World of Warcraft Dragonflight has been a breath of fresh air for players old and new. With clear separations from its preceding expansion, Shadowlands, Dragonflight found ways to make current players’ time feel like it’s being valued. Qualms with gearing have been mostly addressed with new ways to get more powerful without getting new loot. There is no more repetitive grinds that, if a day is skipped, one immediately feels like they’ve fallen behind. Even new catch-up mechanics are added in each patch to help returning players get gear faster to let them take on current content much more quickly than before. However, there has always been a sticking point that is finally being addressed in the upcoming patch, 10.2.5, Seeds of Renewal. Dungeons. The fix? Follower Dungeons.
Specifically, new players’ dungeons will get fixed with the new Follower Dungeon feature and can even improve expansion launches moving forward. What are Follower Dungeons? This new mode, coming only to the normal mode of dungeons, lets you tackle them as solo content with four non-playable characters filling out the rest of the roles needed to beat it. Three DPS NPCs and a tank will join you if you’re a healer. If you’re a Tank, you’ll be followed by a healer, three DPS NPCs, etc. At first glance, this could seem like a negative. A highly social game full of content that requires varying-sized groups of other players to conquer a challenge. Thankfully, this isn’t coming to raids or Heroic/Mythic dungeons, where the real challenge lies.
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So why is it such a great thing to be coming to World of Warcraft, and why is this a major positive for new players? By Day 2 of any new expansion, dungeons feel like they become a speedrun competition to get easy experience quickly. What should be new content that adds to or wraps up a zone’s story, with an incentive being additional experience and better gear compared to normal leveling quests, is trivialized. But if you linger even for a moment to listen to in-dungeon NPCs talking after beating a boss, you’ll quickly be left behind by the rest of the group, who may just want to get the dungeon’s experience and move on.
Dungeons are a fantastic place to really learn your class and role. Leveling as a healer in the greater world just means you’ll be able to survive longer while doing minimal damage. Leveling as a tank just means you can pull more mobs and slowly take them down while taking minimal damage. For DPS roles, you rarely get to learn your rotation while killing overworld mobs. By the time you really get neck-deep into your rotation, the mob is dead. Then you just start over again. Dungeons are the prime place to learn how exactly to play your class, your role, your specialization, and what changes you need to implement to become a better player. With Follower Dungeons, you can go at your pace without the stress of keeping up with other players, letting you learn what you want to learn during that experience.
Even for experienced players, follower dungeons are a great way for them to improve too. Think of it this way. Whenever you would like to try out a new specialization for your class, there is no good way to really learn it. By the time you would like to try something new, most dungeons are a cakewalk. And the ones that do require skill to complete, e.g., Mythic Plus dungeons, you can only participate in if you have a high enough rating for those dungeons and that season. There is no good middle ground to practice, learn your rotations, and set up add-ons to meet any need you need to get the hang of that new role or rotation you’re trying out. Follower Dungeons are a fantastic way to experiment now, allowing you to take the time to adjust any talents or tools as needed between pulls.
This is just the start for Follower Dungeons. In the future, I hope to see this feature come to raids that are no longer current content. Save for Fated Raids, first introduced in Shadowlands which gave raiders a chance to replay older raids for better, current gear, there is no purpose to go back to them. This quickly leaves players who don’t normally do the raids, or do the much more segmented Raid finder mode, out of major story elements. Unlike many other MMOs, World of Warcraft relies heavily on their raids as a pillar of end-game content. They aren’t just larger dungeons to complete with ten to thirty players. They are the culmination of a patch’s or expansion’s story, something many players look forward to experiencing first-hand and unlocking the end cinematic.
Capstoning in major revelations as to what we’ve been fighting against and what’s to come for Azeroth and our champions. Any player who’s missed an expansion and plays through one is missing key story details locked away behind an experience that very few people are doing at that point. Same for players who just miss a major patch completely. If you miss a raid tier and return for the following one, you’re just swamped with new quests that lead to a giant green portal before moving on to the next new area full of quests to complete. That’s a lot of questions left unanswered that aren’t satisfyingly given through Raid Finder at that point. Follower Dungeons are a great way to fix that and are a chance to close story holes that are left open by keeping major plot points locked within a raid.
If Blizzard is making a specific expansion the leveling experience for new players, as how Battle for Azeroth currently is and will soon be replaced by Dragonflight, shouldn’t those people who are leveling through that expansion to prepare for the current one know what all the key moments are and how they got there in-game through one fluid experience? Not just having to look up videos online if they’re confused? Follower Dungeons could be the way that Blizzard implements a system to let players fully enjoy everything World of Warcraft has to offer without having to play a Death Knight to be able to complete the last expansion’s raids on their own.
Until now, the changes to dungeons have served almost exclusively high-end players, with additions of Challenge Mode dungeons, Mythic Plus dungeons, and Mega Dungeons. Now, Follower Dungeons in patch 10.2.5 is the first time Blizzard is changing up dungeons for every player to make that initial dungeon and World of Warcraft experience a more welcoming one.
