r/classicwow • u/Deathtonic • 11h ago

Forever Beta Feedback Unintended outcomes of the Dungeon XP Nerf

  1. Monster Skip Runs [ More than just end game dungeons ]

  2. Hard Reserving of low level gear [ Not just Cruel Barb ]

  3. Less Tank and Healers leveling [ You see them say it every day on reddit since the nerf ]

  4. Tanks and Healers charging for their services for low level dungeons [ Not just end game ]

  5. Less dungeons begin ran [ Meaning harder to find groups ]

  6. Less social interactions [ Dungeons were the group activity, questing is primarily solo ]

  7. Some dungeons being skipped entirely [ Alliance have no reason to run Shadow Fang Keep since there are no quests and no mob XP ]

There are more issues than just these, I normally just run a dungeon 3-5 times now trying to convince people to do that will be drastically harder.

why would cloth users help me do Scarlett Monetary Armory?

Will people just Skip SM Cath because you have to clear all mobs?

We have never had to ask these questions before and this is why people are so passionate about it, we are supposed to be playing this version Forever.

Just make Boosting a lifetime bannable offense.

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108

u/Mind-Game 10h ago

Also I don't care how sweaty you are, dungeon leveling was never optimal except maybe in stretches where you didn't have any quests left, which forever solves.

And even when dungeon spam beat questing, it was only with 3+ mage groups which means you have to be both sweaty and exactly that comp to beat quest exp.

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u/So_Full_Of_Fail 10h ago

I was pretty sweaty for classic. I dungeon ground my warr and priest to 60. A minority of that was cleave groups.

Most of that was with 4 other random people in the normal Tank+Heal+3 random DPS group.

I like it far better than solo questing.

So now, I'm just going to grab the patched/free version of RXP with all the guides and follow the blue arrow solo.

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u/maxifer 6h ago

The worst for me is shoring up the numbers to the next zone. Yes there are a lot of new quests, but we've only done up to level 30. There's a LOT left from 30 to 60 and having an extra dungeon run while you want to pick up some XP, maybe a drop is fantastic. Having it hurt so much means that people leave and go solo instead. Like if I'm mindlessly grinding mobs, I would rather have it in an environment that can challenge spatial awareness, smart pulling, whatever, rather than just chopping off boar heads. I grinded like level 58 to 60 in the original wow on yetis in Winterspring. That's much worse than having a balanced diet of options, especially when it impacts healers and tanks to the point that there are even fewer. We're running things now because there's a hard cap, I cannot imagine what it will look like when people attempt actual runs during release.

It sucks to go into a zone and be unable to pick up some (or any) of the quests and the best option is to just slam your face into mobs. It sucks to have more than 4 friends/guildies you want to play with but would rather opt out because there's almost no value to rerun it - I know some of us still will, but it just makes it that much harder/worse for everyone. It was great if you were underleveled for the quests, as well, could get to the threshold from a run or two, then pick up said quests.

Beyond the already-an-issue of tanks and healer populations, many who would heal in the later stages (~40+) will probably opt for a dps build instead, because it's so terrible questing alone. Will they get dual spec? Maybe, or save the money for their mount and just solo/group quest. Are there enough gear rewards from quests to maintain two sets of gear? Maybe. Is there enough bag space? Maybe. Whatever it ends up being, they've identified the path of least resistance is just solo questing, taking away a huge element of the game for many. Yeah there are likely to be groups and plenty of people will be just fine, but we're also not seeing long-term impact or progress past 30. It was never faster, and now it's even worse.

Sorry to go off, this issue has just stuck with me and I have had the same consideration: just keep grinding solo, if a dungeon comes up at the right time, sure, but it'll likely be time lost at the end of the day.

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u/So_Full_Of_Fail 6h ago

IMO, the real cracks in this plan wont even show until 50-59. Where before you would be doing dungeons for XP and gear you would use for a while 60-prebis or not.

Now the incentive is to just get to 60 first. So, anything from say Mara+ I'm going to HR the gear I want(which will be both heal and DPS or tank and DPS) on the one run of them I do. And because I'll be a healer or tank, I'll be able to because there will be plenty of DPS just happy to get a group quickly.

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u/maxifer 5h ago

Oh for sure, it'll be exacerbated later. 60s can of course just farm them, but they're likely going to keep the HR stuff going on, so it'll be hyper competitive rather than some fun runs.

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u/So_Full_Of_Fail 5h ago

Comparatively, I'm going to be significantly ahead of the masses to 60.

So even at 60, I'll just continue to HR gear on runs that may have sub 60s in them because there will be increased demand for groups.

I expect level 60 groups to just shake out how they always have.

I'll actually bet I get both my priest and warr to 60 before most people get their first there. Just because I took two weeks off work to no-life the launch.

