A deep delve critical analysis of the release, implementation, and hot fixes of Delves in TWW

Community General Discussion
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A Deep Delve Critical Analysis of the Implementation and Hot Fixes of the Delve Feature in TWW

Delve Release

Right away there was a lot of nonsense with delves like saving your keys until tier 8 which wasn’t even released in the first week.

If you didn’t read guides or watch delve strategy videos and you used your bountiful coffer keys on tier 3 during the first week, you were upset with Blizzard for the haphazard and release and implementation of delves that wasted your keys and put you behind on gear and I think the anger was justifiable.

This kind of insider knowledge meta game is just bad game design and antagonizes the casual players at whom delves were primarily aimed to please.

The Skinner Box

We know Blizzard had to fix delves because players were gearing too quickly and corporate needs the progression to take months not days because WoW is billed monthly and not daily. But when Blizzard directly nerfs the reward rate dopamine hit, players will go insane and you don’t need to be a psychologist to understand this. Imagine not feeding your dog or cat for a day. Watch what happens to your sofa.

The delve nerf didn’t make it harder to get the rewards, it made it impossible for most players. This isn’t like nerfing or buffing a spec’s raid damage or healing which is usually like a 3 to 5 percent nerf that players are used to in the meta spec swapping cycle.

Making previously accessible rewards inaccessible is grotesquely unfair to the people who waited a couple of days to do bountiful keys or Zevkir achievement.

Players will blame blizzard for this injustice and they are right to.

Content Creators

WoW has many dedicated content creators and Blizzard relies on them to market the game but in this case the content creators made the problem much worse.

We all watched videos this weekend with thumbnail titles like “easy 610 gear” or “gear up to 603+ FAST in delves” or “don’t miss EASY heroic gear!!”

The creators went on and on about how Alt friendly and Casual friendly gearing is in TWW and there is finally solo progression in WoW.

We even watched a blood DK and arcane mage solo Zevkir on ?? difficulty and get the void delver airplane mount and “let me solo this” achievement with a “strategy guide” explaining how we can also get the achievement by letting Brann do his exploit damage.

After watching all these videos we were excited to get into delves this weekend and Blizzard turns off the fun switch leaving the content creators with eggs on their faces.

Some creators even released the easy delves videos AFTER the delve nerfs and they just look like fools because they didn’t cancel the video release on Saturday after making the content last Wednesday or Thursday.

Aftermath

The fair and just thing to do would be to revert delves back to the mistake beta easy version or remove the rewards earned last week, especially the solo Zevkir ?? achievement from those who did the easy version before the first delve nerf this weekend.

I advise Blizzard to let everyone get their free 603/610 and easy ?? Zevkir as a gesture of good faith to the players.

Blizzard can then correct the errors and make delves more difficult in season 2.

Maybe this will cost corporate a few months in subs because players will gear too fast in Season 1 but a mistake this big on a feature this big should be costly and something the dev team learns from.

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Not to nit pick, but you mean the release version. Beta delves were way, waay harder than what we got on live. They got hefty nerfs fairly close to launch and Brann got some major buffs too if i recall correctly.

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yes revert to release version, thank you for the correction! I said beta because many posters claimed the delves were “untested” but I guess they were mocking the dev team and delves weren’t literally not tested in the beta

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Yeah, I don’t know what to say about delves, except that the end bosses on 8 all have a mechanic that I cannot survive no matter what I try, and that is with a group (which I’d rather not do tbh) or solo. It’s a shame. My priest has a bunch of keys, but…

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I have been very against the increased difficulties of delves but I think this is an extreme take in the other direction.

Supposedly solo delves are easier now than they were last Tuesday due to the decreased magic damage taken and all the time we have collectively spent leveling Bran so I do not agree with rolling back any solo achievements; it sounds like people earned those.

However I think most of can agree that player res negating the death counter seemed too good to be true and adding more folks to the delve decreasing total mob health was… weird.

My main issue was the mid week hotfix and lack of communication I think it would be an extreme correction to go back to last Tuesday. I also think it’s inherently unfair that some specs or roles have an easier time in delves while anecdotally 2-4 man delves are much harder in comparison to solo for me presently.

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It’s so slow but I’ve had a lot of success doing them as discipline and using dominate mind to help with large packs

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Just yesterday I believe. They’ve been pushing hotfixes every few days.

