As a multiboxer (hate me all you wish, I’m a white hat on this), I have found a number of hacks with varying degrees of exploit-ness. This one I just found in delves is not so exploit-ish that I’m going to stop doing it, but I do think that Blizz should do something to address it.
The thing is, you can go into a delve and start clearing the stuff. It won’t scale in health or damage until the rest of your party arrives. Once you start clearing the objectives, that’s when other players will start getting warnings about “delve in progress” and not winning any loot.
But there are a number of delves and different configurations of those delves that permit you to clear virtually all of the trash, including the Underpin minions, before you “complete” the first objective. So, what I can do when I want to carry my alts is just go in with my best tank, clear all of the trash on tier 11, then bring in my alt (perhaps even 2-4 of them) and click objects to clear the objectives. The final boss scales in power and health, but the mechanics are the same and they’re often very tankable, just taking longer for one character to fight. At the end, every character can get all of the loot–that is, Nemesis Strongbox, hidden trove (if they have a Bounty Map), full rune / crest / coin rewards from other chests.
I see that there must be a compromise–if you’re in a dungeon and you have to pop out for a second, you shouldn’t lose progress or credit as your team continues. Likewise, for anything non-timed it should be possible for your team to start shile you’re en route. But in the same way that you won’t get credit for a boss fight or mobs killed while you were out of the dungeon, maybe the Nemesis Strongbox should only apply to players who were at least present in the dungeon when the Underpin’s minions were killed. And more delves should prevent you from going very far until you have everyone there who intends to win the loot at the end.
As I said, it’s a balance, and many of the delves are already protected against this sort of trick. I don’t feel wrong to use it for my alts–I’ve done a lot of delves where my alt was present the whole time and I slogged through mobs with 2.5x health and higher damage. People sell delve carries and they probably have figured this out. But with more tweaks to delves coming in 11.1.7 and, probably, in 11.2, Blizz can continue to keep the playing field level and making the flow of rewards precise.
