World of Warcraft’s new Random Dungeon Finder might be the greatest feature that Blizzard has introduced to the game in my five years of playing. 
The system is not without its flaws, but overall, I’ve had just a fantastic time running through Heroics with PuGs.
This week, the blogosphere has been inundated with posts about the RDF, and I suppose now my blog is no different. But instead of singing irrational praises or complaining about what it could have been, I’m going to point you to the pros and cons as I’ve run into them.
Pros:
- Incredibly fast gearing. I have already been able to buy two pieces of my Tier 9 set as well as get halfway to another. I don’t so much care about the Emblems of Frost that come from the initial Random Dungeon; I care about the massive amount of Emblems of Triumph that comes from running chain randoms. It really helps (finally) balance out those who can raid hours on end and those who have half an hour to spend at a time. Sure, my T9/10 isn’t Heroic, but it’s enough to let me stay competitive and have fun without feeling inadequate. To me, that’s enough.
- Incredibly fast queuing. I never have to wait. As a healer, the longest queue I’ve sat in was 2 minutes. For a person who has as limited time to play as I do, this is a Godsend. I used to loathe trying to get the Daily Heroic done because of the LFG system combined with travel times. Now, I just pop in, get teleported to the instance, and get my heal on and over with in under half an hour, which is the number one reason I fell in love with WoW five years ago—quick, casual gaming that still gave a sense of accomplishment.
- Better, more efficient leveling. I made the mistake when Wrath of the Lich King came out of leveling my Death Knight to 80 and raiding with him. Then, when the healing bug hit me like it always does, I had a buddy who wanted to play WoW level my Shaman because he loved the class. I, however, wanted a Priest, but he wouldn’t touch it, and since I had no time, I refused to look that gift horse in the mouth. Now, however, I still want that Priest. He’s at level 73, but I hate leveling through Northrend. I thought about PvP grinding him, but XP was nerfed. Enter RDF: it took 6 minutes to get an instance to heal while I was questing in Grizzly Hills. I now have a real way to get my Priest to 80 before Cataclysm that won’t make me poke my eyes out with sporks.
Cons:
- Tomb-like silence. I’m a pretty social guy. I’m a talker. The people are the entire reason to play an MMO, if you ask me, but in these RDF PuGs, it’s all business. We should all know our jobs, do them, and keep conversation to a minimum; talking affects speed. The most conversation I’ve had with a group is when the Tank called one of the DPS a douchebag and tried to get us to vote him out. …On second, thought, maybe the tomb-like silence is a positive.
- Skipping bosses; missing Emblems. Because the RDF has now become an efficiency machine where human error is not tolerated, lengthy sessions of doing things like killing bosses has also become passé. I can understand skipping an incredibly annoying optional boss, but I was in a group in Halls of Lightning where they wanted to skip the first boss who wanders along the bridges. He’s easy! It wasn’t a time vs. Emblem of Triumph value; it was just being so dead-set on getting to the finish line that they couldn’t be bothered to play the game. This situation has come up in other instances, too, and that makes me worried about the future of this system and the unwritten rules by which it is governed.
- Easy to burn out. Immediately before I sat down to begin this post, I had the thought: “I have enough time for one quick random dungeon since I just finished grading finals.” Unfortunately for me, that was one too many random dungeons . As soon as I was teleported to Drek’Tharon Keep, I knew I did not want to be there, Emblems or no Emblems, spare time or no spare time. But I trucked along, had a fast 15 minute run, and promptly logged off. Because of the quickness and newness of the Random Dungeon Finder, it’s very easy to hit critical mass from trying to grind out that next piece of gear. Remember, everything in moderation. Even awesomeness.
All in all, I am supremely happy with the RDF. None of the detriments I’ve found so far are enough to detract from the fun I’ve had just being able to actually log on and do something when I have a few minutes. The feature is worth its weight in gold for that alone. The badges and gear are just icing on the cake.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I just posted a tongue-in-cheek survival guide based on experiences like what you’ve outlined. I had forgotten to include the “type in Hi or something” because they cold, calculated efficiency of good runs really offsets the social value I take away from the game. And skipping bosses is a pain. Yeah, some of them just want the Frost for the daily. But some of us (like you Beej!) are way happy with the Triumph. Have you run across the final loot issue? A few times someone has bailed the second the boss is down, and even after rolling Need/Greed on the orb and purple and waiting around for he loot timer, we get nothing. Very irritating, since I’m burning through enchanting mats like crazy upgrading everyones’ new lootz!
Good read. Thank you!
Real Big Kitty´s last blog ..3.3 Random LFG Survival Guide
Heading over right now to read it, RBK.
No, I haven’t had that loot issue at all. I’ve had people bail, but after we waited around, the loot eventually defaulted to the 4 who were still in the run. I hate to hear that’s happened to you. Come on over to Ner’Zhul, and I’ve got a ton of Frozen Orbs and shards sitting in my bag just waiting to be thrown on some T9/10 you can have.
