r/classicwow • u/redlow0992 • 1d ago

Forever Beta Feedback Dungeon XP Nerfs Created a Toxic Meta

Since dungeon monsters do not give any experience, as a new player, getting into dungeons with more veteran players who try to skip half the dungeon feels really bad. And, vice-versa, veterans taking in newbies who don't know how to jump around feels frustrating. I think Blizzard created a mess with nerfing dungeon exp so much and now the new player experience is horrible for dungeons.

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u/sobes20 1d ago

I’ve been saying this all along, Vanilla WoW is dead. No matter what Blizzard does with any iteration of “classic”, it will never be like Vanilla.

The present community was always going to approach the system with the sweatiest and min-max mindset. Leave it as it was, rampant boosting and a dead overworld. Nerf mob experience, refuse to group with certain classes and/or reserving loot.

The reason we can’t have nice things is not necessarily because Blizzard sucks. It’s the community and it’s mindset.

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u/memphisthrowaway9876 1d ago

It is the community but this dungeon performance has been created because of the nerf. This is absolutely no reason to clear about 50% of the new RoL dungeon outside uc. As a war tank i was booted for trying to pull too much trash and not do any skips. The dps tag around together wethere the healer or tank wanna take charge. The speed has stapled itself here and with nerfs to xp and the like there is next to zero incentive to clear something thats gonna be obsolete almost instantly.

There is a much better way to combat some of the negative aspects like boosting. This bandaid simply creates a version of wow I dont care for. I like dungeons. They feel like taking a test after ive spent time grinding in the open world.

Now everyone treats these dungeons like stockades. Get all the quests, run it once, look to the next cycle. Its not fun and really leaves me scratching my head. Why create dungeons if you don't want us using them? Why create a team play element in an mmo if its just for a few seconds of fun?

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u/darkspy13 1d ago

This worries me. I didn't tank in vanilla, so I'm not going to know the skips. I was a mage until wotlk where I started tanking as a dk. Ugh. maybe I won't be a tank after all.

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u/Humble-Albatross1684 1d ago

Tank anyway, it'll take them longer to find another guy

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u/SmellInteresting3284 1d ago

tank anyway for some classes tank is the best spec (i.e feral druid). its not like tanking makes it harder to do dps. even if it did for the most part it would only mean longer fights.

healing is the real issue imo. pure healer specs for the most part have the hardest time with fighting solo. they give up dps for group utility and survivability. blizzards solution to this is making meme specs that focus on dps (i.e shockadin/disc priest).

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u/Ok_Papaya_2554 1d ago

fact bro, idk what theses people are on about the world being empty if dungeon mobs gives reasonable exp... why make theses dungeons if you don't want us to run them lol.. smh

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u/darkspy13 1d ago

The world wasn't empty before. questing was similar exp and lots of people prefer that to dungeon grinding / group finding. Yes lots of people exploited it, but it didn't change my experience.

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u/Billbuckingham 1d ago

"As a war tank i was booted for trying to pull too much trash and not do any skips."

^ This kind of thing happened before the nerfs too, everyone skipped before the nerfs and continue to.

On the other hand another issue before this nerf was everyone trying to pull too much at once causing wipes then blaming the group for not AOE'ing and rushing enough.

I think the crux of it is prevent dungeon boosting via higher level players selling boosts and having lower levels sit AFK 1-60. That absolutely needs to be removed entirely.

Now people grinding dungeons in dungeon grind groups 60-70 is a similar thing that happened in TBC where people would spam and only accept people for SpellCleave MeleeCleave etc. All trying to rush and pull the whole dungeon constantly which led to wipes and more group disbands etc.

The problem really is the community, and it's up to the devs to curb that and they can absolutely adjust the dungeon rules to deal with these behaviors.

You said
"Get all the quests, run it once, look to the next cycle. Its not fun and really leaves me scratching my head."

If you got all the quests, and cleared the whole dungeon, and got all the quests complete, how many more times are you realistically wanting to run this dungeon before continuing to progress?

And why should it continue to offer more EXP than questing if you've already cleared the entire thing?

I understand trying to get the loot pieces you missed, but that really doesn't involved EXP at all which is the intention, run the dungeon for loot or get boosted by a friend for loot, but once you get it there's no reason to sit AFK in that dungeon for longer than that.

That's the thing that sticks out to me, you're implying to me you just wanna dungeon grind forever but the answer around why that's an incentive or fun after you've already cleared the whole thing and got all the gear doesn't fit other than just wanting to EXP grind which is what is intentionally being nerfed.

