WHOA Long post! Don’t complain. You can see the length. Just don’t read if you don’t like it =)
Ok I posted this in a shortish comment on Wowhead and I know probably no one cares but I just want to put this out there into the ether on the off chance that anyone is listening. For those of you who just like to comment that people put too much thought into things, this is mostly for fun from a rookie game designer’s musings and I’m sure my ideas have flaws that the vastly more experienced dev team would toss everything out over.
I really really love delves. They are still my favorite addition to the game in a long long time, even with all the chaos of bugs and tuning early on and continuing to present day (and probably the future if the most recent interview is to be interpreted in such a way). I am a delve-a-holic. I did them obsessively across all classes to gear up and I’ve gotten pretty much every achievement I can find. I maxed everything. Brann is 60. So trust, I know my stuff when it comes to delves. I also am an avid player in general–I usually get AOTC every season and I am close to my first KSH ever, on a healer of all things! I am also a lore fanatic and I play EVERY class, most versions of WoW Classic (been playing since original TBC), and I keep up with WoW news very closely, so I’m not out of touch with any part of the playerbase except for PvP. Delves are great gameplay for the most part, but the rewards are in a super wonky place. The major problems as I see it are:
- T8 delves are too easy to reward heroic gear, but getting champ gear from them feels about right–maybe a little too easy but that’s fine.
- Even though they are too easy for heroic gear, the way heroic gear is rewarded is super frustratingly random and does not depend on any kind of skill or challenge.
- T9+ delves have no increased reward associated with them except for one-time achievements.
- Zekvir invasions do not reward you enough for actually defeating him, and sometimes reward you way too much when you don’t. This is to me the most confusing design decision.
- You are incentivized to only use your keys on T8 delves at low item level, so there is pretty much zero progression because you’re already only doing the max reward. I know you don’t HAVE to horde your keys for this but it definitely incentivizes you to. Strongly. If it’s too difficult, you still don’t want to do lower delves and “waste” your keys on lower rewards.
- Zekvir’s delve is also only good for one-time achievements (now) with the exception of some minor currency rewards.
- Some delves are way harder than others or longer, and similar to how m+ used to work, you are incentivized to avoid the worst ones at all costs.
- There is no season longevity for delves once you are in full champ 4/8 gear unless you’re doing the horrible random grind of fishing for bounties. Sure you can do 8s for hero vaults which many might see as valuable enough, but once you get those hero pieces you can’t upgrade them as you only get 2 runed crests per bounty! And there is no way to get gilded crests through the delve system, which maybe there shouldn’t be but if you’re selling delves as a season long progression then you’re failing if you can’t get to the end at some point, with the strong caveat of it should be much slower than dungeons and raids, and you’re losing these new subscribers you finally gained because they got to the end of what they can feasibly do in delves too quickly and easily with no path forward except doing content that many of them simply do not want to do or perhaps they only want/get to do that content with friends and want someone else to do to progress their alts in the meantime.
- Many of these points contribute to the sad repetitive loop where you don’t get as much variety as actually exists that the team worked so hard to implement, due to the reward structure. Sure you could ignore the reward structure and just do what you want suboptimally, but this is a post about making the reward structure feel better for those that do care about that.
So before I offer my idea of a solution, these are the design principles I believe the devs follow which I will try to keep intact.
- We want some randomness to give players the feeling of excitement, such the feeling you get when you get a rare drop or a bounty.
- We want some determinism so players do not get too frustrated with the randomness–thus we need balance between randomness and determinism.
- More difficult content should give higher rewards, but high tier rewards should be increasingly more difficult and take longer to obtain.
- Delves should not overtake the gearing speed potential of raids and dungeons entirely, but should be an option to compliment them. You should not feel like you have to do delves to succeed in WoW.
- Almost contrary to principle 4, you should be able to feel like you can slowly progress solo in the game solely through delves (on any class).
- Finally, delves should stay relevant throughout the whole season, but at a much slower rate than dungeons and raids so you can push players to do group content without alienating the pure soloists and also not overwhelming high end group content players with too many newbies at once who are jumping into hard group content because they have the gear for it.
