Game Mechanics Dungeons.

Dungeons. They're in a really weird place right now. They used to be the epitome of end-game content, but it's been many years since raids and lootruns were added. The gameplay isn't that fun, the rewards aren't that good, and half of them have non-existent lore while the other half are underwhelming compared to what's hyping them up. When was the last time you played a dungeon? (not counting daily/weekly objectives) It was probably when you needed an item for a build, and you probably just played the dungeon over and over again until you had enough drops to buy it. Or worse, you wanted League and you thought "I'll just run GG a few times, SURELY it will drop from the sky."
Problem 1: They're way too predictable (in all the wrong ways)
Every single dungeon contains a set of rooms, all of which you must pass through, except in Sand-Swept Tomb, which has random rooms (more on that later). Every single time, you do all the rooms the same way, unless it's Sand-Swept Tomb or Timelost Sanctum (the more hyphens there should be in the name of the dungeon, the better the game design). Then once you've done that room, you do the boss, which is usually not too riveting either, and boom! You're at the front of the dungeon again, with a fraction of what you need for your next item/you have a random chance of getting what you want, no matter what. This is not that fun. Many dungeons require you to run them SIX TIMES and even I get tired of Antikythera's dialogue at that point. The other side of this coin is that a certain amount of wins will always give you what you want (and that will be talked about more in problem 2.)
Proposal 1: Rogue-like
yeah you heard me right
read me right, I guess. That's a little weird to think about. Anyways
Doors that lead to random rooms, each like a mini-challenge of sorts. Secret doors to secret rooms. Easy to see and hidden loot chests. Traps and exciting unpredictability! For this to work well, each dungeon would need a LOT of rooms. Eventually you'd have the chance to get the boss room, perhaps after completing 5-10 rooms the chance would go up, until it got so high you'd statistically get there pretty quickly. (Note: This suggestion is NOT to make every dungeon like SST. Only certain rooms are random, and it always picks from a list of related rooms. In this suggestion, there'd be no correlation like that.)
Problem 2: Game Design Infrastructure (Incentive)
I said it at the top. When was the last time you set foot in a dungeon that wasn't because of an objective? Probably when you were first doing the quest for whatever dungeon, and you probably hated it and never came back. Even back when I started playing in 2020, there was little to no incentive, although dungeons make up the bulk of early-game repeatable content, which is exactly why updating them should be a higher priority then it actually is.
Currently the dungeoneering gameplay loop is something like this: You need/want an item, you do the dungeon a bunch, you get the item. Dungeon items aren't that good to begin with, so this is not that common, ESPECIALLY now that Fruma exists and has zero dungeons, meaning that the worth of items relative to the time it takes to get them has gone down even more. Endgame players aren't going to be using many dungeon items besides, you know, Gaze From the Snowbank (which most who will end up needing probably ALREADY have) and a few other stand-outs.
Proposal 2: Loot
The fact that loot chests aren't in dungeons as they exist is kind of insane to me, but maybe that's because in my heart in my soul I still love Minecraft Dungeons I and the entire reason to run levels in that game is for gear. There's no such thing as a secret loot chest in Wynncraft, despite how cool that could be.
Implementing this could be as simple as adding chests to dungeons (not to infringe on Lootruns but...) and giving players running dungeons a small boost to loot quality. If the team wanted to put in a lot more work though, giving each dungeon its own personal loot pool (a lot bigger than the raid and lootrun exclusive items), I think that would go a much longer way towards making dungeons relevant again.
Problem 3: The Good, the Bad, the Outdated
In my six years of playing this game, the main rooms (not bosses) of Decrepit Sewers, Infested Pit, Underworld Crypt, Sand-Swept Tomb, Ice Barrows, Undergrowth Ruins, all the corrupted ones except Corrupted Galleon's Graveyard, Fallen Factory, and Eldritch Outlook have gone almost entirely unchanged. Which is insane, if you think about it. Heck, updating the bosses barely even helped because I'm betting the majority of players who played beforehand haven't run dungeons (see Problem 2) and newer players that died before they reached the boss rooms did not even experience them. I know I haven't played against Theorick at level.
Proposal 3: Apply Modern Principles Without the Pitfalls
Rotating loot pool. Reworked enemies and higher content standards. I wouldn't add an end rewards dungeon chest, because then dungeons will just feel like solo raids. (I'm aware that the forgery chest is older, but the forgery chest's game design is terrible because individual dungeons encourage you to run them multiple times and the forgery chest wants you to run them all without dying in three hours.) Maybe even take some inspiration from Minecraft Dungeons' Tower (combined with Proposal 1), because for all that that was a rock bottom of game design a rotating pool of rooms you can enter would make running the same dungeon on different weeks feel VASTLY different.
Side Bit: The Lore
The best argument I've heard for running dungeons in today's Wynncraft is that unlike in raids and lootruns, what you're doing is very clear: venturing into a dungeon to kill a deadly foe, who (except for Garoth) is hyped up by an entire quest. Oftentimes dungeons fall flat of this build up, which may be why there is still no Dulla Dungeon and why (in my personal opinion) an area that was a good fit for a dungeon (the void) got Seavale Reef 2.0 instead. Corrupted Dungeons, however, forsake this ONE benefit of playing a dungeon. I think dungeons should automatically scale, like raids and that Corrupted Dungeons should be flat-out removed. I'm unsure of how this would affect loot, but this isn't that big of a deal. I'm sure there are people with nostalgia for them, but they just don't fit in with the game at all. We can do level-scaling content, we don't need weird quasi-cannon pocket dimensions.