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u/maxifer 4h ago

Haha I took like 4 days off cause I had spare time. Most I'd done before was just day of and casually made my easy there. I have a feeling there's going to be significant asks for help running stuff.

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u/Alyusha 9h ago

With the new quest exp it kinda breaks even tbh. 1 DM gets you about 1.5 levels with quests. The same for the two new dungeons. I went from 15-21 from purely dungeon quests / pre-quests.

I still have concerns in the 30-50 range though since that was were a lot of the grinding happened before.

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u/So_Full_Of_Fail 6h ago

For that first run only, sure.

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u/Alyusha 3h ago

Well ya, but you can basically chain them into the next dungeon. I haven't done it but I bet you could go from level 15 - 25/26 in just dungeons. Then maybe have to quest a little bit or farm some gear (The dungeons do still give 1-2 bars) before you're back into Gnomer and the new dungeons.

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u/GerardTheButler 1h ago

With 76% reduced exp?

Godspeed king, please give it a go and let us know in a month how it shook out for you and how far behind you are your mates who're playing the same in the overworld lmao.

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u/Boethion 5h ago

Not to mention just killing mobs in the overworld for 2 hours will always give you way more xp than spamming dungeons, no matter if they revert these changes or not.

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u/Varrianda 3h ago

Dungeon leveling was optimal if you did the 3 mage + warrior + priest groups. Or the 4 mage + priest or 3 mage 1 priest 1 lock. Maybe melee cleave groups became strong with shamans in BRD/UBRS but…

People dungeon leveled because the world was too overcrowded and doing dungeons is…fun?

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u/Azuzu88 3h ago

A lot of the dungeon levelling was also done because questing was such a nightmare in certain level ranges.

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u/J0eykarate 10h ago

You are completely incorrect. Every guild that cleared Rag within the first week of 2019 Classic spammed dungeons nonstop once they figured it out. That is why Apes turned off their streams in the second half of the leveling grind. My guild got world 6th Rag doing this and server first on Faerlina, and the entire guild was formed out of a Twitch chat. If we didn't have the benefit of leveling mainly in dungeons, we wouldn't have cleared it that fast. Just because you personally didn't abuse the method doesn't mean it wasn't a thing. It's like people think the devs made these changes for zero reason lol

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u/Wooden_Drummer2455 9h ago

wow a fully premade group leveled faster than total strangers wow so surprising

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u/J0eykarate 9h ago

I did it with total strangers, and we cleared Rag first on the biggest NA server in 2019 Classic. Was only like a day slower than Apes was too IIRC. But yeah, dungeon spamming wasn't totally OP or anything ur right, bro!

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u/Wooden_Drummer2455 9h ago

lmao what the fuck are you even saying? "Yeah my guild did this strat" wow so your fuckin premade group is somehow total strangers. God classic andys are braindead

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u/1000ManaLeakStunsL8r 7h ago edited 7h ago

okay, so your argument is, this is broken and busted and required and everyone is doing it.

And your evidence in support of this is "look, we half-assed it with strangers, and that alone made us so unusual we got the first kill on a massive server"

That seems like proof that people do not view it as required. That it was not so busted everyone was doing it. That the people doing it were a tiny tiny tiny tiny group of people. Like... 40ish apparently. Because some strangers banding together to do it was enough to be leading the pack.

And this is the thing you think the game needs to be balanced around? you want to nerf other dungeon enjoyers' experience?

Did you not enjoy playing your experience before, and if so, why did you do it then? If you did, why does it need to change?

If you enjoyed your experience -> cool, its working

If you did not enjoy your experience -> why should we nerf others' experience to be less enjoyable because you decided to self flagellate? Why is your self flaggelation playstyle more important than theirs?

I don't understand your reasoning at all. As far as I can tell you just torched your own position.

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u/J0eykarate 6h ago

lmfao, so because not every player is abusing something, it means it shouldn't be balanced? Are you actually serious lol?

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u/1000ManaLeakStunsL8r 5h ago edited 5h ago

Is that seriously what you think I said or argued?

Are you actually serious lol?

Are you?

you literally argued "look, hardly anyone did it, so even a ragtag group like mine doing it was enough to be the front. Therefor we should balance around it, because look how imbalanced and required it is!" If it's not OP enough others are doing it, it's not OP enough to nerf the crap they ARE doing over it, which is normal dungeon running.

Your entire piece of evidence is "look, even in the state when I say it was required and egregious, so few people were doing it that a rag-tag group became the top by doing it!" It's your argument that it's required and your argument that no one was actually doing it. Which is it?

The vast majority of players do not care about the uber-sweat experience you want to center the game around, and that you want to do it to their detriment.

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u/Alyusha 9h ago

Being a bit disingenuous there though right? They were using 10 man raid groups with stacked mages clearing for them. The 10 mans got nerfed mid release week. Apes probably turned their stream off so Blizzard wouldn't nerf their next plan.

