Death of Dungeons

When Elemental Evil launched, I vaguely recall reading something about Cryptic using it as an opportunity to re-tune low level dungeons so that they'd only require three players of no particular class composition and could be queued for by a wider range of levels. It sounded like an understandable move for a game that was having issues with queue times and I didn't even give it a second thought.

This past week, my pet tank has been roping some guildies from SWTOR into giving Neverwinter (another) try. I, too, rolled up another alt in hopes of being able to play with them. We were shocked to find that traditional group gameplay has been almost completely eradicated from the levelling game. Sure, Cragmire Crypts, the Grey Wolf Den and Temple of the Spider have been revamped in the fashion mentioned above and now allow level scaling all the way up to seventy. However, all the other levelling dungeons have been removed from the game, plus a couple of former max level ones as well. The wiki has the official list of victims:

The Cloak Tower
Lair of the Mad Dragon
Throne of Idris
Lair of the Pirate King
The Frozen Heart
Spellplague Caverns
Caverns of Karrundax
The Dread Vault
Castle Never
Fardelver's Crypt
Dwarf King Crypt

I'm pretty shocked, as I associate some pretty memorable experiences with some of those names. One would think that Cryptic probably did this with the intent of eventually bringing them back in revamped form as well, but with everything else they've got going on one has to wonder when they were hoping to find the time. I just can't help but think that a Dungeons and Dragons game with most of the dungeons taken out is severely diminished.