Updated
Dungeons: the new ones, and where the quests are
- 42
- dungeon encounter maps
- quests
- leveling source
- up to 2 levels
- one dungeon
Dungeons aren’t optional any more.
Blizzard moved the XP out of dungeon trash and into dungeon quests. So an hour in an instance beats an hour in the open world. That turns “where do I pick up the quests” into a routing question, not a completionist one.
The two new ones
| 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
Alliance’s answer to Ragefire Chasm. The intro dungeon for that side.
Mobs run 13 to 15. One boss sits at 16. It’s tuned gently, but take a tank of 17 or higher. Groups wipe on the first pull, not the last.
Three quests. Two sit right outside the entrance. The third comes from a side quest in Dun Morogh, from Belden Steelgrill. He wants you to check a campsite overlooking the Gol’Bolar Quarry.
Ruins of Lordaeron
Level 16 to 23. Six bosses. The quest counts split hard by faction:
- Alliance: 4 quests, all inside the instance. Grab them when you arrive.
- Horde: 6 quests. Two inside. Four scattered:
- Two in Undercity — one in the Apothecarium, one in Sylvanas’s room
- One at the caravan between Brill and the ruins
- One more on the way
Playing Horde? Do a pass through Undercity before you go, or you’ll run the place twice.
The entrance is inside Undercity, on your left as you come in. Easy to walk straight past.
Why the quests matter
This is the change that reshaped leveling.
- Trash mobs in dungeons pay almost nothing
- Dungeon quests pay a fortune — the reported ceiling is two levels per dungeon
- Every dungeon has quests, not just the new ones
Two people in the beta, same story:
- A warrior gained two levels from one Ruins of Lordaeron quest run
- A Horde character went 14 to 20 across Ragefire Chasm, Ruins of Lordaeron and Wailing Caverns. That was the whole route.
In Classic, speed levelers skipped dungeons. Grouping cost more than the instance gave back. That’s backwards now.
What it does to your route
Classic routing was zone-chaining. Finish a zone, move to the next, skip instances unless a group was already waiting.
Forever routing is dungeon-threading. Pick a few zones. Use the dungeons between them as the backbone. You cover fewer zones for the same levels.
Three consequences:
- Filling a group matters more than optimising a route. A dungeon you can’t fill isn’t a route.
- Tanks and healers are the bottleneck. The XP change makes the tank shortage worse, not better. There’s a long beta thread saying exactly that.
- Blueprints drop from dungeon bosses. The runs that level you fastest also unlock your profession recipes. Professions and dungeons are the same activity now.
Build a camp before you go in
Camp buffs last one hour. A group that builds a camp first carries a pile of stats into the instance for free.
Repair bots and reagent bots also cover the two most common reasons people leave a run early.
If you’re the one organising, the camp matters more than your route.
What this page can’t tell you
Which quest gives what. Quest text and rewards live on Blizzard’s servers, not in the client. Anyone with quest pages typed them up from playing the beta.
The full list of new dungeons. Creators say nine. The client carries 42 dungeon encounter maps in total, and telling the new ones from the returning ones is ongoing work.
Loot tables. Boss data is in the client (342 DungeonEncounter entries). Mapping drops to bosses
isn’t done yet.