The Future of WoW's Dungeons

From Wailing Caverns to Sunken Temple, instances across Azeroth are getting an overhaul.

Raiding is kind of a big deal in World of Warcraft. If you're one of the millions of players who have hit WoW's level cap, you know that after you've filled that last bar, your means of moving up is through one of WoW's many dungeons and raids. Each new set of dungeons in the game represents new challenges as well as a new, stronger tier of loot.

At BlizzCon 2010, a panel was held that discussed the future of raids and dungeons in World of Warcraft. While it was known that the classic dungeons Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines would be redone for max level players, details of changes made to other dungeons were revealed. If you have a favorite dungeon from World of Warcraft, you might want to get as much time in there as you can right now, as changes will be wide-sweeping and in some cases drastic.

Most of the alterations are hitting the excessively long dungeons. Dungeons like Mauradon and Uldaman are being split into wings like the newer dungeons, while others like Wailing Caverns and Sunken Temple are simply having some of the larger (and frankly most frustrating) sections removed entirely. Only some of these changes will be available with the launch of Cataclysm, with the rest being rolled out in future patches.

One of the other changes, currently live on the beta servers, is likely to be far less contentious. Dungeon quests, regardless of whether they are part of a quest chain or not, will be available from characters in the entrance of the dungeon. Remember how many times you had to run Zul Farrak because the quests were in like eight different zones? Now they're not!

Also changing is the location of graveyards for players who are unlucky enough to die in a dungeon. According to the developers, no graveyard will be more than a half minute's run from the dungeon entrance, if it isn't right outside. By IGN's calculations, that will reduce the length of the average corpse-run to Blackrock Spire by eight and a half hours. We kid! We kid because we love.
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