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u/J0eykarate 9h ago

That just supports my argument even more, lol. Also, didn't need a 10-man to get insane XP well beyond questing. We did ZF as a mostly 5-man, sometimes 6-man, with 1 mage, 1 pally, 1 priest, and a hunter. They turned off the streams to not leak their strat to the other people racing to be first to kill Rag, not because of hiding from blizz lol

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u/Michelanvalo 8h ago

Your point is not relevant to anything being discussed. An organized group doing a fully planned and optimized route is always going to be faster than any other players, no matter what the method is. They have clinically wiped out downtime as part of their pregame.

You can't compare the .01% of players that do that to the 99.99% that don't.

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u/J0eykarate 8h ago

I did it with strangers that I had never played with and had insane group turnover, and we still did it around a day slower than the world first guild. Just because Jerry, the dad of two, didn't abuse dungeon spamming doesn't mean it shouldn't be balanced properly.

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u/Michelanvalo 8h ago

A day slower, a full 24 hours slower is a long fucking time man.

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u/J0eykarate 8h ago

Yeah, ofc it is, but that's because we all were strangers and also complete noobs. Not really bad in comparison to people who had played pservers for a handful of years and had a set goal in mind.. We were just trying to do our best. Just for an example of how shit it was, the "main tank" on Rag hadn't even done his berserking stance quest cuz he was a total moron, and it almost cost us the server's first kill.

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 9h ago edited 8h ago

.000001% did it! Crippling! Devastating the game! This is totally the target audience for forever! Most hardcore must be the target demographic!

Thats obviously silly. The game should not be balanced around race to rag first. It happens once. People leveling happens thousands of times a day.

I don't like the dungeon EXP Nerf, this but focusing on this line of reasoning is entirely misguided. They absolutely positively without a doubt should not balance around your use case.

And if they do, it'll end up in an endless game of whack-a-mole for silly ways to level that are clunky and optimized around that. It's not an achievable goal and it's not a good goal for the the player base as a whole.

Whether or not it works well for that use case is orthogonal to whether or not it should be done.

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u/J0eykarate 9h ago

It was simply not balanced in any way, shape, or form.... You literally could level from 15-20s in DM, go to Stocks, get from 20s to 29, go to SM, get from 29- 40s, go to ZF, get to 50s, go to LBRS/UBRS, boom, 60. Just because an average player doesn't think of or want to utilize the strat doesn't mean they shouldn't properly balance it.

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 8h ago

You literally could level from 15-20s in DM, go to Stocks, get from 20s to 29, go to SM, get from 29- 40s, go to ZF, get to 50s, go to LBRS/UBRS, boom, 60.

You could literally eat cereal for breakfast, go to your job, then go someplace else for lunch, and then a different place for dinner

oookay? and? What's the harm here? That sounds great, that sounds like something that should definitely be an option. That sentence should be true, and the opposite sentence (i.e. "you can't [all that]") should not be true.

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u/J0eykarate 7h ago

How can you be so naive? Obviously, options for how to play are great, but the issue is when one method is so far and away better than the others for 6/9 of the classes in the game.

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 7h ago edited 7h ago

Okay, can you make a coherent argument for that? I'm not rejecting your conclusion, but you keep giving arguments that do not actually support it.

And the more you make arguments like that, the harder to believe it is that you're holding back some good one, and the easier it is to believe that your reasons are misguided.

That's why I asked clarifying questions, but rather than take that opportunity to explain your own stance, you resorted to attacks. I don't even mind the insult, it's irrelevant to me. I mind the lack of argument though.

So I'll give you another chance to explain your reasoning but if you reply the same way again, we'll know it's because you don't feel your position stands basic scrutiny and that you're resorting to social media performance to "win" a conversation. Which I have no interest in participating in.

This is why I hate that reddit just slams their "social media" experience into the old discussion experience. Can't even tell if you're a doom scroller Social Media user or a "discuss these links" reddit-was-a-link-aggregator-with-discussion user.

And please understand, "far and away better" for your use case does not mean it's "far and away better" for everyone's. Different people care about different things. How you measure "better" is not the same as others. Hyper focusing on one playstyles "omg this is better" ignores that may be due to other play styles actually mattering too.

If you find the hyper optimized experience unpleasant, don't do it.

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u/J0eykarate 7h ago

You essentially are asking why game balance is a thing in 2026 lmfao. Hey guys, let's add new zones to the game, but keep dungeons completely busted XP-wise, so players have no reason to venture to said zones and just run the old dungeons over and over and over and over and over like we did in 2019, and on Anniversary, Jeez, Classic+ is so great!!!!

