WoW Forever dungeons: 20% more kill XP and a bug fix

Dungeon XP is going up in the WoW: Forever beta. On October 8, Senior Game Designer Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield announced two changes on X: dungeon kills will give about 20% more XP, and a bug that cut kill XP for anyone grouped with a higher-level player is being fixed. Neither change has a build or date yet.

What's changing

About 20% more XP from dungeon kills. Aggrend described it as a "20% increase to base kills in dungeons", and Forever designer Johnny Cash confirmed a "~20% kill xp increase". Both posts are about dungeon kills; neither mentions mobs in the open world.

Kill XP now follows your own level. In WoW, a kill gives less XP the more you out-level the mob. In earlier beta builds, the game worked out every player's kill XP from the highest-level person in the group. Aggrend's example: four level 20s running The Deadmines with one level 25 got "extremely low" XP per kill, because the mobs were measured against the level 25. With the fix, you "receive XP based on your level relative to the mob as intended." Groups whose players were all the same level were never affected.

Together, Aggrend wrote, the two changes "should make it feel better and more even."

Dungeon quest XP stays where it is. This news is only about kills. The October 1 beta build halved the bonus XP that dungeon quests give on top of normal quest values, after Blizzard heard a lot of feedback that testers were leveling too fast. Nothing announced this week changes that.

Dungeons will match questing, not beat it

Leveling in dungeons still won't be as fast as it was in Classic Era. "XP gain is not going to be what it was in era, but it should feel significantly better now," Aggrend wrote.

After the changes, a group playing for perfect XP per hour should level in dungeons "very close, if not equal to the speed you can level with optimal questing play." In Aggrend's words: "That's how much better it was to level in dungeons in Era."

Blizzard won't go further than that. Some players want to "dungeon cleave" to 60, meaning they level almost entirely by running dungeons and killing big pulls of mobs at once. Aggrend said that playstyle being the optimal way to level "does not pass that muster" with Forever's core pillars, and "we need to hold firm on these balance adjustments."

The two pillars are "World is the Main Character" and "Nurture and Protect Social Experiences." Once dungeons become the clear winner, Aggrend wrote, "it has a cascading effect on player behavior." On the podcast the developers put the goal simply: they want players to have "a reason to go into the outside world."

Johnny Cash apologized for the slow answer to the many questions about dungeon XP, saying the team "needed to dial in the numbers before sharing." Then came the short version: "We want the open world to be lively, but dungeons are fun, too!"

On the podcast

Dungeon XP was also the first big topic of Episode 3 of the WoW: Forever Podcast, posted the same day. The developers said they had seen the frustration on the forums, Reddit and social media, that the beta "is being tuned actively", and they confirmed the roughly 20% increase to kill XP. They want dungeons to be worth running more than once, but they don't want the whole game to be running the Scarlet Monastery Cathedral 50 times from level 30 to 50. The bug fix didn't come up on the show, which is why Aggrend posted about it afterwards.

Browse every Forever instance in our dungeon database.

Sources

Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield on X: dungeon XP bug fix and design reasoning (October 8)
Johnny Cash on X: dungeon XP is increasing (October 8)
World of Warcraft on YouTube: Dive into Dungeons with Devs | Episode 3 - The WoW: Forever Podcast (dungeon XP from about 7:30)
Blizzard forums (Kaivax): WoW Forever Beta Development Notes, October 1 build

Source: Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield on X.