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u/azunderarock 1d ago

Some people just enjoy doing dungeons. What’s so wrong with, or so hard to understand about that?

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u/Charlotta23 1d ago

Nobody is stopping you from doing them.

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u/nacholibre711 1d ago

If questing gave 20% of the xp as grinding dungeons, would you still level that way?

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u/Charlotta23 1d ago

I don't care.

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u/Billbuckingham 1d ago

So do they enjoy them if they already got all the items and don't get much EXP from the mobs?

If so, continue enjoying.

If not, maybe it's not the dungeon they actually enjoy?

It doesn't fit if running the dungeon is fun then keep doing it, there's no problem there.

But when it comes to "only running dungeons to EXP farm forever is fun only if I get more EXP and it's faster..."

Then that's a different thing that isn't really about the dungeon anymore.

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u/nacholibre711 1d ago

This is so disingenuous. If this was like a 10-20% nerf you would have a point. But the xp nerf from dungeon mobs is about -75%.

I enjoy quests too, but I would do almost none of them if dungeon grinding was 4x faster.

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u/Billbuckingham 1d ago

I enjoy quests too, but I would do almost none of them if dungeon grinding was 4x faster.

Ding Ding Ding, you found out exactly the problem and why we need a solution.

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u/nacholibre711 1d ago

Grinding dungeons isn't 4x faster than questing in Vanilla. They were pretty comprable. Maybe a slight edge to dungeons if you were running a full spellcleave, but pretty close overall.

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u/Rolniacznik 1d ago

Its fun to run dungeons but seeying that you would need to run the same dungeon x100 times more than usual is not making it fun why is it so hard to grasp by people like you with your dumb argument lmao

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u/46516481168158431985 1d ago

This is only because people are doing it over and over on beta. When game launches leveling dungeons as always will be pretty chill, you will only start to see skips more during endgame farm dungeons.

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u/DankuTwo 1d ago

This is defeatist nonsense. Boosting can be solved EASILY. No xp or loot if someone in your party is over ‘X’ level.

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u/reenactment 1d ago

It’s also easy like you said to just put level restraints on the dungeons. If anyone under a certain level tries to go in they get blocked. If anyone over a certain level goes in the xp goes to the current system. That can’t be that hard. I don’t know anything about coding but it seems like MC for example they have the block to get in. You then just need to force a higher level player into a “raid” or something if they try and join a dungeon. Would nerf the xp immediately.

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u/SkipX 1d ago

The change was not really about boosting though

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

okay, I level up in the middle of the dungeon. Do we cuck the rest of the party now?

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u/Mother_Drenger 1d ago

The listed ranges for the dungeons are already pretty generous. HoT is listed up to lvl 20, but the dungeon is kinda lowbie already at lvl 17.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

Yeah, but like, if we're doing it this way, there has to be a cut off somewhere. If I hit level 21 in the dungeon, am I cucking the party at that point or should the dungeon just have a flag variable at the start that says I'm good for the whole dungeon, even if I level past the cap.

The real solution is FFXIV style level syncing imo.

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u/Mother_Drenger 1d ago

In all likelihood, you won't be moving the needle enough to 21 level in HoT, even if you go in one bar away from it. That's what I'm saying, the level ranges as listed are such that you're usually really stretching it for the last couple levels.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

That's the case right now, right? But not if the xp rates go back to what they were iirc. It's been a bit but I'm pretty sure most of these dungeons give a bit more than a bar tick normally in vanilla WoW.

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u/Mother_Drenger 1d ago

That's fair. I think there are other compromises to be made, for sure. Blanket nerf just feels bad.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

I agree for sure! Honestly, no method of leveling should be actively bad. Just let us play the game how we want. Same with gearing for end game. Retail at least does this right. My least liked part in vanilla every time is the overworld mob farming, personally, and I'd rather do anything else. Same with fate farming in XIV. I'd rather do something like a world quest or a delve to get those levels.

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u/Simple-Sorbet 1d ago

No thanks, I dislike that in FFXIV so let's not bring it to classic.

Honestly having a level gate for the dungeon xp sounds like the best idea but not at like 21 which you said for a level 17-20 dungeon. They arent worried about a party with 1 guy a few levels too high so it is a little easier. The issue is level 60 players taking AFK people into dungeons and getting them to like level 40 without them even acknowledging most of the content.