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 7h ago edited 6h ago

You essentially are asking why game balance is a thing in 2026 lmfao.

lol okay. If that's your level of understanding of the argument at this point, it's clear which group you fall into and that this isn't worth my time. Good luck bud. FYI, this kind of approach will be extremely destructive to your life. You gotta learn to actually challenge your conclusions and hear other sides. Social media has so many of you trained to never go past your soundbyte response.

Learn to not argue from your conclusion, but to it. And with how defensive you're getting at me having the audacity to ask you to explain your position to me makes me think you're feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance of realizing you can't defend it but believe it with all your heart, which makes you extremely uncomfortable. If you learn to respond to that feeling with growth instead of turning to performance to try to feel validated by social media points, your life will be a LOT better, I promise.

No, I am not asking why game balance is a thing. I'm pointing out you think the game needs to be entirely balanced around YOUR use case and priorities, and you're freaking out at the realization that it doesn't need to be and that's why you can't justify it.

I am arguing for game balance. I'm just not arguing for the game to be entirely balanced around you personally, so you hear it as being against balance.

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u/tandrew91 9h ago

People will find a way to cheese to 60 no matter what. If the main reason people are against dungeon exp is from falling behind… that’s pathetic.

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u/unkelrara 5h ago

And who was the world first 60 again? Oh a solo?

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u/J0eykarate 5h ago

Funnily enough, I was in Jokerds stream on Twitch, where he practiced his runs to 15 to 20 viewers on pservers before launch. Then, after he hit the world's first 60, he deleted that mage then he came to NA and joined our guild :)

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u/J0eykarate 5h ago

But kinda funny you mentioned that because didn't they do nerfs to AoE farming as well?

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u/wowadrow 9h ago

"maybe in stretches where you didn't have any quests left, which forever solves."

How exactly does forever solve this?

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u/iHaveComplaints 9h ago

Buddy, if you haven't even seen the reveal announcement from Blizzcon you should probably start there.

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u/wowadrow 9h ago

I've seen nothing specific that solves the lack of quests and the player being slightly to low to move to a new zone leveling issue classic wow had always had.

Historically the player options were grinding or dungeon spam.

Blizzard can talk about all the new quests/new zones all day long. The vaste majority of the new quests available at release will be specifically for the sky elves.

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u/AzuzaBabuza 9h ago

From what I understand, only 250 of the new 1000 quests were in the lv1-30 range, so I don't think it'll be 'specifically for the sky elves'

Riverglades is 35-45 if I remember right

I have no idea what level range shendralar and hyjal are meant for. I don't know if hyjal is even meant to be a leveling zone (55-60 if it is).

I hope there's enough quests to make up for dungeons being shit xp

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u/wowadrow 9h ago

Could be cool additions again notice how almost all of that was outside the scope of the beta?

Blizzard does this with every release. Trust us we fixed x, y, z it's just not ready for players to see yet.

When players actually encounter new stuff it's a broken mess and ten thousand hot fixes are rushed out breaking something else.

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u/DucksMatter 9h ago

It wasn’t optimal you’re right. It was if you were getting boosted though! Which is why 90% of the people complaining against the xp nerfs are being so vocal. They don’t want to play the game they just want to be carried to 60 so they can start raid logging.

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u/Mind-Game 6h ago

Which is why 90% of the people complaining against the xp nerfs are being so vocal

The conspiracy theories that people have about stuff like this are insane, man.

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u/slappadabasss1 8h ago

you cant seriously believe this

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u/Large_Mountains 7h ago

I have met so many people who openly admit they hate leveling and would boost to 60 in any way they can. People in barrens chat talking about it. I'm not saying it's a huge proportion of people but it's certainly true. I'm sure blizzard has a quite a bit of data confirming how many people boost and how often. On a pvp sever you shouldn't be able to skip world pvp questing and just go afk and booster, OR sit in dungeons the entire time and get to 60 just as fast or faster.

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u/GerardTheButler 3h ago

On a pvp sever you shouldn't be able to skip world pvp questing and just go afk and booster,

While my faction is getting hunted to extinction outside I would like do so something to progress. This abysmal attitude is what caused the original, brutal faction splits on PvP servers in classic 1

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u/Large_Mountains 3h ago

So because you don't like WPVP you think we should be allowed to have boosting

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u/GerardTheButler 1h ago

No, I also don't support boosting, I just grabbed the wrong bit of your comment.

If the overworld is completely untenable then yes there needs to be a method of progression. I genuinely have no idea what woodwork you absolute lunatics have crawled out of where there's this contrarian enthusiasm for gimping a significant part of the game

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u/GerardTheButler 3h ago

How have you guys conflated 'Nerfing dungeons to make them pointless progression-wise past the first run is bad and feels bad' into 'I want to be carried and pay someone else to play for me'

Do you just wake up in the morning looking for things to interpret in the most uncharitably insultign ways possible?