Keeping Dungeons Relevant

Blizzard explicitly stated in their preview for Legion that they felt dungeons had "been done a disservice," and that they intended for 5-player content to be relevant throughout the expansion. That said, we don't really know what they're going to do to ensure that.

In Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor, one moved pretty quickly from running heroic dungeons to fighting through the expansions' raids. Players with organized raiding guilds would go on to Normal, Heroic, or for the very serious, Mythic raids, while most players would go into the Raid Finder, doing simpler versions of the raids but with a decent expectation that they would be able to complete the wing they were in (Warlords managed this a bit better - some of Mists' Raid Finder wings demanded more than you could probably expect from a group of 25 strangers, while Warlords dialed things down to the extent that only a handful of bosses were wipefests, and after a couple weeks, most players could execute these fights without too much trouble.)

Before Raid Finder, there was much more of a focus on dungeons. There were certainly lots of people raiding Icecrown Citadel (even pugging it, at least the first half or so,) but the basic expectation was that a player might bring his or her main character into the raid, but would probably leave alts entirely in the realm of dungeons, or possibly dailies.

In fact, turning the clock even farther back, the entire idea of what would become Valor/Justice points started in Burning Crusade, where until a later patch, Badges of Justice were awarded only in heroic dungeons, explicitly as a way to let running dungeons be an endgame alternative to raiding.

Wrath and Cataclysm had multiple dungeons come out after the expansion's launch. Wrath had Trial of the Champion in 3.2 and the three Frozen Halls dungeons in 3.3. Cataclysm had the two Zul raids transformed into level 85 dungeons in 4.1 and then the three "Hour of Twilight" dungeons in 4.3 that, much like the Frozen Halls, could be run as a single, extra long dungeon if you decided you wanted to do it that way.

These new additions helped with an issue that, admittedly, was most relevant in Wrath, which was that people kept running the old dungeons long after they had far, far outgeared them. (To be fair, this had been the case in BC as well, with groups farming Karazhan for Badges once they began to drop there.)

Was this a problem?

Honestly, I don't think it was. I think that 3.3's popularity (this was the high watermark era for World of Warcraft, and even if it technically peaked around the launch of Cataclysm, it was the good will that Wrath had bought that buoyed the game to such heights) implies it wasn't actually a serious issue. We could buy our entire tier 10 sets (item level 251) and several pieces of 264-level gear (equivalent to 10-player heroic or 25-player normal ICC loot,) by slowing earning Emblems of Frost with our daily dungeon runs. It was far faster to actually run the raid, and you could acquire more significant pieces of gear like weapons that way, but you had an alternative for decent, if not the best, gear out of the latter-day additions to the dungeon options.

The sole problem with this is that it made some older content feel irrelevant - that running Trial of the Crusader felt pretty pointless when you could get equivalent gear through much faster dungeons that had only a daily, rather than a weekly lockout.

But I think that in this era of Raid Finder, that problem is no longer relevant. People who play regularly are going to see every raid while it's current (even with Highmaul as a half-tier that was technically linked with Blackrock Foundry, it was very easy to have completed it on LFR before BRF came out.)

There were also concerns that the reward for running these dungeons was disproportionately good for the effort put in. By the end of Wrath, places like Utgarde Pinnacle could be cleared in about ten minutes (contrary to popular belief, the Wrath dungeons weren't actually super easy when the expansion came out. They were roughly on par with the Warlords ones, but most peoples' most recent memory of the outside of Timewalkers is when we were all geared in equipment from the equivalent raid after the raid after Hellfire Citadel.)

That's valid, though again, I didn't mind it. Despite the ease of dungeons, people were more motivated than ever to step into raiding. PUGs were going into ICC Normal all the time. My theory is that the relative lower stakes of dungeons allowed people to build up confidence. By the simple virtue of being in a smaller group, there's less anonymity and more personal responsibility. Yes, there were some profoundly dickish people playing then, but when you could chain pull through Heroic Nexus, and you had your tier 10 set all ready, you could feel pretty confident that you wouldn't utterly embarrass yourself if you went into ICC.

One of the issues with the raiding scene is that it's easy for a character to fall behind. There are catch-up mechanisms in place, sure, but Blizzard has focused those more and more toward luck-based rolls (I've wasted about 60k Apexis Crystals on Baleful Armaments to switch my Frost DK over to dual-wield and keep getting two-handers) and focusing almost entirely on raiding as the means to get gear (Tanaan Jungle was a step in the right direction, but see above about RNG woes.)

So how do we solve this?

Rewarding Heroics:

Blizzard tried, kind of limply, to turn heroic dungeons and LFR into separate progression paths. The idea was that if you just intended to do LFR, you could simply run normal level-cap dungeons and then move onto LFR, and likewise you could simply run heroic dungeons and step into Normal raiding from there.

Two big problems, though. The first is that, once again, dungeons were merely a stepping stone. And while that was arguably the case even in the ICC days, ICC was the final raid of a four-raid tier expansion. In Warlords, they were basically irrelevant - even for players catching up - halfway through the first raid tier (of two.) After my first two characters to level 100, I really only ran Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Grimrail Depot, Everbloom, and Auchindoun, each, once, at heroic solely to get the 680 upgrade to the Legendary Ring.

The other is that gear acquired in LFR was strictly better than that in dungeons. If you were in a raid group that was pushing slowly through the early raids, there was absolutely no reason not to do LFR each week to get the clearly-better items that would help you during the type of raiding you actually wanted to do.

So the solution to this latter problem is simple: Make the launch heroics drop the same quality loot as the launch raid's LFR. "Serious" raiders will be able to truly be ready for Normal mode, while those who eschew heroics will go, appropriately, to LFR as a source for gear.

But this has to be dynamic to keep things relevant. How?

One solution is to simply release new dungeons with each raid tier. I'd love this as a solution, but with a caveat. In Cataclysm, we had nine dungeons at launch, but as soon as 4.1 came out, it was basically a waste of time to do anything but Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub. Rather than increasing the diversity of the experience, the 5-player game slimmed down to a mere two (rather brutal) dungeons.

While these new dungeons should be harder and expect higher gear (and should only show up in the random queue for those with higher gear,) there needs to be something in the older dungeons that retains relevance.

And that's why we had Justice and Valor Points.

So honestly, my suggestions here are pretty simple - essentially to implement a mixture of the Justice/Valor system of Cataclysm with the ever-widening selection of dungeons in Wrath (and not penalizing those who by chance got one of the older dungeons, except in the quality of gear the bosses drop.)

I really think all of this stems from Blizzard's use of LFR. LFR solved a problem for them, but I think they misjudged which one. Rather than providing a replacement for the old dungeon-based gameplay of the game, LFR's true value is that it allows everyone to see the raid content while it's relevant.

I suspect we wont' be seeing any additional significant news about Legion until Blizzcon, but I hope that they do hold to their goal of making dungeons relevant again. I'll be curious to see how (or, for pessimists, "if") they manage to do it.