Instanced environments such as dungeons, raids, trials, are common ways to provide a challenge for players - whether it be packs of strong enemies that must be crowd-controlled, or bosses which require teamwork and coordination of a dozen or more players, there must also be a place in the game world for this content to be tackled by small parties such a duos, or even solo players. The solo player is a little overlooked by MMOs - usually catered to by chores such as daily quests, crafting and gathering, or completionist activities like achievement hunting, mount/pet/follower farming, or glamour/transmogrification runs. Realistically, none of this gameplay is particularly challenging! In order for our dungeon content to be made available to as many players as possible, we have built the first iteration of our content scaling. It works using two simple scaling factors:

• Party size - Parties below the expected size will receive a proportional boost to HP and outgoing damage
• Player levels - If the player with the highest level in the party has a level lower than expected, an additional HP and damage boost will be granted

Conversely, if the player level is above the expected range, then they will receive a percentage reduction to damage and HP. The intention with this is that dungeon content is never trivially out-levelled - better gear, abilities, and player skill will still have a more significant impact.

Benefits to playing in a full-sized party

Apart from it being more fun to play with others? Well, there's some definite incentives to running a dungeon as a group, namely: loot! Running a dungeon as an un-boosted party will give rewards for the following:

• Boss loot including trophies
• Dungeon achievements (boss kills, first time completion)

Sometimes it's a struggle to find a group as the player might not have the time to wait to form one, or maybe they just want to put on a podcast, do a few laps of their favourite dungeon and practice their combat rotation (on something that isn't a training dummy!). In this case, running a dungeon solo, duo (or any number less than the required party size), the player will still receive loot dropped by non-boss enemies, and quest items from bosses. Boss loot such as gear and weaponry will only be available as a party.

Conclusion

TLDR: Solo players can enjoy challenging instanced dungeon content It is simpler and less wasteful to build dungeons with flexibility in the number of players than to make dungeons tailored to specific player counts, and potentially limit what can be enjoyed as a solo/duo group. This capability of scaling the dungeon difficulty also allows the introduction of extra random events such as World of Warcraft's Mythic+ system, albeit with a bit more player agency than a weekly rotation!