You can’t have some hate without love, so here’s the second part of my impressions of WoW’s Dungeon Finder — close encounters of the positive kind:
1. It Makes Me Less Timid
In the past, grouping took so long to get together and was so firmly dominated by the leader that I usually shut my mouth and played as a good little meek soldier. I guess I’m always pretty mindful of my reputation, so I never confronted puggers very often. The Dungeon Finder threw me 180 degrees in the opposite direction. No, I’m not some swaggering jerk (at least, I hope not!), but suddenly I’m incredibly not-shy about calling people out on bad behavior/gameplay, initiating a vote to kick if someone is truly hopeless, and rolling need on gear I really need without worrying if it’s going to upset other people. If I don’t like the group, or if they don’t like me, oh well — I can leave and re-queue. No biggies.
And when you’re willing to heal, another group is just a few seconds away.
2. Faster Runs, Better Gear
The random dungeon tool has incentives up the wahoo — it offers quicker access to a run, it gives you XP and gold and a satchel of goodies upon completion, and (best of all, IMO) it throws a 5% buff on your damage and healing for the duration of the run. This, combined with post-Wrath AOE tanking/DPSing means much faster runs, where hours are being pared down into half-hour, 45-minute segments.
And while I’ve rarely found a usable item in the mystery bag at the end of the run, I’m constantly upgrading gear through the dungeons in Outland — sometimes as many as four pieces of gear a night. I don’t even think about the gear, because the runs are so fast, so when I do get an upgrade it’s more of a surprise than something I was hoping for and anticipating.
3. Instant Accessibility
Here’s the double-edged sword of instant teleport activities in MMOs: on the down side, they break world immersion and make the world “smaller” for it; on the up side, everyone loves them because they save time. The Dungeon Finder simply cuts the fat of group formation, assembly, travel and prep by 99%. You can queue up from anywhere in the world, and when it’s ready, you instantly are taken to the dungeon, which you can leave at any point to instantly teleport back (to repair, get supplies or return at the end of the run).
This also adds loads of flexibility while leveling — I didn’t really want to repeat Outland content (which I’ve done a million times), so I’ve leveled from 58-67 mostly through random dungeons. And it’s proving to be just as fast, if not faster, than questing for XP.
Oh, please, do not do this. You’re tempting me even more to dig up my old BattleChest CDs and actually use that 7 free days. That would mean all the frustration that comes with patching. That probably induced the rage-deletion on my Alliance characters and a Horde reroll, grinding all the way up to RFC and running it over and over again with noobs. As a trivial conclusion, I’d smash my face to the screen repeatedly, finally breaking it. The leftover class pieced would injure me. Through the injuries, liquid crystal would get into my bloodstream and poison me, which would certainly turn out to be lethal. My family, finding my cold corpse, would hire the spiritual successor of Jack Thompson and make a lawsuit agains Blizzard. Blizzard would get fined so much that they’d go bankrupt. Due to their bankrupcy, the world’s economy would collapse. This collapse would lead to riots, civil wars and general pandemonium. The pandemonium would cause the opening of several Chaos Portals at the North and South Pole, through which Tzeench would destroy the whole universe.
I beg you, do not write more about dungeon finder, please! You’d be the one responsible for the takeover of Chaos on the universe…
Accessibility is the best thing about the LFG for me personally… although it does remove a lot of the immersion that should exist in a game world. I much prefer to meet up with players on a server that I can constantly keep in touch with and maybe even bump into but I suppose WoW never had to start with so really there’s not been any losses there
WFS,
I felt bad about that at first but than I realized that for me WoW hasn’t had the feeling since Classic. Personally when bgs become cross-server it was the first big change to not knowing everyone and it’s just continued down the line with server transfers, name changes, faction changes, etc.
But in the end, I have my guild and people I have know for awhile also PUG raids can sometimes get that feeling back.
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