Question time: How many of you actually care about going fast in an MMO dungeon?

Terminally Online

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

I've been playing quite a lot of World of Warcraft, recently, to check out the new expansion, Midnight. In my journeys, taking a brief sabbatical from the nicely structured two-pull into a wall safety of Final Fantasy 14, I've been reminded that there are in fact videogames that've figured out how to make dungeons that aren't basically just corridors.

This has a trade-off, though, when it mills up against WoW player's tendency to relentlessly optimise the fun out of everything. Now to be fair, part of this is encouraged by Blizzard. Mythic+, WoW's endgame dungeon progression system, is entirely designed around speedrunning—but good lord do people move fast.

Which is fine. When I want to smell the roses, I can pop into a follower dungeon, and as an Outlaw Rogue I'm more than happy to be popping blade flurry and watching the numbers fly on a massive heap of enemies (even if playing interrupt watch and juggling nameplates is a massive pain in the ass). But it got me thinking: How many of us actually care?

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I mean yeah, if I'm timing a key, I want to go fast because that's the entire point. But I've had tanks doing giga pulls in normal levelling dungeons, sometimes to the group's active detriment, and it had me wondering: How many of us actually give a crap? If my tank pulled a cosy two packs instead of five, would I care? The answer is typically no.

Thus I ask you, readers of Terminally Online (whom I have determined through scientific means are typically more handsome, pretty, skilled, and intelligent than the lion's share of MMO players)—when you're not hitting that endgame grind, is doing a dungeon super fast actually a big deal?

And if the answer winds up being "no", then why the hell are we all going "gogogo"? If you've got experience with the kind of loser who boots a tank in a normal or levelling dungeon for moving too slow, feel free to share your experience in the comments.

PRODUCTS

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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