Is Blizzard risking “Dungeon Fatigue”?

I’ve been one of the many singing the praises of Blizzard’s decision to put the Dungeon Finder tool in WoW patch 3.3. It’s been amazingly fun for the most part, although the antisocial among us have a special way of rearing their heads in these dungeons, and it’s also been amazingly productive. My newly 80 warlock is now geared basically as well as my raiding shaman was. Tark’s new priest has exceeded her raiding mage’s item level.

So a whole new world has opened up to us. While I’m not one of those that thinks that 3.3 will trivialize guilds, I do believe it is changing the role of the guild. Guilds will no longer have division between the geared and the ungeared in the sense that the geared will be able to do things and the ungeared cannot. Unless you are one of the lucky ones whose guild is helpful to new 80′s you had to find your own heroics groups and get your own gear until such time that you reached a gear level that is appropriate for doing what the more-geared people in your guild are up to. That used to be difficult, and could cause division in the guild between the haves and the have-nots.

Now with the dungeon finder your new 80 can gear themselves relatively easily. All you have to do is run a lot of PUGs with the Dungeon Finder and collect the emblems you need and whatever gear drops, and before you know it you will also have the gear you need to do more with the guild or others you want to run with.

So what does that have to do with the title? That’s a fair question. In the past, if you could get 2 or three heroics in that wasn’t a bad night’s work. Between getting a group together, traveling, doing whatever else you needed to do, and turning in quests you had a good chunk of time that got eaten. Last night, Tark and I ran that many after we were done doing everything else we had going on that day, which included messing on alts, doing some glyph making and posting, running a couple of raids with the guild (our first Ony 25 on the new toons!) and whatever else we wanted to do we still had time to do those runs.

On other days, we have run a LOT of heroics. Tark is nearing 100 runs. In (less than) a week. So here is where my inner grouch starts to worry. Are we going to get tired of running instances? Is this going to make it harder to bring up a new character because DEAR GOD, if I have to run Oculus again I’m going to jab a fork in my eye? OK, the Oculus example is probably not the best one, since I already felt like that, but I do worry that we are in danger of burning content, premium content, faster than they can create new stuff. And while we are all having fun now, what is to keep us from getting dungeon burnout.

Right now the queues are relatively short and everyone is playing, but what is going to happen when everyone is all badged up and not as many people need heroics any more? I think it’s going to slow down, but it is going to be OK. Why do I think that? Well it was near impossible to get a BC dungeon before, and it’s not hard to get them now with the dungeon finder. I think that’s how the Northrend intances will end up.

One bonus: I think more people will roll up more healers and tanks, or at least alt spec them. The one thing that holds up the queues is a lack of one or the other of these. I know I alt-specced my Ret Pally to Prot, and found out I am one hell of a bad tank. That’s bad as in stinky. Hopefully I’ll get it figured out but thanks to the helpful paladin that was on his alt who gave me some advice. And stuck with the group until the dungeon was done.

-Genda