Here is my proposed solution. AGAIN. I put way too much time and thought into this which no one will probably care about but I’m just having fun and I had to write to get it out of my head.
- Being defeated by Zekvir invasions rewards worldsoul currency, nothing else (I hate the worldsoul mechanic but we’re not getting into that here). It’s just a way to mitigate the potential loss of your run by giving you the tiniest amount of key fragments for pity.
- Defeating Zekvir always gives you a bounty (the item that rewards hero pieces, but I also want to change what bounties do so put a pin in this).
- Defeating Zekvir-empowered mobs, rares, and puzzles increases the chance (but does not guarantee) that Zekvir will invade your NEXT delve.
- Bountiful delves that award veteran gear in the end chest do not require keys to unlock the chest (come on are we really going to gate veteran gear?) This completely solves the key hoarding and progression ramp problem and who cares if you can get vet gear faster from delves than from raid/dungeon?
- Keys will only be necessary for champ gear rewards.
- T9+ bountiful delves will not contain better rewards in the chest which can still be opened with a key, but completing them with or without using a key will award progress toward a guaranteed bounty (25/100 currency or something that can be used to purchase a bounty). You can earn a maximum of one or two of these guaranteed bounties per week, no more. This limits the gearing speed of delves so it doesn’t overtake dungeons and raids but also gives incentive to play in the harder delves. It will be a slog but for a guaranteed hero piece from solo content, it’s worth it and the difficulty and time investment actually matches the reward especially when you take into account that….
- Bounties no longer result in a new chest appearing in your next delve. Instead they highlight a random delve on the map (bountiful or not) which can be completed any time at T11 for a guaranteed hero piece at the end. This forces players to play the underplayed delves and really cater their run to one very specific option–and still allows them to decide if they want to tackle it on a different day to get a different story.
- The bounties you get from Zekvir invasions could be the same or different from your guaranteed bounties–perhaps as a treat for the randomness the Zekvir bounties will only require T9/10 to get the hero piece.
- Now for the vault. I think T11s are hard enough to warrant a single myth slot per week. If they’re not, maybe they can be tuned to be that hard, but I think it would be really cool to make it so completing one of your guaranteed T11 bounties (not just any T11 because we want to make you spend the time grinding up to that specific T11) IN COMBINATION WITH killing Zekvir hard mode will unlock one and only one Myth tier vault slot, maximum.
- Final big question: crests. I think you should get 5-10 runed crests per T9+ bountiful delve you complete with or without a key, to keep raids and dungeons as the faster option, but still not make upgrading your gear miserable while solo/duo. And I think that runed crests already being capped and only having 4 bountiful delves available each day limits the spamming of runed crests well enough for this. I think you should get 15 gilded crests per week max for doing the hardest loop in this design proposal, so maybe 5 for doing each of 2 available T11 bounties, 10 if we go with only letting you do one T11 bounty/week, and the remaining 5 from hard Zekvir.
- As always, I prefer even more determinism, so I would prefer that these bounties for how much effort it would take to get them would instead award you a currency that you can use to purchase a hero tier delve item of your choice. Since delve items are often inferior in small ways to dungeon and raid items anyway, I don’t see the harm in making it slightly more deterministic, and then you can still spend catalysts to get your hero-myth mogs eventually. But this particular option I don’t think would be chosen even if all the other ones were, due to what I believe Blizzard’s design principles are–that it goes a little too deterministic.
I have other nitpicks about how delves work of course, as anyone does, such as some things about brann, fairness for certain classes, and the disparity of difficulty from delve to delve (most glaringly I hate swirlies in fungal folly going invisible under ground clutter), but I truly believe all that is super secondary to a robust reward system that respects the player’s time while still keeping them a few steps behind more social content. Delves are way too good, even in their early state, to limit their playability with limited rewards. Devs worked too hard and did too good a job on design to end up with a fun system that falls off as dramatically as it has in the life span of a season.
Oh and again on the off chance anyone reads this, I’m so thankful for literally any implementation of player housing. Hopefully delves will be the primary way to get housing cosmetics, since both are pretty soloist-themed.
Ok if you read this thank you so much for listening to me ramble. Maybe I’ll be back to complain about the underuse of the glyph system.