Sunday, May 4, 2014

Timewalker Dungeons Hoped for Some Time in the Future

As an obsessive of all things time-travel related, I was very excited to see the Timewalker faction pop up on the Timeless Isle (if one can ever grind rep with them, I will be exalted.) The Bronze Dragonflight is the best dragon flight - that's just fact.

Anyway, as we've seen in a few data-minings and what has been now mentioned by Ion Hazzkostas in an interview, Blizzard is hoping to be able to implement Timewalker dungeons some time in the future. I doubt this is going to be there for 6.0, but I could see this being one of the major features to come about some time during the course of the expansion.

Oh, what's a Timewalker Dungeon, you ask? (I'll defend the lack of linearity in my thoughts here as being thematically appropriate when talking about time-travelers.) Timewalker Dungeons would be scaled (or perhaps scale us down) to allow us to go in and run dungeons of expansions past in a way that remains challenging.

It's heartening to hear that Blizzard is working on this. WoW has so many great dungeons that one just doesn't run anymore. Even when leveling up a new alt (a process that is being at the least de-emphasized with the level 90 boost,) many dungeons just don't get run. Level-cap dungeons, especially those more challenging ones that came in later patches, are basically impossible to run at the correct level. Now granted, I am not yet yearning to run 4.1-era ZG again, but having the option to go do Magister's Terrace or Forge of Souls, or End Time in a way that: A. isn't absurdly easy to solo (ok, End Time's just "easy" and not absurdly so) and B. has a built-in way to get likeminded people to go run them - would be really cool.

Some challenges present themselves, though:

1. It can't be mandatory

The expansion system for World of Warcraft functions by allowing us to play within the context of the particular current expansion. If you hated Pandaria, come 6.0 you'll be able to leave it behind entirely. Much as I loved the strange quasi-futuristic sci-fi landscape of Outland, or the classical grim fantasy (and awesome Titan stuff) of Northrend, I don't need to be forced to return there constantly for the rest of WoW's lifespan.

It's important for us to be able to leave some of that stuff behind, for the same reason that as much as I love Ocarina of Time, I haven't been playing it over and over for the past sixteen years (wow, that makes me feel old.)

So making Timewalker dungeons a separate thing from the random heroics you use to get gear and Valor Points or whatever is important.

2. There still should be some incentive

It's a tough line to walk in an MMO, where both PvP and PvE are intensely competitive, between mandatory and pointless. Still, I'd love to see Timewalker dungeons provide some sort of reward. Gold is always an option, in that it's useful, but not game-defining (a player with a million gold who's never stepped into a raid is still going to be less powerful than heroic raider with two thousand gold.) But gold's actually a minor enough part of WoW that it might not actually be a big enough incentive.

Cosmetic rewards seem like the best option here. Titles, pets, mounts, and transmog gear could all be ways to get people to run these things while not forcing them to.

I figure running Timewalker versions of every old dungeon could give you a title, and then each time you complete one of these dungeons, you could get a currency that is spent on those cosmetic rewards. Rewards could be added to keep people running them in future expansions, and with enough rewards, you could keep people running them for a while before running out of stuff to get.

Still, given that these would probably take about as long as contemporary dungeons, it might be nice to get Valor Points, though you could make the reward rate lower to encourage people to run the new stuff.

3. Something would have to be done about Vanilla Instances

A lot of the best dungeons of vanilla were redesigned in Cataclysm and Mists, which had the unfortunate effect of leaving only the least popular ones unchanged. Deadmines and SFK were the original linear dungeons, which made them kind of the model for dungeons in BC and beyond. But that means that what we're left with in vanilla dungeons are the enormous, labyrinthine dungeons.

Now obviously, there's some fun to be had doing the huge dungeons. Blackrock Depths is actually awesome - if you're exploring solo or with one or two friends. But when you're in a match-made group of people who just want to get to the end of the dungeon, it's a pain.

In Cataclysm I believe, BRD was divided into two "wings" - the instance is unchanged, but depending on your LFG group, you might be deposited later in the dungeon and have to kill a different "final" boss. The problem is that there are parts of the dungeon that are not covered in either wing. Breaking it up was probably a good idea for the sanity of the players, and I applaud that they didn't physically separate it like Stratholme, so that if you wanted to, you could just keep going and clear the whole place. But they just need to make sure that every part of the dungeon is covered by one of the LFG pseudo-wings.

The other reason vanilla dungeons might be a bit of a slog is that many of the bosses in vanilla dungeons were pretty dull. A lot of those bosses would basically have no abilities, and only hit harder than a regular mob. That's not so bad when you're still learning how to play, but coming in at level 100, it's going to be a little pathetic when the boss is just a damage sponge.

One option would be to only Timewalkerize BC dungeons and beyond (including the revamped DM, SFK, SM, and Scholo... and UBRS... though that wouldn't really be a Timewalker until 7.0) But that would cut out a fairly large swath of dungeons, some of which I do legitimately think would be fun to run at max level (I was always partial to Razorfen Downs.)

4. Scaling

This is pretty simple: I'd recommend they scale the dungeons up rather than scaling the players down. Firstly, that keeps you from having to worry about the whole question of whether players retain their abilities when they get scaled down in level, and it would also mean that you could just figure out what boss and mob health ought to be for people at the level cap, and bring everything up to there.

I don't think you really need Proving Grounds/Challenge Mode- style scaling for this. Each expansion, you could just figure out the new level of difficulty for Timewalker Dungeons, and as the expansion goes on, players would get more powerful and be able to beat the dungeons more easily. If it's all for cosmetic rewards, then what's the worry?

5. Loot

What kind of loot do bosses drop? Well, you could just have them drop their ordinary loot. If someone wants it for transmog, then what do they care that it's designed for a level 70 toon?

For fun, you could also have each boss have a chance to drop something actually useful for a level 100 - not often enough to make Timewalkers more rewarding than heroics, but a little reward for your effort.

Walking the Dungeons:

I'm sure that Blizzard will look into this as a potential feature, and I think it would be a great way to allow people to have fun little nostalgia trips. There's so much stuff in WoW that we never see anymore. It'd be fun to hop back in and fight our way through the old haunts.

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