Why Is the Retail Dungeon Experience so Terrible?

I think you can tell from the way that I've been talking about retail WoW for the past few years that I'm actually feeling pretty positive about it nowadays. It's not my favourite MMO, but there are enough things for me to like about it.

With that said, I hope it's clear that I'm not blindly hating on retail when I say: For all the things it does well, it amazes me how utterly horrible retail's casual dungeon experience is nowadays. (I'm specifically singling out the easier difficulties here because regardless of what you or I think of Mythic+, I think we can all agree that it operates on a different level from regular dungeons at this point, with very different incentives and goals.)

What do I think makes for a good dungeon experience? Well, presumably not everyone will agree with my definition, but personally I'd break it down into four major points:

• Exploration: Interesting/unusual environments, mechanics and monsters.
• Gameplay: Taking on tougher enemies than you would usually be able to in the open world. Getting to play with other people and experiencing synergetic group play that allows you to use abilities and skills you don't necessarily get to use in the same way while soloing.
• Rewards: Quests that give you some nice one-time rewards. Bosses that drop loot that's better than what you'd get from a solo mission. Increased XP gains from taking on tougher enemies as a group.
• Socialising: Meeting new people and having a good time hanging out together.

But yes, I know modern WoW players don't like to stand around and admire the scenery, or to chat while using the dungeon finder. So we're just going to ignore the first and last point. I'll be content if I can tick the gameplay and rewards boxes as described. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Well, in modern WoW it apparently is, because your gameplay will be jogging after a tank who just runs like hell while spamming AoE abilities (with you occasionally being able to hit a dps button if you manage to stay in range long enough) and your reward is going to be the dungeon completion XP at the end. You want to do quests? Kill bosses? Puh-lease.

I honestly thought I'd come to accept the ways of retail dungeons by now and that I'd lowered my expectations enough to not be disappointed by every pug, but every time the game lures me into queueing for a random normal or heroic dungeon with some new incentive, I encounter new ways to be let down by the experience.

For example, while levelling some of my low-level alts through different expansions, I'd pick up quests that asked me to do a specific dungeon and then queue for that. My expectation was pretty much nothing but a quick run of the place, but I still managed to be surprised when it turned out to be a quick run of avoiding most of the dungeon. I know people always hated out-of-the-way bonus bosses and all that, but nowadays literally everything possible gets skipped, even bosses that are right on the main road so to speak. I didn't even know that you could totally ignore the second and third bosses in Underrot and Freehold for example. Now I know, and it meant I got minimal loot and experience out of those dungeons.

As for the matter of quests, I have a new favourite story illustrating the utter absurdity that is going on right now. It happened to me during Wrath of the Lich King timewalking the other week. I got into an Utgarde Keep on an alt that had never done it before, so I made sure to pick up all the quests at the entrance and off we went. Knowing well that people were impatient, I mounted up and raced back to the quest NPC the moment Ingvar died, but someone immediately initiated a role check to queue for another dungeon. I didn't respond because I just wanted those thirty seconds to hand in my quests. Next thing I knew, I'd been wordlessly kicked from the party, and the timer to get ported out was apparently shortened to only ten seconds or so, so I was booted back to Valdrakken before I could actually reach the NPC. Yes, I got kicked from the group after the dungeon had been completed, because taking thirty seconds to hand in my quest was considered an unacceptable delay. I then had to manually travel back to Northrend and inside Utgarde Keep to hand in, which probably took longer than the entire dungeon run had taken.

And I'm not attributing that to "people being toxic" or anything like that - okay, I think the kick in that story was kind of mean, but more generally, WoW's design decisions kind of push people into this kind of behaviour. Why would long-time players levelling their 50th alt care about killing bosses for loot drops when they are fully kitted out in heirlooms? Dungeon quests are basically not a thing at max level nowadays (you literally can't get quest credit in M+ dungeons for example), why would anyone think of their group mates having quests to do in a random timewalking dungeon?

More importantly though, I think there are two major problems with WoW's dungeon system while levelling and playing casually, and these are things I've seen occur in other MMOs as well, to similar results:

1. The game allows characters, especially tanks, to become way too powerful relative to the content, to the point where they can easily solo the dungeon with zero regard for the rest of the group. The group gameplay falls apart at this stage because there isn't really any, all you have is the tank dragging a mob train along with them while sprinting to the end, possibly annoyed by the dps and healers slowing them down. You can't have rewarding group gameplay when players are made to feel like they are just a nuisance to each other.

2. The incentives for random dungeon completion are way out of whack compared to anything else. If you're levelling, the XP bonus for doing a random dungeon will be bigger than everything you get for actually doing things inside the dungeon (kills, bosses, quests etc.) put together. At max-level, the problem persists when you have timewalking weeks where you get rewarded with heroic raid-level gear for getting completion credit for five dungeons, never mind what you actually did inside those dungeons. It's all in reaching the end as fast as possible and at all costs, with little to no reward for the actual process (and since the gameplay is shite as per point one, there's no incentive in prolonging the process "for fun" either).

What you're left with is with a dungeon experience that doesn't reward anyone but those who don't actually care about grouping or gameplay and who just enjoy using the XP hose to level their alts. If you mention this anywhere on a forum or social media, people will come back with comments like "but that's just how it is" or "who cares anyway, the real game is M+", discarding the interests of new, returning and more casual players alike.

It just baffles me that as someone who used to adore running dungeons when I first got into WoW, and who still enjoys this sort of group content in Classic and SWTOR, I find modern WoW dungeons pretty unbearable when not running with a group of friends. I'll still get lured in every now and then for the sake of the extremely overpowered rewards Blizzard likes to hand out, but every time I am reminded of just how not fun it is nowadays.

This topic has been sitting in my drafts for a while, but the reason I wanted to actually finish and publish it this week is that the latest patch brought in a feature called follower dungeons, which allows you to run Dragonflight levelling dungeons with a group of NPCs instead of pugs. I haven't tried it yet, but I've seen enough reporting about it to know that it's nothing like running with actual people in the modern game. The NPCs adjust to your pace and the tanking one will even tell you that they're waiting for you to get some mana back if you go OOM. Basically, they're more like dungeons used to be.

I think this is a net positive for the game and will be welcomed by many, but at the same time I can't help but see it as a tacit admission by Blizzard of what an utter mess they've allowed normal and heroic dungeons to become, a system that is actively hostile to anyone not deeply invested in what little benefit it still provides. Giving everyone but the speed-runners a new mode where they can have a chiller experience does help, but it also kind of looks like regular dungeons are basically being abandoned to being nothing but an XP hose for power levellers. I do wonder whether increased segregation of the player base is really the best long-term answer here.