While we will only be getting seven dungeons to start with in Warlords of Draenor (one of which is a revamped Upper Blackrock Spire,) there is hope that we will be getting more as the expansion progresses.
Typically, each expansion has had three raid tiers (though BC had Sunwell Plateau as a kind of tier 6.5, and Wrath straight up had four tiers, even if tier 9 was a mere five bosses.) It would stand to reason, then, that we could get a new set of dungeons with each new raid tier.
One of the things that Blizzard hopes to address as new "dungeon tiers" are introduced is to keep the old dungeons viable.
Despite having more dungeon bosses than any other expansion, the five-man experience in Cataclysm suffered due to the separation of dungeon tiers. Whereas in Wrath the random-dungeon option in the newly-released dungeon finder would plunk you down in any of the sixteen dungeons, Cataclysm separated it out so that after 4.1, if you wanted to do the new dungeons with their superior loot, you'd queue in a totally separate menu, meaning that for all of patch 4.1 and 4.2, most players would only run Zul'Aman or Zul'Gurub. Later, with 4.3, this would change to the three Hour of Twilight dungeons, but the point was that the nine 4.0 heroics basically got taken out of the mix as soon as new dungeons came out.
In Mists, this was only not an issue because there were no new dungeons after the initial nine in 5.0. That's not exactly the kind of solution I think we were all looking for.
The problem is that when new dungeons come out with new loot, you are incentivized to run only those. Unless you've already got a full set of raid gear (which admittedly, in the days of the Raid Finder, is far more likely,) you're going to want to get anything you can out of those dungeons before you even consider queueing for the older ones.
One of the odd, though sort of understandable things they did in Mists was that they eliminated normal-mode level-cap dungeons. Back in Burning Crusade and to a somewhat lesser extent in Wrath and Cataclysm, one would actually spend quite a bit of time in level-cap dungeons in order to gear up before one felt ready to do heroics. Often, you'd wait until you were hit, expertise, (and for tanks in Wrath, defense) capped. Having passed that threshold, you would feel ready to push into heroics.
In Mists, however, heroics basically came to mean "level-capped," and the heroic dungeons were easier than they had ever been (yes, even easier than those Wrath heroics the "hardcore" complained about.)
With normal and heroic modes for every WoD dungeon (at least in 6.0,) an interesting potential solution presents itself.
I'm going to make up some iLevel numbers. These are purely hypothetical.
So let's say that the level-cap dungeons in 6.0 reward iLevel 600 gear. They're tuned for people who are at 580-590, which would be the levels you're seeing in whatever winds up being the final leveling zone.
Then, the 6.0 heroics award iLevel 615. They're tuned for people who are about at 600. This heroic blue gear is totally good enough to get you into the first raid tier, and you're off.
So then 6.1 is a story-based, transitional patch, and after a few months we get 6.2 - the second raid tier (The Mana-Forges of Farahlon!) With 6.2, we get two or three new dungeons, thematically connected to the new raid. The heroic versions of these new dungeons reward iLevel 630 gear.
But, to keep every dungeon relevant, the original seven 6.0 heroics also get their rewards boosted to 630, and they are tuned up to be more difficult.
Sounds great for those of us who have been keeping up, but what about new level 100s? How are they supposed to make the leap to heroics if the jump in difficulty has just gotten twice as big?
They key is that there is still a normal mode. The level-cap dungeons from 6.0 still award iLevel 600 gear. They're still tuned just as easily. Once they've got a decent complement of iLevel 600 gear, they then transition to the NORMAL mode versions of the 6.2 dungeons, which award, you guessed it, 615 loot.
So more patches come out, and the final raid against Gul'dan/Mannoroth/Medivh/Murozond/The Great Gazoo comes about. And we get new dungeons - let's say three. It's a big patch.
With these three new dungeons on heroic, we get iLevel 645 loot. Likewise, all the old heroics get beefed up to award the same quality of loot (so you've got quite a few options now.)
But if you just hit the cap, you still have a path in which to progress. First, you go through the 6.0 level-cap dungeons, then you hit up the 6.2 ones, and finally, you get a nice set of iLevel 630 gear out of the 6.4 dungeons on normal mode, and with that accomplished, a huge world of awesome 645 heroic loot becomes available to you.
I think that this system would work best, because each time you take away a path of progression by beefing up heroics, you provide a new one by providing new normal dungeons. And meanwhile, for those of us who like heroics and want to keep getting cool loot out of them (providing a non-raiding alternative progression path as well,) we get an ever-expanding pool of dungeons instead of getting funneled down into just a few.
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