Dungeons: the new ones, their levels, and where the quests live

Dungeons stopped being optional. Because Forever moved experience out of dungeon trash and into dungeon quests, a run is now the single most efficient thing you can do with an hour — which makes knowing where the quests are a routing problem, not a completionist one.

The two new instances

Dungeon	Level range	Bosses	Quests (Horde / Alliance)
Hall of Thanes	~13–17	6	3
Ruins of Lordaeron	16–23	6	6 / 4

Hall of Thanes

The Alliance counterpart to Ragefire Chasm, and the intro dungeon for that faction. Mob levels run 13 to 15 with one boss at 16. It’s tuned gently, but the recommendation for the tank specifically is 17 or higher — the first pull is where groups wipe, not the last.

Three quests. Two are right outside the instance, and the third comes from a small side quest in Dun Morogh, starting from Belden Steelgrill, who wants you to investigate a campsite overlooking the Gol’Bolar Quarry.

Ruins of Lordaeron

Level 16 to 23, six bosses, and the quest counts diverge sharply by faction:

• Alliance: 4 quests, all of them inside the instance. Pick them up when you get there.
• Horde: 6 quests. Two are inside. The other four are scattered:
  • Two in the Undercity — one in the Apothecarium, one in Sylvanas’s room
  • One at the caravan between Brill and the ruins
  • One more along the way

If you’re Horde, this means doing a pass through Undercity before you go, or you’ll run it twice. The entrance itself is inside Undercity, on the left as you come in — easy to walk past.

Why the quests matter so much

This is the change that reshaped leveling:

• Dungeon mob kills pay close to nothing now
• Dungeon quests pay enormously — the reported ceiling is up to two levels per dungeon
• Every dungeon in the game has quests, not just the new ones

Two beta reports, both consistent:

• A warrior gained two levels from a single Ruins of Lordaeron quest run
• A Horde character went 14 to 20 across Ragefire Chasm, Ruins of Lordaeron and Wailing Caverns — and that was the entire route

Compare that to Classic, where speed levelers routinely skipped dungeons because assembling a group cost more than the instance paid back. That calculus is inverted.

What it does to a route

Classic routing was zone-chaining: finish a zone, move to the next, skip instances unless you had a group sitting ready.

Forever routing is dungeon-threading: pick a handful of zones, and use the dungeons between them as the experience backbone. You’ll cover fewer zones for the same levels.

The practical consequences:

• Group availability matters more than route optimisation. A dungeon you can’t fill is a route that doesn’t work.
• Tanks and healers are the bottleneck, and the dungeon XP change makes the tank shortage worse, not better — there’s a long beta thread arguing exactly that.
• Blueprints drop from dungeon bosses, so the same runs that level you fastest also unlock your profession recipes. Professions and dungeons are the same activity now.

Camps make dungeon groups better

Because camp buffs last one hour, a group that builds a camp before a run carries a pile of stat buffs into the instance for free. Repair bots and reagent bots offset the two most common reasons people leave a dungeon early.

If you’re the one organising runs, the camp is worth more than your route.

What we can’t give you

• Quest-level detail. Quest text and rewards live on Blizzard’s servers, not in the client. Saying exactly which quest grants what requires either playing it or reading someone who did. Sites with quest pages got them by typing them up from the beta.
• The full new-dungeon list. Creators report nine new dungeons; the client carries 42 dungeon encounter maps in total, and separating the new ones from the returning ones is ongoing work.
• Loot tables. Boss encounter data is in the client (DungeonEncounter, 342 entries), but mapping drops to bosses isn’t done yet.