I hate to say it, but normal 5-player dungeons just aren’t very challenging anymore.
For the sake of discussion, I call a dungeon “challenging” for a group of players if there’s some reasonable doubt about whether they can, with a moderate level of cooperation, preparation, and skill, successfully complete all of the encounters in that dungeon. Or, to put it another way, it’s challenging if there’s is a chance that they might fail to complete at least one encounter without extraordinary effort, careful play, and good teamwork.
So when I say that normal 5-player dungeons aren’t very challenging, what I mean is that a randomly-selected group of poorly-geared, unskilled, and uncooperative players, put into a 5-player dungeon by the Dungeon Finder tool, can reasonably expect to complete all of the encounters inside, without any fuss. I can only assume this is intentional on Blizzard’s part, since many players do not seem to be interested in challenges, especially while levelling. (Witness how many people silently drop group at the first sign of a wipe). But it also means that a moderately skilled group of four friends, queuing up in the hope of stretching their limits a bit, is bound to be a bit disappointed.
It was in this spirit that some friends and I found ourselves looking for ways to push beyond the gentle boundaries of the Dungeon Finder, to find something we could do with our growing alts that would let us feel a little less like well-insured steamroller-operators, and more like brave and heroic adventurers facing daunting odds. After all, it’s hard to be thrilled at victory if there’s no chance of defeat.
We tried a number of things, and learned some lessons, which perhaps you might find useful as well.
Lesson 1: Avoid the Well-Trodden Path
One of the first things we noticed is that the “random dungeon” option of the Dungeon Finder tool never puts you anyplace difficult. As much as we enjoyed getting the Satchels of Dubiously Helpful Goods, it quickly became clear that random choice would always prefer instances with mobs around our level. If you look at the list of dungeons available for explicit queuing, you see that LFD almost always opts you into the ones that are at the “green” level of difficulty.
If you’re seeking challenge, then, don’t queue at random: Instead, pick which instances you’d like to go to, and queue for them explicitly. Always favour the highest-level dungeons available to you. A good rule of thumb is: Try to go places where the boss loot requires a higher level than you currently are.
Lesson 2: Take Off the Training Wheels
Even if you queue explicitly for higher-level dungeons, the Dungeon Finder won’t let you get into too much trouble. For example, while it is perfectly possible to zone into Sethekk Halls at level 63, LFD will never put you there until everyone in your party is at least level 65. Likewise, you can zone into the Forge of Souls at level 75, but LFD will not let you queue for it till level 80.
If you’re queuing for the highest-level dungeons you can, and still aren’t finding the kind of excitement you want, skip the Dungeon Finder completely: Once you reach the minimum level to enter, get a friend with the Have Group Will Travel guild perk to summon you to the meeting stone outside your favourite instance, and walk right in. Remember: Your aggro radius may be bigger than you’re used to. Also? You’re crittable, crushable, and you’ll miss a lot. It’s great!
Lesson 3: Run One Player Down
Running Magister’s Terrace at level 65 is a lot of fun, but if you really need to get your pulse rate up, you can also try doing it with a group of four instead of five. Our four-player group made it through all three five-player wings of Tempest Keep with no wipes, but we got destroyed by a very bad double trash pull in Magister’s Terrace (the room just before Priestess Delrissa, if you must know). The whole instance was delightfully harrowing, and we had a blast. Similarly, we had a really rough time of it as a four-player group in Forge of Souls at level 75 (another wipe, this time on the Devourer of Souls, after a fairly close call on James Brown Bronjahm).
So if riding the bottom edge of the entry bracket isn’t edgy enough for you, try cutting your group down a player or two, and see how you can do. You may be pleasantly surprised at how difficult it can be.
Lesson 4: Swim in a Bigger Pond
At level 70, mostly as a joke, the four of us rode out to Karazhan. We figured we’d try a few trash pulls, maybe take a few attempts against Attumen and Moroes, and get the tarnation beaten out of us. After all, it’s a raid instance, with boss-level mobs, intended for ten players. Back in the Burning Crusade days, casual raid groups often took two nights to clear all ten of the boss encounters inside Medivh’s old castle. Also, it’s such a lovely instance, full of great atmosphere and spooky music.
It turns out that four or five level 70 characters can clear the entire raid, including the dreaded Prince Malchezzar (“madness has brought you here to me!”), in a single evening of fun. We started out with four, but it turns out none of us had completed the quest that allows you to summon Nightbane, so we invited another friend along who had done it. We didn’t even wipe, although several times we had some individual deaths.
The lesson here is, don’t be afraid to try something radical: The Northrend raids aren’t available until level 80, but the early Burning Crusade ones will let you in the door at level 68, and nowadays, almost all the attunement requirements have been removed. You will not get very good experience from raid content, but if you’re looking for some harder fights, this is one way to find them. (I should note, though, that we had a harder time in Magister’s Terrace than we did in Karazhan).
Lesson 5: “When I asked if you had BG experience…”
Another way to get a challenge is to step outside the dungeon world completely, and queue up for some battlegrounds. Diving into the level 70-74 bracket with no PvP gear at all was a breath of fresh air. To be certain, we suffered some defeats, but the experience really made clear to me the power of cooperation to surpass the limits of gear. By the time we got to level 74, we all had plenty of appropriate PvP gear, purchased out of the honor we’d won from random battlegrounds.
