the dungeon with AoE spam while taking on the big dungeon challenges almost incidentally. The whole point of the Heroic achievements was that they were supposed to be harder to do; as gear got better, they became almost trivial.
Cataclysm dungeons launched with compensation in the wrong direction. The fights were still mechanically pretty solid, and the dungeons still had a lot to offer… but the fights were tuned to remain challenging for much higher item levels while also generally leaning a bit harder on mechanical precision. The result was that after a year of dungeons being something that you could easily jollystomp due to exceedingly high gear, players were thrown against challenges that would have been a touch harder anyhow even with that level of gear… but they didn’t have that gear yet.
A precedent, then, was set. And while the designers learned that those dungeons weren’t welcomed by the majority of the playerbase, the lesson got truncated to “hard dungeons aren’t wanted by people in the queue.” So they quietly went away.
Therein lies the problem: Challenge is not the primary reason why people queue up in the dungeon finder. The primary reason is convenience.
Whenever debates happen about whether or not the game’s dungeon finder is a good thing, one side usually ends up talking past the other with talk about how having to form groups within your server strengthens communities and forms lasting friendships. It’s ignoring the fact that for many people, having to form groups manually meant the groups didn’t exist. They were never formed. They simply did not happen for a wide variety of reasons.
Why? It varies. Some people are really anxious about meeting others. Some people don’t want the responsibility of putting a group together. Some can’t be sitting by their computers long enough to go through the slow process of putting a group together (and it could be very slow indeed). Some don’t want the shame of everyone knowing that they’re new to certain content. There are countless reasons someone might not want to take the time to shout for a group until one happens, and pretty much all of them are valid.
And yeah, some people in that position are just plain bad at the game. But by no means all of them. I swear by the dungeon finder, and most of that has to do with the fact that I got sick and tired of shouting for groups when I was playing Final Fantasy XI and haven’t gotten less tired of it subsequently.
If you’re not grouping up with random people on a regular basis, you’re not really a good indicator. Sure, maybe you did find a group of people that you stuck with because you found server-specific groups, but saying that will happen for everyone is like putting forth my romance with my wife as the correct way to get married. What works for some people won’t work for others, and there’s a lot of random chance involved.
The current state of Mythic (and Mythic+) suffers specifically because it’s a throwback to that era. It’s not, thankfully, a one-for-one mapping; the addition of premade groups makes it far easier for players to get in on the action, and that’s a good thing. But it’s still focused on a throwback, and unfortunately the existing dungeons have been gutted so that the “real” mechanics can be put on display in Mythic. This means that for a decent portion of the playerbase, the “real” mechanics do not exist. It’s just a boring stomp-fest through bosses that have longer health bars and sometimes force you not to attack for a bit.
That’s without even getting into the Mythic-only dungeons. “But would pickup groups sit through nine bosses of Karazhan?” Well, unless they have a dedicated Mythic group, they’re going to be a pickup group anyway. Just one that isn’t queued. And it seems odd to assume that everyone without a dedicated raiding group really wants to form a dedicated Mythic group, as if the reason players weren’t regularly raiding was more about numbers than about the style of content.
All of these mistakes, though, are pretty understandable in the long run. This is the first expansion that has really had the idea of Mythic dungeons and a dungeon-based endgame as an actual thing, which means right off of the bat that the designers are playing and experimenting with the concept. All of this is arguably stuff that should have been obvious from the design phase, but it’s also a delicate dance of making all of the mechanics work combined with the simple fact that there are technical limitations in place.
But refinement is needed, and while I’m having a lot of fun with the game as a whole, it’s weird when Mythic is more annoying to handle than the upcoming LFR for the Emerald Nightmare. I shouldn’t have more challenging mechanics and more irritation at getting into groups with the content that offers less by way of rewards; at that point, we’re back to the exact same problem that Warlords of Draenor had with Heroics. There’s not enough compelling to make them worthwhile.
Also, I hate manually reaching the entrance to Black Rook Hold. That shouldn’t bug me so much, but it does.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to put forth a wishlist of things that I eagerly want to see in Legion moving forward; hey, just because the expansion is great doesn’t mean it can’t get better, right?
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with a decade of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
