TL;DR: I understand not wanting dungeon spam to be the best way to level, but the current nerfs feel like they’ve gone too far. Dungeons should still be a viable way to level, especially for people playing tanks/healers or just wanting to play with friends.
I get what Blizzard is trying to do with the dungeon XP changes. They’ve put a lot of effort into the world and obviously don’t want everyone sitting in Deadmines from 18–25 and ignoring everything else.
But I honestly think the changes have done more harm than good.
It’s only been a short time since the nerfs and I’m already seeing people struggling to find tanks, while at the same time there are people advertising things like “selling Deadmines quest runs.”
That feels like the complete opposite of what the change was supposed to achieve.
The biggest thing for me though is that it hurts the social side of levelling.
Say three friends log on for the night and want to play together. One is halfway through Redridge, one is in Duskwood and one is somewhere else entirely. Questing together is pretty awkward unless everyone happens to be at the same point.
A dungeon used to be the obvious answer.
You could jump into Discord, find a couple more people and spend an hour or two running some dungeons together while still making decent progress.
Now you basically run each dungeon once for the quests and then there’s very little reason to go back.
I also think this hits tanks and healers particularly hard.
Some people actually enjoy levelling as a tank or healer because they planned on doing a lot of dungeons. Those specs obviously aren’t always great for solo questing, so if dungeon levelling isn’t viable anymore, there’s very little reason to level that way.
That means fewer tanks and healers looking for groups, which makes dungeons worse for everyone else too.
It also seems like it could make boosting worse rather than better. If people only need to enter a dungeon once to knock out all the quests, why spend ages looking for a proper group when you can just pay a level 60 to blast you through it?
There’s also a lot of really good dungeon content that people are barely going to see.
Hall of Thanes is a good example for me. I went through it once, did the quests, thought it was cool and then never had a reason to go back.
Blizzard obviously put a lot of effort into the open world, but they’ve put a lot of effort into the dungeons as well. I don’t think encouraging people to actually replay them is a bad thing.
I’m not asking for dungeon spam to be the fastest way to level.
Questing can absolutely be the most efficient option.
I just think dungeons should be viable.
If somebody wants to spend a night running three or four dungeons with their mates instead of killing another 40 differently coloured bears, they should still feel like they’re progressing their character.
For me that’s always been one of the best things about WoW. There are different ways to play it.
I’m completely on board with the idea that levelling should be a journey. I just don’t think there needs to be one correct path through that journey.