I think each of these proposals on their own would help, but together I think dungeons would be a LOT more interesting and a lot more people would play them. I won't end on this, though, it's tradtion.

Until my next wall of text.

 

They would have to rework every dungeon but they TOTALLY SHOULD

 

Gee, never done that before.

Dungeons feel really bad. The other day, I needed an item from one of the corrupted dungeons, and realized I need six tokens to get it. Six. I would need to run the dungeon six times in order to get a single item. For the record, this was for a meme build. Now, I'm not about the say that the game should be balanced around being able to make meme builds. But y'know what else it maybe should be balanced around? Being able to make creative builds. That's a huge part of the appeal of the game. As soon as you start demanding six dungeon runs (of a fairly long dungeon that even has forced waiting mechanics, just to really rub it in) of my time in order to get an item, you effectively say that I shouldn't use this item unless it's for a build I know I'm going to want to use for a considerable amount of time. If I ran a dungeon for half an hour to get an item. only to then learn that it wasn't actually that good? I'd be pretty discouraged from trying new stuff. This is worse for lower levels. The lower level dungeon items are, quite frankly, a joke. By the time you've done enough runs to get one, you're probably high enough level that you might as well just use a higher level item anyway. Nothing I love more than running the skeleton dungeon like 3 times only to realize that I could literally just go buy a better piece of gear in Detlas because I leveled up enough that it doesn't matter anymore.

The dungeons themselves also are super janky and outdated, as you noted, and doing them feels kinda painful. Half have some sort of annoying forced waiting mechanic built in to extend the runtime, almost all are just a really bad experience to go through, and none offer good rewards without spending and excessive amount of time running them repeatedly. Galleon's Graveyard is the only one that's actually kind of enjoyable to run, and with some small tweaks and fixes it would actually be more or less fine as it is (I haven't run Timelocked Sanctum yet actually).

Adding variety to the runs, updating the mechanics so that they aren't awful, and making it so that getting items wasn't a massive grind (1-2 tokens = 1 item would be fine I think) would make them actually a fun and important part of the game, as opposed to the weird, awkward sidelined bits of content they are now.

 

Timelost Sanctum doesn't have a hyphen in its name, and 'swept' really ought to be capitalised.

 

fixed

 

Galleon's Graveyard gestures at what seems to be the CT's idea of what a Better Dungeon should look like, but it doesn't fix the motivation issue and it was also, glaringly, never finished. The mode that was supposed to add more variable content does nothing except skipping cutscenes, thus constituting false advertising.