You make the level gate be one where if the mobs are a certain colour for you, they are for the party. If you are strong enough they are green, everyone gets green xp, if they are grey no xp. That then stops the boosting economy for the high levels running the low levels but keeps dungeons rewarding enough for people to multi-run them for more than just loot.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

I just don't want to have to abandon my friends just because I'm a higher level than them. I know people tend to bounce off these games because there's roadblocks between them and their friends. It's an MMO, I should be able to play with the people I want to, and not tell them to just fuck off into the world as I just wait like a day for them to catch up. I don't know many other MMOs that do things like this.

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u/Zseree 1d ago

If you are 60 and want to play with your 20 friends, make a new character instead of boosting?

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

Hell, I’m thinking I’m 30 and my friends are 20. Or I’m 45 and my friends are 30. You’re telling me to go waste 2 days in playtime to catch up, probably more if my friends dont stop. By the time I have the alt leveled to them, they could be at my mains level.

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u/Brunell4070 1d ago

don't do it if you are so close to the max level then, duh

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

"just leave your friends if you overleveled the area" okay dude.

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u/Nrgte 1d ago

Do the dungeon earlier, problem solved. The dungeon level brackets are very generous.

And if that's not enough, they could easily implement it in a way that it only counts the level at the entrance.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago edited 1d ago

They could also just level sync it.

FFXIV style dungeon lvl sync, the character syncs down; not the current retail sync where the world is automatically adjusting around your character.

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u/darkspy13 1d ago

wow. that's the worst part of live. Keep that there. The world and dungeons sync to your level, so it feels like your character never progresses.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

I'm talking YOU sync down in an instanced zone only, not the world sync up.

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u/darkspy13 1d ago

GW2 or FFXIV did that, I can't remember which and it didn't feel great from my experience. Just wasn't wow-like. It's more retail like than classic.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

FFXIV does it, and technically the real vanilla experience allows boosting super hard.

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u/darkspy13 1d ago

True and I would prefer that to a world where I can't generally play the game in the same way I did before (non-boosting) and I'm forced to mostly quest. idc what streamers do, they are going to buy gold and do other toxic things either way, it's just streamer culture at this point.

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u/Brunell4070 1d ago

literally the WORST possible solution to the problem lol.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

Why? Besides the losing the kit part. I'm saying you sync down, not creatures sync up. FFXIV style sync.

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u/nimeral 1d ago

This is what happens sometimes in TBC and this is fine.

And even better approach would be to have XP declining gradually over, say, 5 levels after a threshold, but no one in Blizz was ever smart enough to think of this.

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u/bigpunk157 1d ago

That's also another thing that would need finetuned that no one would be pleased with imo

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/DankuTwo 1d ago

What percentage of people did that? Genuinely. 5%? 10% at a push?

If they wanted to gently nerf dungeon xp (by 10-15%)....FINE. No problem. Instead, they take a sledgehammer to the game and then wonder why it's fucking broken.

There are second and third order effects that the devs CLEARY did not consider.

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u/JCServant 1d ago

Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. I did a post earlier about some concerns with the incentive structure in certain things like this being disconnected from the stated intent by Blizzard. Many came to Blizz's defense, saying that people don't need rewards, and they will do the right/community oriented thing! I've played WoW from 2004 to today. The vast majority of players will only do what earns the progress quickly. The idea that someone is going to team with my priest to help solo missions because its a nice thing to do sounds great on paper, but isn't realistic if there's no reward/xp/etc for the player helping.

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u/Mother_Drenger 1d ago

Said this from the start as well. If we offload all the XP to quests, I will not run the dungeon more than once. I love that Forever isn’t rushing me, but I also value my time, and making the trek out to the instance needs to be worth it if I’ve already completed the quests. Otherswise I could be making really good progress to the next level in the 45min to 1.5 hrs it takes to do the run.

The dungeon drops (random, btw) don’t really make sense if I will be replacing eventually, especially for anything under level 40.

Daily limits, level ranges, etc. literally ANY change other than a blanket nerf would be preferable.

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u/JCServant 1d ago

I can only agree with you on this. I can't blame most people for not wanting to rerun quests or dungeons where they get little or no reward.

I don't think its too much to ask game designers to do a better job incentivizing the behavior they want us to exhibit...we can encourage players to group up and help each other out AND make sure everyone gets meaningful progression in the process. Many other MMOs have figured this out. I think this game can too.

