Advertisement

Are low-level dungeons too easy?

Are lowlevel dungeons too easy

Taepsilum went on today a little bit about an assertion that low level dungeons are too easy. This position is one that many experienced players can likely sympathize with, particularly those who have alts climbing through the levels with full heirlooms and considerable player knowledge behind them.

For players in that position, yes, low-level dungeons are too easy. But, as Taepsilum points out, players with years of WoW under their belts ought to turn back the clock, to let the Ghost of Azeroth Past take them on a journey through time to their first ever dungeon. Hopefully they weren't as foolish as your writer, and didn't select tank without really realizing what it meant. The low-level dungeons have, at least to some extent, to cater to players who have never been in a dungeon before.

And, of course, for the lower levels, dungeon leveling has to contribute an equivalent amount of XP per hour to questing, or nobody would ever go into dungeons at all. But, as another poster in the same thread commented, perhaps it would be possible to open up heroic difficulties of dungeons at lower level to players who wanted a challenge?



This lead to an interesting question. If Blizzard were to do that, but made these harder dungeons award no more XP and no better gear than the easier ones of the same level bracket, would you choose to take the challenge, or stick with the easy modes?

Personally, I'd take the challenge. I can often be found on lower level toons queuing for the Burning Crusade heroics, for Botanica and the like, even though the rewards are inferior to those obtainable from the early Wrath dungeons. Partly, as I'm leveling tanking or healing characters a lot of the time, I enjoy the consternation of players being thrown into something unfamiliar from ym specific dungeon choices! But what about you? Taepsilum asserts that most players would take the easy route, and that the queues for the harder option would be longer. Do you agree?

Taepsilum
The problem with lower level dungeons is that they are used by many players as an alternative to questing for levelling up.
So they need to be somewhat similar in terms of xp/time, otherwise players would probably skip dungeons altogether and simply quest, only a very small minority would probably be joining dungeons for the sake of curiosity, and some loot.

There's also the trick about making dungeons easy enough for the less experienced players (new players levelling up for the first time). This becomes particularly important and we need to pay more attention to it whenever we release a new expansion since we usually tend to reduce the amount of xp needed to level up on lower levels or we usually adapt it in a way so that levelling becomes faster on previous expansions' content.
This has the inconvenient of making players less prepared since they have less time to get to know their characters and their new abilities that constantly unlock while levelling up.

Still, I agree, some do seem a bit too easy, but I don't know if I would feel exactly the same way if I had just started playing WoW and ran dungeons while levelling up my very first character.

14/12/2012 12:42: Posted by Maxmus
Maybe its a possibility to make heroic versions of those instances for lower lvl's who want a challenge, and get better gear from them. I understand that blizzard's mainly focus is at the lvl 90's but they could atleast do something to make it more challeging.

That's one possible solution; it's all a matter of priorities and the amount of resources that we have at our disposal.

Still, while we always strive to make the game appealing and have something for every kind of player to do and enjoy in-game, it seems to me that the amount of players that would actually be running such dungeons would be very small, I suspect most players, even those that would enjoy a more challenging version of the dungeons, would probably still take the easy route simply because it's there, it's available and it will make them level up faster. Also, the queues would probably be long and players would tend to cancel them and re-queue for the normal version.

Actually even right now, depending on the level of your character, you should be able to queue for the heroic versions of certain instances, for example, if you're level 80 you should be able to queue for Cataclysm heroic and normal dungeons, it's up to you if you want to queue for the heroic version, but I suspect the system only allows you to queue them at very specific levels. Some improvements have also been made regarding allowing more players into older heroics. BC heroics for example, used to require specific reputation levels to queue for the heroic versions, those restrictions have all been removed. (there are no more keys) This change actually happened during Cataclysm.



Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.