Players are only a few days into World of Warcraft: Forever, and dungeons are already a sore spot! The game launched on November 4th, and players on Reddit and Blizzard's own forums are saying a trip into a dungeon pays less XP than staying out in the open world. That hits one of the game's big new features, since Forever added nine new dungeons, as Kotaku points out.
Those XP cuts go back to the beta, before launch, but now that the game is live for everybody, players are really letting Blizzard hear it!
Forever's dungeons were designed with much lower XP from kills and bigger first-time quest rewards, as Warcraft Tavern reported. On October 1st, Blizzard's beta notes cut the extra XP that dungeon quests pay beyond normal quest values by 50%. A week later, the October 8th notes raised XP from dungeon kills by approximately 20% and fixed a bug that penalized party kill XP based on the highest-level member. We covered the mob XP cuts during the beta too.
On October 8th, in a post on Blizzard's forums, Senior Game Designer Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield wrote that with those adjustments and perfect XP-per-hour play, "leveling rates in dungeons will be very close, if not equal" to optimal questing. He also said XP wouldn't return to what it was in Classic Era, and that dungeon grinding as the best way to level doesn't fit Forever's core pillars, so Blizzard planned to stand by the changes.
On the official podcast from that day, Senior Game Designer Rowan Ryder says grinding dungeons shouldn't be the optimal way to play, but that this shouldn't leave dungeons feeling unrewarding. Ryder also says the team doesn't want to punish players for old quests that can take multiple runs. The dungeon XP talk starts around 7:12. Check it out below!
Now that the game is live, a lot of players say that's not what they're seeing! Kotaku's Rebekah Valentine rounded up a batch of r/classicwow posts on November 6th. In one, u/Add_xyz_torealvendor says they get twice the XP from an open-world mob five levels below them as from a dungeon mob one level below them. u/StoicGigs says boss XP is the same as regular mob XP, and u/yojimbofog points to Wailing Caverns quests the whole group can't finish.
It's all over Blizzard's official forums too!
A thread called Dungeons Are Dead went up the morning of November 6th and had already passed 190 posts by that afternoon. Qfiend reports getting about 30 XP a kill, and Talespinner describes a clear where every player walked out with 9 of the 10 Twilight Pendants they needed. Cyranis says two Ragefire Chasm runs barely moved their XP bar and they'd have been better off killing boars.
Some players are also mad about where everyone went to level instead. Sequitur32 and Taz both argue that players are farming fast-respawning open-world mobs across layers, the same kind of repetition the dungeon cuts were supposed to stop.
Now, these are player reports, and we couldn't find XP-per-hour numbers from Blizzard for the live game. Aggrend was also comparing perfect dungeon play to optimal questing, and the forum posts we read and the Reddit titles don't test that. On top of that, Blizzard's November 2nd notes say respawn rates were adjusted in many areas and that lower-level zones will come back down to more typical rates once the launch surge settles. That could slow the open-world farming in those zones, but it wouldn't change what a single mob pays. That's our own read, since Blizzard hasn't said so.
Not everyone wants a change. jxx says nobody should be able to sit in dungeons all day and level to 60, and Shadowswillm calls the complainers a small, loud group.
As for Blizzard, the November 5th hotfixes stopped Plainsrunning from stacking in battlegrounds and cleaned up some spawn, item and quest issues, with no mention of dungeons or XP. As of the evening of November 6th, we couldn't find a post from Blizzard staff about dungeon XP since launch, and we checked the blue tracker on its US and EU forums, which doesn't cover X or Discord. Valentine expects the backlash to force some kind of change, but that's just her prediction. Keep an eye on GameFragger for more info as we have it!
If you're still leveling, our launch guide and Demonology Warlock guide can help, and Blizzard says Forever is included with an active subscription or Game Time, which you can pick up on Battle.net.
What do you think? Should Blizzard raise dungeon XP? If you're playing, are you still running dungeons after the first clear?
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