WoW: Forever dungeon mobs no longer give EXP if they're trivial for anyone in the party

1 hour ago 17

Add us as a preferred source on Google

It's been something of a rollercoaster watching Blizzard tweak the experience rewards players can expect from dungeons in World of Warcraft: Forever. They've always been a reliable way to get oodles of experience and fat loots, but in Forever, the goal has seemingly been to ensure they're more of a supplement to regular questing and exploration.

Initially, mob experience values were nerfed pretty hard to compensate for a boost in quest experience, meaning that you'd get diminishing returns for spamming one dungeon over and over. Later, dungeon enemy experience was buffed by a lot, but not back to its pre-nerf value.

In a hotfix released yesterday, dungeon experience was tweaked yet again: "Killing enemies in dungeons now awards zero experience to all party members if the level of the enemy is trivial to the level of one or more of the party members," the note reads.

A mob is considered trivial in World of Warcraft when it's a significantly lower level than you (the exact threshold changes based on your level)—you'll know an enemy is trivial to your character when its level is displayed in a gray font.

This change seems aimed at higher-level players boosting their friends or a group of paying customers through instances, potentially offsetting the experience nerfs by clearing the dungeon and its quests much faster.

A potential problem with this is that in classic World of Warcraft, the roster of enemies in a given dungeon varies wildly in level, with some early trash mobs being much weaker than the bosses at the end. Blackrock Depths, for instance, has players killing everything from Grim Patrons which range from level 48-52 to Emperor Dagran Thaurissan, a level 59 elite mob. It's possible these values have been or will be tweaked in Forever, but if not, players might be less keen on forming groups with players outside narrow bands of levels close to their own.

Player opinions are mixed on the change.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

"Mad decision, it's like they don't want people to play with friends," said Lewis Ainslie in a post on X. On the other side, user Yunghonch said on X, that "everybody freaking out about this sounds like they're arguing against seatbelts."

Boosting might be an age-old tradition, but it remains as contentious as ever.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

Read Entire Article