Solo Dungeons
One of the things I really liked about Vanilla was the Rhok'dellar questline. It was a coming of age accomplishment that proved that you knew at least a little bit about how your class mechanics worked, from kiting to pet control, and it didn't allow you to have any help beyond the buffs you started with. The downfall was the potential for griefing, and probably would have been better if the demons had been located in either small instances of their own, or at a location totally unreachable to the general public, like the mage tower in Azshara. Point being, there wasn't really a way in Vanilla to fake your way into a Rhok'Dellar. You either had the skill, or you didn't.
I've had an idea for solo dungeons floating around in my head for some time now. Obviously, they couldn't work like typical instances; some classes can't really tank, others have no healing capability. But I think that with the proper preparation, this idea could actually become a reality. Here's how I envision it would work.
- Quite like the now-old Daily Heroic quest, which would send you to a different dungeon every day, a player would go to an NPC for a job. Let's say that this person is a Rogue. He talks to the NPC and sees that he has a list of 3 daily quests to chose from- accepting any one will lock out the other two for the rest of the day unless he abandons it and re-picks. These quests would be class-specific and chosen from a rotating pool of, let's say, ten quests.
- Accepting the quest starts a timer, and activates a death counter. Both of these components have an impact on the reward the Rogue will get from the questgiver. For instance, lets say that the timer is set for five hours. If the rogue turns in the completed quest with four hours remaining, he will get X much extra gold. If it takes him a little longer and he turns it in with three hours remaining, he'll get Y much extra gold. If the timer drops below two hours remaining, he won't get any. The death counter also plays a part in this; if the rogue completes in four hours but dies on every pull he won't get a very good reward, because he is sloppy. But if he doesn't die once, he's gonna be swimming in a pool of gold a la Scrooge McDuck.
- The quest could be anywhere- lets say this particular quest is straightforward. The rogue is assigned to travel to Silithus (because I heard that zone) and take out a mercenary captain planning to stage an attack on Cenarion Hold. Homeboy rolls out, flies down, and finds the instance portal, which would be (for instance) in the side of the zone-edge mountains. The location of the portal would be marked on his map for easy tracking.
- Here's the fun part. Because he's a rogue, he obviously can't heal much beyond things like bandages and pots, but this isn't your typical tank and spank. Given his class, his job is to sneak by some guards, sap others, disarm traps, sprint through an AoE gauntlet of traps he can't disarm, maybe- basically use all their big skills to get to this merc commander. Que a quick fight against the "boss", who could probably be evasion/cloak tanked- the point is not to have some supertough boss, but to have a boss be tough enough to last against a rogue's burst. Why? Because the alarm has been sounded, the boss' help is on the way, and now the rogue now has to re-prove their stealth skills in escaping the instance via a different route than he came in by. You know those instance layouts, like Underbog, where you drop-down from the final boss' chambers right into the entryway you started by? That's what would be in place here, so a person couldn't simply hearth out to safety. No, this rogue has to sneak past another gauntlet of mobs actively looking for him, talk to a friendly NPC at that aforementioned dropdown, and then escape.
- Now, the ranking bit. Let's say this system gets implemented but you're new to it. Much like rep-based quests, you won't get the really high-rewarding jobs right off the bat. You have to prove yourself to your employer. So you run some jobs, complete them without too many deaths and without wasting time, and doing so gains you Reputation with that quest-giver's faction, which will unlock the better (and harder) quests from the quest pool. But it will also give you something like Arena Rating- we'll call them Mercenary Rating, for the moment. This rating will act as a multiplier for how much gold you get as reward, and possibly, a reward grab-bag or something. Harder quests completed will give more Rating.
- Could be even that, if you're really slick and have a real high Merc Rating, you could get rewards much better than things like a bag of Eternals, rare gems, or enchanting mats. Could be that you get handed reward bags of epic gems, rare crafting materials, or possibly even Tier Armor tokens.
