Wrath Classic won’t have a Dungeon Finder

The chaos gremlin in me is a little disappointed, but I think we all knew that Wrath Classic was going to require the sacrifice of the Dungeon Finder. During the announcement video for both Dragonflight and Wrath Classic, Holly Longdale — the Lead Producer on the WoW Classic team — made a point to specifically mention that the feature, which debuted in Wrath of the Lich King, was one that they were specifically not going to include in Wrath Classic. Furthermore, they were making this decision based on the feedback from the WoW Classic community, and that they as developers do not feel that the feature fits into the reasons why people want to play WoW Classic in the first place.

I have to admit, when WoW Classic debuted with its attempt to recreate the original experience of playing World of Warcraft at launch, one of the questions I always asked was what are they going to do when they reach Wrath of the Lich King? The Dungeon Finder was one of the ways that the social fabric of the MMO was forever changed, and I did wonder how they’d introduce it into that ecosystem.

But in the newer some changes mentality that’s been the case since just before Burning Crusade Classic, where the goal is less to present older WoW exactly as it was and more to provide an authentic gameplay experience with improvements as necessary — basically, treating Classic less as a museum piece and more as a game being developed for modern players — it makes a lot of sense to omit the feature. People who play WoW Classic do so because they want to play a different game, ultimately. All the things that drove me entirely insane at the time — having to spam chat in a city, spending hours waiting for a PUG to form, being half way through a dungeon and the healer noping out because their pants didn’t drop — are part and parcel of the experience for the dedicated Classic player.

My snark aside, server community was a very different thing before Dungeon Finder, and it’s clear that those communities are part of the reason players invest so much time in WoW Classic — fostering and building raid groups and guilds is a big part of the draw. During a recent interview, Wrath Classic Production Designer Pat Dawson mentioned that the community doesn’t want to push a button and get queued up inside a dungeon, but rather that they want to actually go to the dungeon themselves. And his fellow Production Designer Tim Jones talked about maintaining the size and grandeur of the world players are going to be exploring — while Northrend still exists in modern World of Warcraft, it’s undeniable that modern players who level through it can easily miss the sheer scale and scope of the world, and often have no idea where the dungeons they’re running even are.

So if you’re a WoW Classic player who was worried about the inclusion of the Dungeon Finder when Wrath Classic arrived, worry no more. It’s not coming. Your feedback has been heard.