World of Warcraft: Current Year

M+ would be so much better if they just cut Fortified/Tyrannical out as BASE modifiers. They are not fun. They are not (barring a few fights) challenging. They just make the entire thing tedious, particularly Fortified.

Both of those affixes are just straight up lazy.

BoozeCube said:

Yeah the McDungeon complaints started showing up in TBC.

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Right, people liked Scarlet Monastery so they went off the deep end and made EVERY dungeon like Scarlet Monastery. Sprawling dungeons aren't really all that fun as instanced content anyway though. Sebilis and Chardok were great because it took effort to get to and hold a camp, and if you were successful in getting to the deepest parts of the dungeon you were rewarded for your time and effort (usually). That sense of accomplishment and satisfaction are withdrawn from instanced content. BRD was cool and designed well, but nobody ever really cleared the entire thing. You'd skip as much of it as you could to get to the bosses that dropped your item.

If you can kill, zone out, reset, and kill again that's what people are going to do and designing a sprawling dungeon only makes that process more tedious (aka annoying). TBC moved to winged dungeons because that's what people wanted. I'd love a good dungeon crawl but you can't really make it work in an instanced world.

Khane said:

BRD was cool and designed well, but nobody ever really cleared the entire thing. You'd skip as much of it as you could to get to the bosses that dropped your item.

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Pretty much this. Back in Vanilla, getting people to run BRD was like pulling teeth...ESPECIALLY Emperor runs. No one wanted to fucking run that shit except warriors and rogues.

I agree BRD was an awesome crawl dungeon, but crawling gets tedious after you've run it enough and all you're interested in is the item with a 5% drop rate. I'm pretty sure the old Onyxia key quest didn't help either. I ran BRD prison area like 20-30 times doing that slow as fuck escort quest when we were keying the guild. Even the HBO 'Oz' jokes weren't enough to keep me interested after running just a few times.

The problem with BRD was the level range. People would have done it if it was all lv58+, doing the max level stuff there invovled doing shit like jumping through lava rivers to skip all the low level trash.

BoozeCube said:

I mean it was designed over 12 levels from 48-60 so yeah that might of been a bit of a blunder still overall it was a great dungeon. I do miss the non-instanced stuff of EQ and they had so many amazing dungeons and experiences.

Still my point is we can never get an amazing experience for a dungeon as long as the current design must conform to a timed M+ run. They can be split like Karazhan was but that really isn't great either.

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Lower Kara was the best M+ dungeon in legion. So many crazy pulls to try. I think all dungeons should be designed as these “raid” dungeons and then split up.

I also wonder if there is a way for them to effectively implement Diablo style map randoming for a dungeon or two, and I don’t mean door bullshit like in Waycrest. They should also have big open dungeons, like have a huge fortress you have to invade and clear but they don’t give any path, you pick.

BoozeCube said:

I mean it was designed over 12 levels from 48-60 so yeah that might of been a bit of a blunder still overall it was a great dungeon. I do miss the non-instanced stuff of EQ and they had so many amazing dungeons and experiences.

Still my point is we can never get an amazing experience for a dungeon as long as the current design must conform to a timed M+ run. They can be split like Karazhan was but that really isn't great either.

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You can turn every single dungeon since TBC into an M+ dungeon with little effort. Timewalking kinda proves that. M+ was just a natural progression of their dungeon design philosophy since 2007. The problem really lies in instancing and the removal of respawns. Pretty much every dungeon in EQ had huge level ranges. Kurn's Tower was 8-30, Kaesora was 30-50 and both of those dungeons were in the same lowbie Iksar zone (Field of Bone) and if you really wanted to you could pick a dungeon and just sit in it for 20 levels at different camps and probably make some decent profit off of rare spawns and drops that were tradeable and never bound. All of that is gone, sadly.

Twinking for low level battlgrounds in Classic is probably going to be pretty fun (if they add XP Off) because you could substantially twink back then.

BRD works in an open world game, it doesn't work when it's instanced for 5 people.

That's the entire problem, too much instancing.

I'd agree but what MMO in the last 15 years has non-instanced dungeons? lol

Pantheon, I guess

Non-instanced dungeons have a host of problems

1) If your game is popular, then the place is too crowded
2) If your game is dead, then it might be overwhelming for the RvR
3) If you implement limited instancing, people are going to try to get into the less crowded ones because despite what people say, no one wants a dungeon that has no mobs/no loot for THEMSELVES
4) If you put anything meaningful in the non-instanced dungeon, then it will be camped 24/7, leading to griefing/botting/exploiting/scams/gold sellers
5) Timezones. Do you remember Euro guilds and Asian guilds killing content in EQ1 while the majority of your guild was sleeping/in school/at work? I sure as fuck do.

All of the above ends up leading to your playerbase who cannot access the content bitching about it. Then it becomes simple math. If 80% of your playerbase isn't able to access the shit, that means you are sinking development costs and time into content the majority of your customer base cannot access and WANTS to access.

It's no coincidence that virtually every MMO in the past 10 years makes the content available to virtually everyone, but then tiers it by difficulty level to appease most of the playerbase (easier versions so general playerbase can enjoy the content, then hardmode versions for the epeen/uber crowd so they can get +betterer loot over the plebs and have a bigger challenge).

I definitely feel like it's going to go way up on launch. Ton of people coming back trying to get tokens so they don't have to pay for the first month, wouldn't surprise me.

That is a good point though I wonder how it will actually affect token prices.

Also I need to get better at AH game. Currently the only thing I do is buy out all the Augment runes and re-list them on raid nights for way more gold in stacks of 10. It works but patch is mighty close and unsure if they're getting better runes or not yet.