WoW: Forever’s Dungeon EXP Nerf Is Shaping Up To Be A Disaster For Dungeon Lovers

World of Warcraft World of Warcraft: Forever

© Blizzard

The launch of World of Warcraft: Forever is mostly proceeding smoothly, but as players begin to reach higher levels and leave their starting zones, many are uncovering a fairly serious problem: dungeons are turning out to be a massive waste of time.

Now, that doesn’t sound right at all, does it? Dungeons are one of the staples of World of Warcraft. They are usually the first group content anyone tackles. And in WoW: Forever, with nine new dungeons added, you’d think we’d all be running dungeons to our hearts’ content. But thanks to some sweeping changes to how dungeon experience points are awarded, a great many players are skipping dungeons entirely in favor of open-world questing, because the time and effort they invest in dungeons isn’t being adequately rewarded with gold, gear, or level progress.

Initially, when Forever entered beta, noticeable changes had been made to the original Classic dungeon experience. Experience from dungeon mobs had been lowered, while experience from dungeon quests had been increased. The idea seemed to be to encourage players to run dungeons once or twice to complete story quests and pick up gear, but to discourage them from spamming the same dungeon over and over to level quickly. That made some sense, but it quickly became apparent that questing EXP was overtuned, with players blasting through the level-up process simply by focusing on dungeon quests. So another change was made in October: a simple but major nerf to all dungeon questing experience. That left dungeons in a situation where basically all EXP gains from them had dropped meaningfully from where everyone remembers them being in the original version of the game.

This is…kind of a big problem! As many players are reporting, this nerfs dungeons to the point where doing them is just a time suck with no real reward. Even if you’re not trying to speedrun leveling through dungeons and just want to do them normally as you reach them in the story, the amount of time it takes to form a group, get them out there, and work through the dungeon is disproportionate to the reward, which at this point is a handful of EXP and maybe a piece of gear. It also makes certain other issues feel even more painful, such as the need to sometimes run a dungeon multiple times to complete a quest, as this person points out:

It’s also seemingly impacting how people run dungeons, when they actually do:

And some people are complaining that while nerfing dungeons was intended to get people out socializing in the world, such socializing is near-impossible for them due to the new layering system hiding most other players. I haven’t personally experienced this issue—Mulgore and the Barrens are jam-packed—but enough folks are reporting it that it sounds like another real problem that needs solved:

I understand that in WoW: Forever Blizzard wants to incentivize players to spend time in the open world, and I support that entirely. But putting together dungeon groups is a part of that experience. It’s not like retail WoW, where you can just sit AFK in town all day and use group finder to instantly warp to whatever dungeon you want and spam it over and over until you get the item or level you want. You’re constantly coming across cool questlines out in the world that ask you to do dungeons. But if I’m going to spend an hour, even two of my time to coordinate something with strangers, I’d like there to be something nice at the other end beyond just a quest completion text box.

There are dozens of threads like the ones above, as well as posts on various forums and even folks talking about it in in-game chat. I feel pretty confident that the level of backlash here will result in Blizzard making some sort of change to dungeons, but whether that’s a full backpedal on the current model to the old one or something totally different remains to be seen. For now, though, I guess I’m skipping dungeons.

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