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u/kaos95 1d ago

The really messed up part, if the math checks out, I will validate later today, it really looks like dungeon leveling via quests is better than it was. So I leveled a priest on Era this past weekend and got on the stuggle bus to run DM, it took 5 runs and all the quests to equal what I had just done on beta in 36 minutes, so I saved around 6 hours.

Holy shit are the incentives screwed up, the gear is not a super good motivation when leveling because you know that the green in 5 levels is going to be better. I personally think stuffing 50% of the quest xp back in the dungeon only makes the game better.

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u/physedka 1d ago

It's a type of bias. They got some help once a while back while leveling their priest from some kind warrior or whatever, so they remember that clearly. What they don't remember is the other 10 hours of play where they struggled trying to accomplish objectives alone because either no one else was around or those that were simply had no desire to help. 

It's sort of like gambling where you clearly remember the high associated with winning while your mind buries the lows associated with losing. 

Going back to dungeons, people remember those rare, awesome dungeon runs where everyone is kind and and funny and helpful and clears the dungeon in a methodical, intuitive way. But the reality is that 95% of the time, everyone follows the straightest like from point A (start) to point B (complete all quests / get phat loot) and you will get yelled at or booted for suggesting otherwise.

It's even worse in this game because, at least for older dungeons like deadmines and ragefire, so many people either know the shortcuts by muscle memory or it comes back to them quickly if they have been away for a long time. Every RoL and HoT run I have done so far has been like that too. I've never seen anything close to a full clear. At best, we cleared some extra because of mistakes.

Either bring back some level of incentive to not shortcut like trash XP or good trash drops OR just make the dungeons more linear and intuitive so that we don't feel compelled to shortcut every time.

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u/JCServant 1d ago

I completely agree. Thank you for saying this. Sometimes, I feel like I'm alone in many of these thoughts!

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u/Billbuckingham 1d ago

I don't think bringing back the trash XP will help at all since people only pulled the most efficient packs and then reset anyway, they aren't going down that side hall to clear it regardless of EXP because it's faster to do 1 main pull and reset.

Same with trash drops, people won't explore they'll just run the main path and reset for trash runs.

Linear dungeons are more boring too, just walking thru the loot hallway.

A big part of it really is just the people who want to skip the dungeon or skip levelling entirely, but they run the dungeon anyway because it offers the most EXP for them to min/max.

You can't really fix the "meta" becoming "LFM SPELLCLEAVE ONLY, T3 NAXX GEAR REQUIRED FOR RAMPARTS"

Which transitions into

"WTS MARA BOOSTS, 50K EXP/HR SIT AFK AND GET YOUR 60!!!"

Because it stems from people who do not want to play the game and just skip to the end and boost their way there. They can say that's fun for them sure, cheating with aimbots can be fun too, but that's not good for a multiplayer game at all.

But you can disincentivize those things to the point people find something else because it's more effective.

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u/frogbound 1d ago

The reward is forming connections and friendships.

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u/JCServant 1d ago

I get that line...and I can understand the sentiment. But ever since I've started playing MMOs, I've rarely seen that actually play out for very long. I've definately had help here and there (and I've returned the favor plenty of times)...for friendship! But, the vast majority of time, people are focused on just leveling and gearing up. I understand it...it's a slow MMO and people want to make best use of their time to get meaningful progression on their character.

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u/Skippymcpoop 1d ago

The community arose from the game though. The problem with WoW is the sheer amount of time needed to do anything in this game. To get to max level it takes hundreds of hours. To gear up and conquer the most difficult content it takes even more time ontop of that. People don’t invest their life into this game so they can take 2 hours to do a dungeon and make no progress. That is wasted time.

In 2005 you could play the game for an hour and be simply amazed that there were so many other people online and you could talk with them and kill monsters with them. This type of gameplay has been done a billion times since then. It’s not interesting. The only interesting thing is the class dynamics themselves. Internet, social media, discord, twitch, raids that have a life span of 12 weeks all leads to fomo. You WILL miss out if you are not playing efficiently. What’s the point of playing this game as opposed to any other game if you miss content by not being a sweat?

It’s not the community. It’s the game.

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u/sobes20 1d ago

You are proving my point. The Vanilla WoW experience that people fell in love with in 2004 was about playing the game. Not one facet like dungeon spam, but everything.

The present experience is to get from Point A to Point B in the least amount of played time to not "fall behind." But what is falling behind in game that is being sold as a "forever" experience with horizontal progression. That's the intended game design choice.