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I agree about the lack of communication and mid week hotfix. A warning to do your delves bounty keys now before we make them 10x harder Tuesday maintenance would have been more fair to everyone. I would have spent all weekend on Zevkir ?? let me solo him and gotten the void airplane instead of wasting a saturday volunteering at an orphanage for kids with leukemia. I thought I better read to these kids now because they don’t have much time left and I can just do Zevkir ?? next week but no, blizzard decides to screw me over for being a humanitarian

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I feel you.

I actually spent the weekend at a children’s hospital letting them know that it could be worse. They could be doing delves in WoW.

If I had known they’d get even worse I may have waited a week or two.

But honestly. Delves are terrible.
Everyone knew they would be. You can’t make difficult- enjoyable - soloable content that for all three roles unless it is catered to those roles.

Soloing delves on my rsham is just spam healing myself to outheal the white attacks while the mobs slowly die to healing rain, Brann(when his ai isn’t bugged out) and the occasional gamble on an offensive spell.

Riveting.

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I was actually doing group bountiful delves with the orphans on Wednesday and Thursday before the nerf made delves impossible in a group so on Friday I had to tell the orphans that I cant carry them to 603 loot anymore because delves are more efficient as a solo blood DK. The nurses heard the wailing and came running but I explained that it was blizzard’s fault and there was nothing I could do except post on the forums asking them to revert the worst hotfix in WoW history.

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Not really sure this is applicable in this situation… Don’t tier 3 bountiful delves drop adventurer gear? I used one key before higher tiers were released and came to my own conclusion to hold them until higher tiers were released. I knew higher tiers would drop better gear so I decided to wait, no videos watched, no guides, etc. Plus adventurer gear is very easy to come by.

Judging by the forums, I’d say not many people are clearing them too quickly.

What exactly is meant by this? Did they nerf rewards from delves? They’ve been the same for me since higher tiers released. I do know they aren’t rewarding crests at 8+ which is kinda infuriating, since it’s probably a bug and those crests will (most definitely) NOT be reimbursed once it’s fixed.

Everything is still accessible as far as I know. They made Zekvir harder, but if you’re struggling with killing him now, chances are you were struggling before too.

Can’t really comment on the creator thing, other than they do it for clicks. Usually why I don’t watch guide videos, since they’re almost always too good to be true.

Players that were able to solo Zekvir the first time will just solo Zekvir again… One thing people need to realize is that players that cleared everything up until this point are different breeds of WoW players. They will just find a way to beat it again. Brann hits like a wet noodle now, but I can still clear 8s on my own without any issues. I think what we’re forgetting is that these are supposed to be hard, and not clearable until the recommended Ilvl is met AND one plays their class to a point of mastery.

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Blizz hates Orphans. Confirmed.

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So before the ‘Hotfixes’ as an Arms warrior, I was able to do T7s pretty well. Even in Earthcrawl mines with the Web Bolts of doom in packs.
After ‘Hotfixes’ I did a bountiful ECM today. It was slower, I had to die in the swarm event so I can pull 1 mob at a time because I guess having 3 mobs spamming Web Bolt is just death. Go back an pull 1 at a time, then die again when it spawned another group, then pull 1 at a time.
The last boss was trivial as I remembered it, interrupt the curse because it doesn’t spam Web Bolt. An I got my same trinket, just 2 ilvls higher lol.
Yeah, its still not as ‘easy’ as I remembered it being even as a dps solo, and Brann is just…a wet noodle.

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It’s honestly surprising to me that Blizzard isn’t using the tool they added to delves to address the issues in delves and instead keep applying sweeping changes to the delves themselves. The solution is RIGHT THERE, the solution is Brann the guy they have with us to make things more agnostic. Adjust him based on class and mastery and problem solved. It’s not that hard to understand, it may be difficult to do but that is another issue. One they should of addressed prior to launch.

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Honestly this is it. Make brann a tank. And everything would be solved.

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All this delve tuning will come back to bite Blizz in the rear. They were okay upon release and now they’re just a clown show

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To be fair, I have never watched any videos on gearing up in TWW. I assume others probably did not as well.

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the videos have a view count. lots of players watch guides so they can be “meta” and play “meta” and get gear at a meta speed

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Ya I have heard videos have view counts. Im just saying not everyone was influenced by someones videos. I am aware of the copy paste portion of the community.

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Good.

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