Unlike the Dungeon Finder, the Random Battleground finder always puts you into a level-appropriate place. So, if you feel like a change, PvP can be a great way to play with your friends and learn some new skills.
Wrapping it All Up
What I hope you’ll take away from this is that, even though running dungeons at their “appropriate level” may not be much of a challenge, with a few like-minded friends and a little motivation, you can still make your own fun, and find some worthy opponents to fight.
Unlike real heroics, there are no achievements for these kind of “hand-made” heroics, except perhaps the bragging rights you get among your guildies for receiving the Northrend Dungeonmaster at level 75. Really, though, the achievements we get points for aren’t as exciting as the ones we make for ourselves: Those are the ones that make for fun and geeky party tales long after the “Achievement Unlocked” window has faded away.
So, go forth, Heroes! And conquer!
If you’re seeking challenge, then, don’t queue at random: Instead, pick which instances you’d like to go to, and queue for them explicitly. Always favour the highest-level dungeons available to you. A good rule of thumb is: Try to go places where the boss loot requires a higher level than you currently are.
If you’ve the time and inclination, you could always just bypass the LFD and enter an instance the old fashioned way. Or, make sure you get the start of a chopped up instance –like, say Mara– and go all the way to the end. That’s how I ended up getting the Blackrock Depths achieve on Neve at level.
And I’ll second MgT. The bosses weren’t so much the issue as the mobs were, if you ask me.
I agree! See Lesson 2.
The guild summoning perk has really taken a lot of the pain out of doing dungeons manually.
Awesome list of suggestions! How to make dungeons hard is a topic close to my heart, particularly these days, when many dungeons can literally be completed using movement keys and one other ability button.
Additional suggestions if you want to make it even harder (and I’ve done all of these):
I’ve featured this article over on the MMO Melting Pot today.
Thank you for the referral!
I’ve never tried Psynister’s “iron man” challenge, but you’re right that it could be a fun way to up the ante without a bigger dungeon.
I’ve tried no-healer heroics, but never no-tank dungeons—that sounds like it would get quite interesting.
DPS-only dungeons are awesome. If you want to learn threat control, kiting and ALL your abilities, they’re the way to go.
I still regret we didn’t call our guild “lols we all just DPS”.
I remember my H:MgT group in TBC. I was tanking on my bear, I had a paladin healer, we had a mage for CCing the humanoids, a Warlock to control the demons and a rogue for Sap. We would run the instance almost every night, and it was a blast – we used to call it “mini-Kara” because the fights were interesting and each one required a different kind of strategy, the drops were useful, the content was fun and challenging, and there was the cut-scene with the orb, KT’s speech at the end, that we all knew by heart, and the chance of random mount and pet and cosmetic item drops – all in one dungeon. Even the trash was painful – remember clearing the courtyard before the last two bosses? Or the final pull before KT which had to go PERFECTLY with all the CC and the order of kills and the interrupts and LoSing?
I fully appreciate that you can’t put that much effort in every single dungeon maybe, but that was the pinnacle of 5-man design for me. When I didn’t have my regular 5-man, I used to PUG it and nobody had a problem with working on it for an hour or two and only getting maybe 3 bosses down before calling it. Or having on-server friends on your FList if guildies weren’t on that you could pull in.
You know what dungeon felt kind of like this at Cata launch? H:Grim Batol. That place was punishing in greens. The trash hit hard with all the caster elementals, you had to CC at least a few of the pulls, and the last two bosses were hell in PuGs for about 2 months. The Trolloics were like that for about 2 weeks before they got the massive nerfs.
However. I really wonder how much people who weren’t raiding at least a little bit and running dungeons and gearing from badges enjoyed H:MgT. Normal MgT was hard enough for those folks and, well. I don’t know. There’s the question of people just flat out being unable to see that content.
I don’t know that there’s a clear answer here – but yes, I do agree that having harder content for people who want it would be appreciated. Especially if I want challenging and fun stuff to do on non-raid nights.
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I’ve never really had a problem with dungeon difficulty — I can do the harder stuff, and it’s fun once in a while, but I wouldn’t like it to be the norm — but I do appreciate you taking your gameplay into your own hands like this. One of my pet peeves with the “hardcore” (at least in their own eyes) section of the fanbase is that they’re endlessly complaining about how easy the game is, but they won’t do anything to make it harder on themselves. “Lol, ICC sucked it was so easy.” “Did you ever turn off the buff?” “Of course not.”
I did something like this with questing, because I found it way too easy for me. I’m a bit odd in that I like my group content fairly faceroll but my solo content challenging. My solution was to level a warlock through quests without using pets, which turns out to be fairly awesome. Mind you, if I get really stuck or bored, I do swap over to demo spec and trash the place with my felguard, but nine times out of ten, I’m playing petlessly as destro and loving it.
You make an important point here, which I meant to be implicit in what I wrote, but never really said in so many words: I’m not calling for Blizzard to make a bunch of radical changes, or claiming that the existing content is bad. While I do think it might be nice to have a little bit more baseline challenge in the levelling dungeons and outdoor content, I agree with you that it’s not the only answer.