I like the idea of cutting Corrupted Dungeons entirely, but I suspect the Forgery itself is a hard darling to kill. It has a Secret Discovery, it's a prominent build in the Light Forest, it just got a new dungeon made with higher content standards. Plus, running multiple dungeons at once as an endgame activity can't be done if they're randomly distributed through the world; that's far too much walking to ask of the player. The idea of there being a Forgery which presents higher-level dungeons is probably sound, but someone with a merciless eye should take a look at it.

But, alright, I'll take a crack at it. What do I think a good model for the Dungeons is?

• Have no mercy. The only dungeons which should live are Galleon's Graveyard and Timelost Sanctum.
• Every dungeon should play substantially differently. Timelost Sanctum is our model here; it's unique, and that's why it's good. But there can only be one Timelost Sanctum. Every dungeon must have a solid gimmick that permeates all play in that dungeon. (Gimmicks like 'raisable barriers' and 'closable spider spawn points' and 'more enemies than usual' are not good gimmicks.)
• Every dungeon should be optimisable. If we're framing this as content endgame players will want to do, there needs to be a high skill ceiling.
• Every dungeon should have automatic difference between runs. For some dungeons, that would be random rooms. For others, that would be random room layouts. For ones like Timelost Sanctum, it doesn't need to be that prominent.
• Every dungeon should be similar in length. Otherwise you get Decrepit Sewers Syndrome around festival time.
• Every dungeon should have side objectives. Everyone loves a good side objective. And everyone loves a good secrets.
• Dungeon Fragments and Boss Items are clutter. Merge them. Cut out the item rain. It's just bizarre. The theme of a Dungeon's items should be singular and powerful. Raid rewards give you substantial augments that don't take traditional item slots (tomes, aspects), in addition to like random other stuff I guess. Lootruns give you a vast quantity of regular items, with the end chest being highly valuable ones if you built it up enough. Dungeons shouldn't resemble either of these, and the boss item theme provides a good reference for what they should be instead. You get two boss items per dungeon run, and items cost at maximum four. They're strong, but specific; they don't resemble other items. (There should also be, like, emerald conversion or something if you don't want these items or have excess boss bone.)
• There does need to be a Corrupted Dungeon system if you want to have endgame players running multiple different dungeons. But the Corrupted Dungeons kind of suck. They could be repaired, but there could also be a different theme. I'd argue that either Upgraded Dungeon Keys should drop whole from their guardians and not broken (with runes being an way to purchase them), or there should be a flat up-front cost that lets you try every dungeon in the set once, unless you die (to add a press-your-luck theme). Forgery Chest should probably stay, but ought to be low pull count.

 

Yeah fully agreed with this, I feel like the forgery is just kind of cheap/lazy feeling design wise. It’s not an inherently bad concept, revisiting lower level dungeons later on, but I don’t think it’s well executed. And yeah the dungeon grinds can be a lot, I definitely they should be max 2 runs for an item like you said. But some items may be cheaper than others of course.

As for the older dungeons (not TLS or GG), conceptually I think they’re mostly good, especially SST. Gameplay and build wise yeah they could use some touch ups, to say the least lmao. Underworld Crypt is probably my least favorite tbh, lore wise Charon is just kind of another generic bad guy. On the other hand I really like Sand-Swept Tomb, and honestly I’d say it holds up decently well today for being such an old piece of content lol. Except for the waiting/survive sections I won’t be sad to see those go

 

SST is pretty good, but the traps are just sad and have always been, and Hashr is just laughably easy.

 

Corrupted Dungeons can get blown up without killing The Forgery

 

Yes, that makes sense. Perhaps it could be Cosmic lore? Or it could depict, like, the dungeon if you didn't get involved?

 

I saw a rare constructive feedback post that was well thought out recently suggesting that the forgery should lean into the alternate reality aspect of it more heavily by giving the dungeon a unique theme/reality, as opposed to "The corruption overtook Wynn as well as the ocean and now everyone is dead and the world sucks." I believe some suggestions included were "What if the silent expanse and EO got overtaken by the light?" and "What if the Fallen Factory and Corkus came back under Avos control instead and the factory was reclaimed by nature?" I honestly think that giving thee dungeons each unique themes could be a major step forward to making dungeons a more enticing aspect of endgame Wynn, as at least now you're experiencing some more increased in colour and build style.

Dungeons in general need rebuilds imo.