Breakfast Topic: What’s your favorite part of dungeons?

Yesterday’s Legion dungeon race was pretty amazing — Maw of Souls looks like it’s going to be incredibly fun. During the broadcast, Assistant Game Director Ion Hazzikostas mentioned that dungeon design was taking a different direction and utilizing more environmental mechanics in encounters. Basically, they’re creating environments that are far more interactive, and far less “round room” feeling. That got me thinking about Warcraft dungeons in general, and what I really like about them — and honestly, the environment and visuals pretty much tops the list for me.

I think I’ve said more than once that my least favorite raid in World of Warcraft was the Argent Tournament’s round room of certain doom. While I appreciated the lack of substantial amounts of trash, and it was really refreshing to simply go from one boss to another for a little while, the experience quickly got old. Especially when you consider a lot of people were clearing the place on 10-man Normal and Heroic and 25-man Normal and Heroic every week. But it wasn’t really the encounters themselves I disliked, it was just…being stuck in the round room. The room never changed, at least not until you fell through the floor at the end, and the underground visuals weren’t exactly breathtaking.

On the other hand, one dungeon that has always stood out in my mind is Vortex Pinnacle — the visuals are absolutely stunning, and making aerial leaps from section to section just felt really cool. When I think about past raids, the ones that invariably stick out as extra entertaining are the ones where the environment came into play. There’s something inherently more interesting about hopping a flight from one section of a dungeon to another, or fighting in several different levels of space. The conveyor belt in Siege of Orgrimmar was always fun, and I loved the final encounter in Blackrock Foundry. Being swept up in a freefall between phases and plunging through different levels of the Foundry just felt good.

It’s those moments that tend to stick with me in both dungeons and raids — and Legion, so far, seems to have plenty of visually interesting dungeons with a certain level of dynamic interactivity involved. But I’m wondering what you guys think. What’s the best part of a dungeon or a raid for you?  What kind of things make you want to run a dungeon over and over again? Is it the environment? Interesting boss mechanics? The music? What is it that makes a dungeon a really good dungeon? And what makes a dungeon get really old, really fast?