Dungeon kills give 20% more experience
Monsters in dungeons give 20% more experience in World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard also fixes a bug that based the experience per kill on the highest level in the group. Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield announced both changes on 8 October.
Greenfield, known as Aggrend, named the 20% in the third episode of The WoW: Forever Podcast, which is mostly about dungeons. He announced the bug fix the same day on X, because it did not come up in the podcast. In which build the changes arrive, is not known.
The bug with the highest level
In earlier beta builds, every kill gave experience based on the highest level in the group. Greenfield gives an example: in The Deadmines with four players of level 20 and one of level 25, each kill gave very little. After the fix, each player gets experience based on their own level against the monster, as intended.
Together with the 20%, dungeons should feel “significantly better”, says Greenfield. Experience will not be what it was in Classic Era. With perfect play for experience per hour, levelling in dungeons is now very close to the best questing, or as fast.
No dungeon cleaving to 60
Some players want to level to 60 by cleaving through dungeons. That does not fit the core pillars of Forever, says Greenfield, and Blizzard holds firm on it. He names two of those pillars: “World is the Main Character” and “Nurture and Protect Social Experiences”. Once dungeons become the clear winner, it changes how players behave, he writes.
Senior Game Designer Rowan Ryder of the encounter team explains the idea in the podcast. A dungeon should not be a one-time visit, but grinding dungeons should not be the best way to play either:
We will continue to tweak it and we will continue to keep an eye on feedback, but importantly, just grinding dungeons isn’t the optimal way to play. We want to make sure there is a reason to go into the outside world, there’s a reason to hang out with different people, do different things, have different experiences, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of dungeons feeling unrewarding or unexciting to play.
The beta is still being tuned, Ryder adds. Experience from dungeons was a point of discussion from the start: in September, Blizzard moved experience from kills to quests, and since the build of 1 October dungeon quests give 50% less extra experience. Blizzard’s statement on gold buyers comes from the same podcast.
Source: Wowhead