Imagining Timewalker Dungeons

Blizzard has figured out some interesting tech that allows them to scale content to the player, or to scale players to the content. Primarily this has been used for beta testing and the PTR. Right now, on the beta, you will always be the right level and properly geared for any dungeon you test, because the game scales you. For example, Bloodmaul Slag Mines is an entry-level dungeon, something you can probably start running the moment Warlords goes live (though if you didn't raid at all during Mists, you might want to quest a bit to gear up.) Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, on the other hand, is a level 100 dungeon - even on normal, you're expected to be at the level cap. But both dungeons can be tested at basically any level on the Beta.

Blizzard has done tons of work over the years, creating new dungeons for every expansion. You spend a lot of time in them while they're current, but you pretty much pass them by when you level up to the next expansion's content. And level-cap dungeons, like Shattered Halls, Pit of Saron, Grim Batol, or soon Gate of the Setting Sun, you basically just ignore.

The sad fact is that as the past few expansions have gone, there have been fewer and fewer dungeons, which I've always thought are the backbone of what makes WoW WoW (raids being a kind of intense super-dungeon that you don't do as frequently.)

Actually, the place of dungeons versus raids has always been a kind of difficult thing to pin down. In Wrath and Cataclysm, the dungeons that came out with the final raid patch allowed you to get gear equivalent to the previous tier's raid gear. Blizzard was frustrated that players were skipping places like Firelands or Ulduar because they could easily get equal or better gear running dungeons. I would argue that the solution to this problem was in LFR. Any player is going to easily be able to raid while the raid is fresh. If LFR had been around during 4.2, I'm sure that most people would have run Firelands plenty of times before they were sent into End Time, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight.

Still, one of the issues with dungeons is that, because you can run them indefinitely (the "random heroic" option in the Dungeon Finder kind of invalidated the one-day reset Heroics used to have,) you can easily get burned out on them. This problem has been compounded by the fact that we've gotten fewer and fewer dungeons to run.

Never was this issue a bigger problem than during the stretch of patch 4.1 and 4.2. 4.1 introduced the revamps of the former raids Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub. The problem was that everyone was heavily incentivized (with better gear and higher Valor returns) to run those two dungeons to the exclusion of the other nine Cataclysm heroics that had come out at launch. Later, the 4.3 dungeons would take on that role, and while I personally preferred those dungeons, it meant that the effective span of dungeon options just expanded from two to three, which is still not that great.

Mists of Pandaria never dipped below its nine total heroics, but we never got a single new dungeon during the entire expansion.

While I still have some small hope that Blizzard will recognize how important 5-person dungeons are to WoW, and focus more on producing dungeons, the trend is a little disheartening. Warlords of Draenor is going to launch with 8 dungeons, which is the smallest number ever (though granted, there are seven brand-new dungeons to Mists' six.)

Now the interesting thing that Blizzard has talked about is the concept of a "Timewalker" dungeon. The Timewalkers, of course, in-lore are basically mortals who are taking up the job of the Bronze Dragonflight now that Nozdormu has lost his super Aspect powers. In practice, these dungeons would essentially just scale you down, or perhaps they would scale up, to the appropriate level.

I expect this could be done with relative ease for most BC-forward dungeons. Vanilla had some funky dungeon design, with places like Blackrock Depths clearly meant to be a several hours' evening activity with some close guild mates and not the kind of place you'd want to PUG with a bunch of strangers. They've worked on this a little, largely by breaking the dungeons into digestible chunks, but sometimes you lose something (for one thing, there seem to be gaps in BRD that don't correspond to any Dungeon Finder wing.)

Then there's the question of rewards. While I think there could be some difficulty in figuring out just exactly how those should work, I do have a somewhat radical solution: scale everything up. It's clear from things like Item Upgrades and Warforged gear that it's fairly trivial to just bump up the item level of a piece of gear and have the values on it increase. Would it, then, be such a bad thing if the Red Sword of Courage became a viable weapon at level 100?

I maintain that dungeons, when they're good and appropriately challenging (not BC heroic hard, not Mists heroic easy) are the most fun you can have in WoW. Opening up the grand library of dungeons for players to experience would be fantastic. Plus it means that rather than running the same eight dungeons over and over and over for one or two years, you'd instead have a variety of 62 (not counting vanilla ones, except those that got revamps.) I don't know about you, but jumping around a list of 62 dungeons seems like it would last a bit longer than 8. And a lot of players never got to run Magister's Terrace or Forge of Souls when it was current. (The one thing I'd say about all of those is that Halls of Origination should probably be separated into two dungeons, because seven is just too many bosses.)

I know this is something Blizzard has talked about, and I really think it would be a great way to bring the nostalgia while simultaneously upping variety. While I hope this doesn't get used as an excuse to not come out with new dungeons in, say, patch 6.2 or whenever, I think it would be a great addition to the game.