DISCLAIMER: This is not about Brann, I will not discuss Brann. This is about other issues with Delves. Do not bring up Brann here! There are other threads for that!
This is about the fact that they trivialized mechanics and turned mobs into truck-hitting damage sponges.
It’s not fun. It’s boring. I play Delves for fun little mechanics. Things I have to work around. Like the spores as they were. Like the candles that depleted.
Put back in mechanics. Put in fun stuff. Heck, toss in little puzzles and things for me to do. Stop making truck-hitting damage sponges with no mechanics. That’s not why I liked Delves.
I enjoyed kiting spores and the mechanics of them. I liked having to concern myself with candles depleting and small areas to kill the boss. I want more different things like that. I want little tasks and puzzles.
I don’t want mini dungeon damage sponges with no mechanics or fun.
Now? I can carry 14 candles around and fill a room with them. I can run through every single spore with no consequence. But I have to deal with these terrible mobs that take half my health in one hit, while it takes me forever to kill them.
That’s not what Delves are supposed to be.
So let’s talk about the types of mechanics we want, fun things we want. NOT BRANN. That’s an entirely separate topic and there are other threads for that. This topic is about the mechanics and lack thereof. Let’s discuss!
Mostly agree but Brann is literally a delve companion. It is very much not a separate issue, topic, or discussion.
They really did go out of their way to remove the mechanical intricacies of delves this season and just replace it all with damage sponge mobs and kiting nemesis packs while Brann is laying on the floor.
It’s turned into a terrible experience but making fun things terrible is what they do best.
They are great at initially pushing out a very fun concept and then within the same expansion turning it into a braindead slog of a grind.
There aren’t a lot of mechanics you can do that include “any spec and one automated friend” with the intended accessibility. The one thing everyone can deal in is numbers. Honestly, from what I hear of how raid mechanics feel like now, it’s kinda nice to have a “mash my numbers against your numbers” place. If that has to be delves, I’m ok with that.
This is kind of true as well to be honest. Not everything really needs to be dance dance revolution and that’s really all that raids or M+ are. Can clear the stuff while doing tank levels of damage as long as you can pull off the choreographed dance routine infinitely and just beat the enrage.
Sure there are. They already had some. They trivialized them.
They could have done bombs in a similar way in the new ones. Or floating clouds of Void that you could drain for a channeled ability, but with a stacking debuff where if you got 5 stacks, you’d disorient with insanity for 5 seconds. Or if you hit the clouds without draining them to use against mobs, you’d get the disorient immediately.
They can make little easy puzzles to go around and solve to unlock doors or to pick up items for the story scenario.
No it isn’t. It’s boring. Last season wasn’t boring.
I mean the first few times through each delve weren’t boring as long as you were progressing through the tiers consistently. It got pretty stale on the back half of the season.
And S2 really didn’t shake up delves to the degree I expected it to. It would appear that the most interesting time frame for delves is going to be the first few weeks of each expansion and then they will just stagnate for anything other than supplementing gear in S2 and S3.
If we aren’t talking about Brann, then there is really not much to talk about.
Reality is that Delves are VERY softly tuned in comparison with Season 1. The only real danger of dying right now is on Tier 11, and that is because everyone is under-geared for the season.
As soon as everyone starts getting at 658 ivl and above, they will steam roll through them, which is a different look from last season. That duo (Tala and Velo) were a nightmare even at 626-630 ivl.
The only non-Brann issue that we should be talking about is how badly tuned Underpin is, and how we have yet to see it fixed. They need to close his hitbox so melee can do better with the bombs (whether or not a macro can help), and they need to fix the extra adds that are bugged on ? ?.
You must only mean environmental mechanics like sporebombs being effectively gone because mobs are every bit, if note more, lethal today than they were last patch.
Personally, I liked the “older” krieval (sp) and waterworks delve mechanics. Dropping the candle/breather and clearly seeing my safe aura and playing within that was much better than wondering how long I got left and what my radius and timer might be if I want to pull more stuff. I do think sporebomb strats are too OP for right of bell curves but it isn’t like adding tedium in the form of time spent grinding HP sponges vs pulling them into an explosion with me standing out of it matters. A right of bell curve is still clearing t11 delves easily.
I found old delves to be far more monotonous and boring. Zekky empowered trash were significantly easier too compared to Underpin mobs. The underpin jumping you in a delve is a decently harder mechanical fight than Zekky was.
Brann is just Brann. I don’t support healers getting to be lazy healbots finger pecking their respecting version of “heal” into Brann while he does all the work, but that is more my belief system that healing is long overdue for a massive mechanical revamp where they all MUST play as battle healers with a lot more emphasis on translating DPS to healing over staring at health bars. I hear they nuked his glitched robo dino spawns but he’s otherwise inconsequential to me in delves anyway. Mostly I just wish he’d execute snipe things “better” (as in save it for elites/bosses exclusively) and I’d love the ability to deactivate abilities for more passive DPS…cause frick trying to kite into traps or watching him waste his “big DPS cooldown” on a single running away dead mob.
Annoying? How were they annoying? You used them against mobs. It was hilarious.
“I don’t want interesting things, I just want to stare at Netflix.”
Y’all ruin this game with this mentality.
Underpin is its own thing that I can’t comment on, because I haven’t attempted it. My problem is the now boring nature of truck-hitting damage sponges that are boring.
I specifically said they hit like a truck now and are damage sponges. That’s my problem: they removed interesting things and mechanics that made us strategize or think a little bit… and just put in harder hitting damage sponges.
But I want to see interesting things. Puzzle things. These were once said to “scratch an itch” for archaeology, too. They don’t do that at all. So why not have more scenario style things to do?
I’m here for something different. Not truck-hitting damage sponges.
The 3 underpin hobgoblin that wipe the floor with my kitty druid ( and Brann sorry). They can hit me from 10 paces, but I must be sitting on em cause melee must melee now!
I have to pick up spice satchel in an area where every square meter is covered in spores an they keep spawning! And I cant use them to kill mobs anymore!
Pipe puzzles that are solved in ONE move! Just gimme the buff while at it!
The underpin’s connected friend, that can only interrupted by stun/shove/fear mechanics… Very few classes have that. And he bloody spams that summon!
Sluice house ceilings/floors are so thin I swear I can pull mobs 3 floors up or down!
Each pack of mobs starts a fight with me half dead and scrambling for pots.
Underpin pack that kill the regular pack… Only sometimes the pack is not quite ‘dead’ and join in the slaughter!
I agree that Delves could certainly use a lot more interesting puzzles and mechanics to spice things up. The only issue I have with that is Brann’s AI is about as sharp as a sack of hammers. They need to tune up his AI to better avoid traps and stuff instead of just standing still and getting floored.
They no longer chase you and they appear to be something to entirely avoid since they don’t damage the mobs (they instantly heal spore damage it seems) and simply exist as an area denial mechanic.
As far as the candle mechanic it’s not actually gone. It’s just mindless now and doesn’t require you to replenish it. You just need to remember to actually drop it.
Overall they dumbed them down and made them very unengaging mechanics that may as well not even exist.
Brann shouldn’t be triggering things. He never did before. So that’s not an issue.
He didn’t trigger webs or anything.
I’m kind of warming up to this idea of these Void clouds and little bombs. They could even make it so that the bombs are different colors to negate each other if kicked towards each others… or do a magnets thing where you can use them to slide yourself across the floor or move them to walk around normally, depending on what you want to do. Doesn’t have to be a negative interaction either.
