A week on, WoW Forever's dungeon XP nerf has over 1,000 forum posts and no Blizzard reply

When the beta opened, we reported that Forever moves leveling experience out of dungeons and into quests, and that players were unhappy. A week later it is the biggest running argument on the beta forums, and the shape of the complaint has changed.

The numbers

Four threads carry most of it:

Thread	Posts	Views
We need to talk about Dungeon XP in Forever	784	5,409
Dungeon xp - solution	180	854
The Dungeon Mob XP Nerf Is Backfiring	73	1,169
Congrats, you just made boosting the meta instead of killing it	29	1,231

That is over a thousand posts, and no Blizzard reply in any of them. The team has answered forum threads about mob tagging, respec costs and the auto-shot bug in the past week, so the silence here stands out.

The original complaint

The opening post of the largest thread puts a number on it: 36 experience for killing an elite in a dungeon. The argument is about effort against reward. Dungeon elites are harder than open-world mobs, need a group of five, and can wipe you, but pay less than questing.

The poster’s own framing is the one most repeated in the thread: if I wanted to just quest, I would just quest. Mixing dungeon runs with questing is how a lot of people have levelled since 2004, and that mix is what the change discourages.

The new argument: it protects boosting

The more interesting turn is the claim that the nerf fails at its own goal. Blizzard’s stated aim is to stop players spamming dungeons to level, and to hurt boosting. Players say it does the opposite:

• Quest experience stayed high. A level 60 can stack shareable dungeon quests, run a group through, and everyone collects large one-off quest rewards while barely touching the trash.
• The repeat run is what boosters sell. As one reply puts it, boosters do not make money running someone through once, they make money when the same person pays again and again. Low trash experience does not stop that, it just makes the honest version worse.
• One thread title sums up the mood: Congrats, you just made boosting the meta instead of killing it.

Blizzard did close one hole in build 70009: dungeon quests that could be shared to hand the receiving player a free quest item were fixed. The experience question was untouched.

The part that affects your groups

The most practical point comes from the Backfiring thread. Tanks and healers are the hardest roles to fill, and once they have finished a dungeon’s quests, there is little reason to go back unless a specific item is in there. If the second and third run pays badly, the people everyone needs stop queueing first.

One tester describes exactly that after a morning of Hall of Thanes runs: the group was happy to go again, but the later runs felt noticeably less rewarding.

The other side

The threads are not one-sided, and the counter-arguments are sharp:

• It is working as intended. Blizzard said it does not want dungeon spam to be the leveling path. Low trash experience is the mechanism, not a bug.
• Most people never cleared dungeons anyway. Plenty of Classic groups ran Deadmines once and moved on, so the nostalgia for full clears is partly a modern habit.
• The world is the point. Several posters argue that the open world empties out when dungeon grinding is the fastest route, and Forever’s whole pitch is that the world is the main character.

What players are proposing

The threads converge on a few ideas rather than a simple revert:

1. Shift the balance back a little. Cut quest experience slightly, put some of it back into dungeon mobs.
2. Daily boss bonus. Large experience from each dungeon boss, once per day per boss, as Hardcore does, so repeat runs stay possible but are not the fastest path.
3. Fix boosting at the source. Scale experience properly when a high-level player is in the group, rather than taxing everyone.

Where it stands

The level cap is still 20, so most of this is being argued from the first stretch of the game. The next full beta update is where a change would appear, and Blizzard has already shown in this beta that it will move on respec costs and wand tuning after a week of complaints.

Until then, our leveling guides are built around the current numbers: quests first, dungeons for their quests and their drops.