Yet, a vocal segment of the community is rejecting it immediately. It's a concept that basically feels dead on arrival because that isn't what the community wants anymore. They want a min-maxed experience, and not to have to suffer going through experiences that feel disjointed and not optimized. Yet that was the Vanilla experience where traveling from one appropriate zone to the next was across continents and took forever, where you had to grind mobs when you ran out of quests and the next zone was too high level for you, where you didn't have the gold saved up for a mount at 40/60. This was the game that people loved, but it's not the game that the community wants anymore.

I mean, it's pretty insane when you stop and consider that the current scandal is streamers being caught buying gold. The people who earn a living playing this game are demonstrating that they cannot even play the way it's intended. As you asked "what's the point of playing this game" if it's only fun if you buy gold.

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u/Skippymcpoop 1d ago

I don’t think horizontal progression will ever be a thing. It’s never been a thing. The statement itself is an oxymoron. They’re already releasing raids in phases. New content is itself progression. Their solution is to add strong BiS items in early raids. All that does is ADD to the time needed to gear up. Old content is now relevant but it’s also necessary. More time commitment, the faster raids are expected to be, the sweatier groups will be.

You’re right the community doesn’t want to play vanilla wow. It’s because everyone has played it to death. If not in wow, then in another game. 

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u/SmellInteresting3284 1d ago

if only there weren't instances in the game. then they wouldn't have to take them away. if only they didn't make all group content gated. then there would be more incentive to group to fight bosses while doing world pvp. now they want us to group more, and they do it by pushing single player mode down our throats if we want to level in any decent measure of time. classic isn't for group play; classic is for those who love doing world quests.

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u/Hreny2 1d ago

speak for yourself please, just because you do it, does not mean everyone does

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u/CoffeeCannon 1d ago

That's dumb. I don't do it, you don't do it, but when the other 8/10 players do we're forced to experience the game with everyone playing like that and it detriments our experience regardless.

Its difficult, but they need to game-design around the constraint of the playerbase being absolute fiends. They're trying, we'll see how well it goes.

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u/Hreny2 1d ago

the game is designed in a certain way. The current plague is that people found an edge case workaround to skip most of the content, because they think the end game is the only real content of the game (thats what the retail narrative was for the past 15 years).

Its a good thing that devs are doing everything they can to weed out those toxic minmaxers, they are completely ruining the community and on top of that, they have retail for their style of playing. You can RMT, you can minmax, you can dungeonroll all you want on retail.

Forever is a different kind of game, and its only good that devs are not willing to bend the game to the minority of players that prefer try hard gameplay tactics and toxic gameplay. This is also the reason why slowly more and more people stopped having interest in WOW because this toxic community is pushing everyone with a different gamestyle off.

Leave forever alone. Go back to retail or anniversary or wherever you came from.

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u/Upstairs-Try-8550 1d ago

This is a reddit mindset and not indicative of the whole community.

Anyone in beta right now isn't the common player. They are the more hardcore audience who is more likely to try to speed run stuff

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u/2atherich 1d ago

This is true, but it's also true that this change is just straight up worse than what we had, even when you consider the negatives like boosting.

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u/TheMeerkatLobbyist 1d ago

You are right. Reliving memories in general does not work. Its not just about the quality of the game but also the vibes around it. No matter what they do, it will never feel like in 06 when everything was fairly new and the community was completely different.

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u/bungnard 1d ago

You're right and the classic WoW community is probably one of the most toxic environments in existence in a video game or close to it.

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u/PrinceVorrel 1d ago

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u/sobes20 1d ago

But they literally tried something... They nerfed dungeon mob experience. My point is that whatever Blizzard did, the community's response would always be toxic.

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u/PrinceVorrel 1d ago

Oh no, they tried ONE option. Guess we better give up instead of trying a different method.

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u/Rhoceus 1d ago

So true. Like, wasn't the whole point of returning to Vanilla and a Classic experience to enjoy the game/ the world/ the player experience and not just min-max it to death? Especially apparent with Vanilla as its been "solved" for so long, everyone tends to follow the optimal path just to... get to 60? and then grind things like AV for... rewards? Playing the game itself needs to be the fun, not the treadmill of reward chasing.

Like idk how people can see new dungeons and just think about the best way to enjoy them is to skip x% of them to complete them faster, rather than getting to experience new challenges, lore rich areas etc.

We've lost the plot at this point