I don’t get time walking dungeons

I’m not against them, I just don’t really want to do them.

I ran a few of these yesterday between raids and other whatnot and was realizing that I didn’t enjoy them. I was thinking about why they didn’t appeal to me and came up with a few different things.

Wait, I was just here

Since I am an altoholic, I run all of those dungeons being used for time-walking pretty often. If you are someone that has 1 main (mind = boggled) or a few alts but they are all close to the same level, you are probably up to date on current content but maybe not doing much with older content. I have characters in all sorts of ranges so I see all of the dungeons on a fairly regular basis. For me, this isn’t a big, exciting trip back to something fun that I haven’t done in years. It’s an exciting trip back to last week.

Reward vs Risk

Since you can’t count on a warforged piece (although I did get lucky once yesterday) it is safe to say that any reward you get out of the dungeon will be 660 ilvl. If the entire party is below 660 (so the ones that would benefit from the dungeon), the level of struggle to get those new 660 pieces may not be worth it, or even possible depending upon the group. If you are overgeared, you probably aren’t getting much out of it. It’s not that there shouldn’t be challenge; I’m fine with that. I’m just not clear on who the challenge is for.

Tumbleweeds in party chat

The social aspect of the game is really down. Now, as someone that enjoys a fair bit of solo WoW, this shouldn’t bother me in principal. And I do think some of the calls about the social aspect of WoW are a bit over the top. However, even though I (generally) like questing alone, I understand that dungeons are group content. And I always try to type hello or whatever in the group when I enter. And I’ll usually get one, maybe two responses. And then off to the silence.

It’s not that this type of thing never happened before, but it just seems so much more so. Even when LFD first came out, people talked and were generally nice (for WoW). But to have a nice group of people that talk or interact at all is so rare anymore.

To be fair, this isn’t unique to time-walking dungeons and is present in all dungeons.

L2dps noob

When people aren’t being quiet, they are likely being jerks. It isn’t just dps, tanking and healing get it too. There is this very unkind mentality to players that do not meet some imagined minimum standard. It’s not that people were always kind and welcoming in Wrath, far from it. But it did seem like there was more room for error. For learning. In the current time walking dungeon, I think it is because people are expected to have played in Wrath so they are expected to know everything right away.

This isn’t about the lunk heads who just yell “gogogo” or think they can pull the entire room without heals. It’s about players who don’t read damage logs or wowhead or watch videos. There’s nothing in game that indicates what the challenge of a time-walking dungeon will be and when those people enter and get hit by the situation, their teammates are far from forgiving.

Again, not unique to time-walking dungeons, but it is most definitely a reason I dislike dungeons.

You can never really go back

I was there when the content was new, so I remember when I was still learning the layout of dungeons, the excitement of new types of enemies, and the new stories being told. All of that newness is gone, so it doesn’t have that excitement about it.

In addition to that, I was also in a guild with friends when this content was current. Those friends have moved on now but being back in those areas is always a little bittersweet.

I think they just aren’t for me. I’ve read a few people that started in Mist of Pandaria or Cataclysm and so they didn’t really spend much time in Wrath and never when it was new. So for them, this is content is a good challenge. And that’s great. Again, I’m not against the dungeons and I’ll likely try to do the run 5 dungeons quest and see what the reward is. But if I don’t get anything really good or the investment is too high, they’ll just be something I rarely, if ever, do.

One last note about why I don’t like them. Since I find the overall story here in WoD to be lacking at best, re-running these other dungeons from expansions with lots of good and engaging story, really makes me notice the lack of one here. Especially when I’m literally leaving current content to go do old content.
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As I was writing this I noticed a few people have been writing about time-walking dungeons too. I'm sure others have too but I haven't found them yet. So I'm off to read these and see what they think and perhaps search out some more opinions.

Growing up in Azeroth - A Walk back in Time
Rambling thoughts about WoW - Wrath Timewalking
The Grumpy Elf - Historical Revisionism: The Wrath Time Walker Dungeons