Forever Cut Dungeon Kill XP and Moved It Into Dungeon Quests — Blizzard Confirms It, Testers Split On It
The most-discussed change in the first week of the World of Warcraft: Forever beta is not a class, a zone or a new dungeon. It is a number nobody can see: the experience value of a dungeon mob.
Testers noticed almost immediately that killing trash in Ragefire Chasm felt worthless and that turning in a dungeon's quests felt enormous. On September 20, that stopped being a suspicion. Blizzard had already described the change deliberately — it just had not been published as a patch note.
What Blizzard actually confirmed
Kris Zierhut, principal designer on Forever, confirmed the design in an interview with The Sun, and the quote is unusually blunt:
"Yes. Now, one place experience did change is we made a big change to our dungeons. In that the amount of XP you get from killing monsters in dungeons, we brought way down. But we made the amount of XP for completing dungeon quests much, much, much higher. So your first run through a dungeon is amazing. You get tons of XP. You get great rewards."
The stated goal is to stop repeated clearing of one instance from being the optimal route to 60, and to reward actually visiting the game's nine new leveling dungeons — once.
That framing matters, because it is not a nerf to dungeons. It is a relocation of where a dungeon's value sits: from the pulls to the quest log.
What testers measured
The community numbers are player-collected, not Blizzard's, and they should be read as an indication rather than a dataset:
| Observation | Player-reported figure |
|---|---|
| Elite kill XP in Ragefire Chasm | 9–18 XP per elite |
| Quest reward scaling vs. Classic | roughly 200% higher, by feel |
| Ruins of Lordaeron quest turn-ins | six quests ≈ almost three levels |
| Route without Silverpine or the Barrens | level 18 from Tirisfal Glades, Ragefire Chasm and Ruins of Lordaeron |
Both halves of that table appeared in the same week, and they are the same fact seen from two directions. If dungeon quests pay roughly 200% more than players expect and elite kills pay a fraction of Classic values, the first clear of a dungeon becomes a leveling event and the second clear becomes charity.
The first-clear theory
By September 20 the discussion had spread across three threads and past 120 replies, and a working theory emerged from testers: the system pays a large one-time sum when you complete a dungeon's quest set for the first time, and substantially less on later runs.
That would explain both complaints at once — "dungeon mobs give nothing" and "dungeon quests give too much" — without either group being wrong. Several players also described it as something the developers had previously explained on stream.
We have not found a Blizzard post or transcript stating that explicitly, so treat the first-clear-scaling mechanism as player understanding rather than confirmed design. The practical advice that follows from it is the same either way: collect every quest a dungeon offers before you enter it, because the first clear is worth the most by a wide margin.
The objection: roles, and empty groups
The strongest criticism is not about experience totals. It is about what happens to the roles that learn by repetition. Tanks and healers build confidence by pulling packs that cannot kill them yet, and a design that pushes groups toward single, quest-driven clears removes that practice loop. One tester's version of the question: "How are tanks and healers supposed to practice on the way to 60?"
The second objection is social. If a dungeon is worth one efficient pass, groups may skip every pack they can, take the quest credit, and never queue for that instance again — thinner dungeon traffic, longer queue times, and less reason for the community to keep those nine dungeons in rotation. One widely-shared retort summed up the apparent contradiction from the community's side: "We developed nine new leveling dungeons. We don't want you to use them for leveling."
A more measured defense of the change is that a busy outdoor world is what Classic fans have been asking for since 2019, and that repeated-instance grinding was always the least interesting way to get there. Both can be true: the outdoor world may benefit, and the five-man scene may get quieter.
What it means before November 4
Three things follow for anyone planning launch.
- Quest-log discipline is now a leveling skill. The dominant strategy shifts from "spam the fastest instance" to "chain quest hubs, then clear each dungeon once with its full quest set." Routes that ignore dungeon quests are giving up the largest single lump of experience in the game.
- Beta numbers will move. The cap is 20 now and rises to 30 later in the test, which is the natural point for a tuning pass. Testing runs through October 21 and nothing from the beta carries into launch.
- The design is reversible, and that is the point of a beta. Kill XP is a drop-table-level value. If the outdoor-to-dungeon balance looks wrong on the live population instead of a capped test, it is one of the cheapest things Blizzard can change — which is exactly why it is worth reporting now rather than after launch.
If you are in the beta and want the feedback to land, the useful form is not "dungeons feel bad." It is the two things Blizzard cannot read from internal logs: how often your group could still fill a five-man after the first clear, and whether a new tank had anywhere safe to learn the role.
Sources and further reading
External references used to verify or expand this article.