I still think this feature puts too much focus on dungeon running.
World of Warcraft or Dungeons of Warcraft? What do you play, and what do you want to play?
This does not mean I think this feature is bad – it is awesome. I just see some dangers in this development.
I dunno, WoW had already put so much emphasis on dungeon running, this only smooths out the process. 5 years ago, Blizzard decided that the “world” aspect of WoW needed the instancing because of the camping problems the original EQ had with public dungeons. I just see 3.3 as a refinement of the system instead of a detriment.
To me, there’s not really a lot more “world” feeling by clicking a flight path and tabbing out while I head to the dungeon than there is with just teleporting there. Sure, flight paths were neat and I watched every dip and dive of the gryphon 5 years ago. But that newness has worn thin, and I just want to play my game.
But then again, I come from an Ultima Online background where we could easily recall across the world from the beginning as long as we had marked runes. So I’ve never had a huge connection to the “feeling” of a world through travel.
Do you remember UO players doing any dungeon runs? There were some, but they were not all that mattered. There was a whole world, even if we could basically teleport around like crazy.
The dungeons were a part of the world, and you could enter them alone, in a group, all that. Now we need to have them instanced so that only the party has to worry about loot distribution?
Tank & Spank in multiples of 5 was not what brought me to MMO gaming.
I did love how they were part of the world. But I would also go get groups (usually me and two others) and go hunting ancient wyrms in Destard or Balrons in Hythloth.
They really started trying to make it a group game with Champion Spawns, which were great fun in a group, actually.
But I see your point. The idea of a dungeon being a social thing between friends may be on the way out, with guilds raiding being the main place that kind of socialization takes place. And that puts people like you and me out because I can’t make a whole lot of raids.
Bingo, you got my point. You also reminded me of something else. Due to Moongates, Recall and all the many other options it was so much easier to form a group anywhere or call for help. In fact so fast that using instant messengers like ICQ was forbidden on some private servers.
It’s great for tanks or healers. For DPS, however, it’s a little slow. We’re talking 7-9 minutes even off prime time, and even longer if you want a specific instance (13 minutes+ for Halls of Reflection T_T).
That being said, I like it. I agree with the burnout. I’m doing at least one random on each of my three 80’s per day, and anything more feels like ‘oh god kill me in the face’. Still, it’s a great system for what it does. I can’t argue with free T9 or free crusader orbs to craft ilvl 245 gear with.
Yeah, I haven’t even tried to do it on my DK yet. I have thought about it, but keep feeling the “this time would be better spent gearing my Shaman” and always do that one more.
I’m only 14 badges away from T9 4-piece, so once that happens, I might be able to start saving for Orbs to get some off-set gear crafted.
I agree with all of this. Since I heal and Patrick tanks, we get groups in a split second. Some other guildies and I queued up as dps and waited 20 mins and gave up. I guess it didn’t really fix the problem of no tanks and no healers
But, since I know my and my tank’s strengths, we chain pull huge groups and finish just after the dungeon debuff wears off. It’s nice.
Oh, but I have been put in the same instance more than once, and SURPRISE there are no bosses. That is balls.
No bosses? That’s very much a bug because the RDF is supposed to override any lockouts you’ve accumulated during the day. You still get saved by using random so you can’t specify that dungeon again, but you’re supposed to be able to do it again if it’s random. I’d submit that one to Blizzard.
Yeah, it isn’t supposed to do that, but we got put in the same Gundrak instance 3 times in a row! This was last weekend (I don’t have time to really wow during the week because of work ‘n’ such), and surely they fixed that on Tuesday. If not, I’ll definitely be GMing in the next few days.
Have you tried the new 5 mans yet? They’re not as good as the system but at least HoR has an epic feel to it.
I have done the first two. I haven’t tried HoR, though. Casey told me it wasn’t too PuG friendly, and I haven’t been able to find a guild run.
I have to admit that I haven’t been able to use the feature yet due to the fact that my desktop died
It looks awesome and I’m very excited about trying it out!
We Fly Spitfires´s last blog ..EVE Online – Tempting Me Back With A Zephyr
I hate the thing. I can’t use it because it includes hard, non-heroic dungeons that you need to be geared for in the regular random dungeon list and doesn’t tell you. So I caused a whole lot of groups to not work out without even knowing it was my fault! And now I can’t use the thing, not knowing whether I’ll be able to even DO the dungeon it gives me. Not impressed at all Blizzard.
I thought they implemented something in the code to make it so that each player in a group had to be geared well enough to enter a dungeon. But I suppose that could be for just the max level Heroics instead of non-Heroics, which would kind of make sense.
I hate to hear that it caused you so much problems, though. I would have thought Blizzard would’ve planned better than that.