The Endangered Heroic Dungeon

For a few weeks, heroic dungeons were the endgame of Warlords of Draenor. We dodged shrapnel blasts in Grimrail Depot or desperately killed skeletons in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds.

But now?

There's really not much incentive to run heroic dungeons. Essentially, when you first hit 100, and if you don't have a Dwarven Bunker or War Mill (because if you do you'll likely gear up for them just from Nagrand quests,) you'll hit up the four level-cap dungeons for a bit and then move on to heroics.

But you'll only be in heroics for a brief time before you'll be qualified for LFR. Technically, you can gear for LFR without doing heroics at all, though it's a lot easier to hit that 615 item level quickly if you're getting 630 pieces to balance the 600ish questing greens from Nagrand.

Hitting LFR, you can get 640 gear and now 650 gear out of BRF, meaning that the 630 stuff from heroics is just not remotely worth the effort.

LFR wings are very easy this expansion, compared to those of Mists. And they should be! But what this means is that the amount of effort to get 640 stuff from LFR Highmaul is much lower than the level of effort it takes to get inferior gear from heroic dungeons. At this point, my new 100s really just run Grimrail Depot, Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Everbloom, and then Auchindoun to get them their legendary ring upgrade before going into full-time LFR.

And while I like LFR - and approve of the low difficulty that it has now - I wish that I had a reason to go into dungeons on my main again.

In the past, this was accomplished by awarding Valor Points, or its predecessor Emblems and Badges. It would be very easy to simply have heroics award something like Apexis Crystals in order to bring them back, but there's a kind of philosophical question to be answered.

Blizzard doesn't want players feeling "forced" to go back and do content they outgear. Now, I personally enjoyed running 5-mans throughout Wrath, even when we so ridiculously out geared the original dungeons that you could clear Utgarde Pinnacle in about ten minutes. But I can also sympathize with those who felt that it was just adding busywork to those who wanted only to raid.

The thing is, 5-player dungeons and 10-25-player raids are really different kinds of content. They're structured similarly, but there's a very different feel to running a dungeon than running a raid. I love, for example, not having to tank-swap constantly (and man, do I wish they would come up with new tank mechanics, or just bring back the idea of a main-tank and off-tank and let the off-tank worry about adds.)

Challenge Modes clearly aren't a good fit to make 5-player content relevant, as it's more of a niche, competitive thing. I still want to feel the effect of my gear progression as I go through these instances.

One thing I might have done was simply put LFR and Heroic dungeons at the same level. The intention originally was for serious raiders to gear up in heroics before they jump to Normal/Heroic/Mythic raiding. But LFR still offers better gear, and thus incentivizes even the hardcore to run it instead of Heroic dungeons. If things had been reshuffled, and, say, both heroic dungeons and Highmaul LFR had offered 635 gear, you'd allow those who could handle the more difficult dungeons to gear up faster.

But another problem remains, and that's the idea that Dungeons are just a stepping-stone to raids.

Now maybe that's always going to be the case. It always has been, and it's true that organizing a raid takes a lot more effort than organizing a dungeon group.

To me, though, I've always preferred smaller group sizes. A 5-player dungeon to me evokes the classic RPG group - a couple friends sitting around a coffee table eating junk food and listening to, I don't know, Led Zeppelin probably. When you play D&D around a table, you're not going to get 25 people to play - that sounds awful.

And granted, part of the appeal of doing this via computer is that you can handle these huge groups.

But I wish that raid did not come at the expense of dungeons.

Anyway, I'd like there to be meaningful rewards behind running dungeons. Garrison resources ain't going to do it - it needs to be something that leads to greater character power, and that means gear.