Delves and My Immediate Over-Worrying

Community General Discussion
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I have been putting off watching the Delves announcement and recently gave it a watch. For the record, I hope it’s awesome and we all love it! I hope we have a great time and it’s everyone’s new favorite way of progressing their character.

However, I have immediate concerns just based on my experience with WoW.

The Unavoidable Min-Max Problem: Making it class-agnostic so you can quickly join is a great idea on paper. However, the content would need to scale depending on the party. We know they aren’t doing this kind of scaling because they say in the trailer “If you want to clear fast, you can take a team of five DPS!” I can tell you right now, THAT will be all people do. Even in vanilla when the raids were super easy, people still excluded certain specs because they wouldn’t want the raid to be slowed down even slightly. So, that is an immediate problem. I can tell you right now that if someone joins and sees they are in a team of nothing but healers, they will likely just bail because they will view it as a waste of time.

Seasonal Companion: So, I love companion systems in RPGs. I have no issue with companion systems and getting to CHOOSE an NPC to take around the world or into content with you is always great. However, it isn’t a choice here. They are ASSIGNING a companion, and this has immediate implications. Most notably, if you hate one of those companions, if their voice, personality, or looks is absolutely toxic to you then you will feel chained to them and it will make you want to simply avoid the content. I think assigning a pre-made companion is a real bad idea, and they should really make the companion much more customizable or at least provide multiple options. I have no problem with the first companion, but that doesn’t mean season two’s companion won’t be the worst thing ever.

Silly Hats: This is more of a “me” problem. I am getting older and more bitter. However, isn’t this game silly enough already? It’s often way TOO silly. The thought of everyone in WoW walking around with a silly hat is going to be pretty immersion breaking for me. I am not trying to insult the people who enjoy the sillier moments in WoW, I just think we need to maintain some kind of balance. This game doesn’t need to be TF2. This is a minor concern, and obviously the least of the problems I list here.

Progression: This is fine on paper, but it also comes with the additional problem of being min-maxed. Either its going to be faster than other forms of progression, causing everyone to storm the forums and talk about being “forced” to do it, or it’s going to be slower and everyone will storm the forums complaining they have no reason to do it. Progression could be fine, but it has to be balanced, and that might be very tricky to pull off.

So those are my initial thoughts, and I realize it’s all very negative. I do feel quite bad about that, but I feel like most of the time when I hear something new about a video game I am conditioned to immediately try to find all the problems with it. It’s rare blizzard introduces something and it’s just GOOD. Dragonflying gives me hope, since that system is awesome. However, dragonflying is a much less tricky and complex system than Delves.

Again, I hope they can pull it off and we all love it. However, I hope they are considering the above, otherwise this is going to be painful.

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I want delves but with a party of 3 companions and I get 8 total companions to recruit for my delves and I can swap out my party members as I please and level them all up like an RPG.

Thats just me though.

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There is a third possibility: it will be just as fast as other forms of progession, and everyone will storm the forums complaining that since delves are available and more flexible, no one wants to do the other forms of progression anymore and the Delves Have Killed Raiding thinkpieces will be everywhere.

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You’re absolutely right, I hadn’t even considered that. In a game that has already divided the player base in several ways, this will be one more division.

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If Delvs are done in a way other MMos do it, clearing the instance will be notably slower, more as a protection against players using them as a viable alternative to existing dungeons. I like to think that Delves are to be designed for solo and perhaps dual players, and not existing dungeon running groups.

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People have been asking for this to do solo for a long time, why are those folks gonna suddenly start doing them in groups when they’ve been avoiding group content for years?

The people who want to do group play for the fastest rewards will still be doing m+.

1 heroic raid level item/week, it’s very solidly behind m+ and raiding. It’s only going to be a gearing upgrade for solo or less than 5 people group players.

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I can already see it now. “Delves killed raiding because I can’t GATEKEEP gear from people I think doesn’t deserve/need it!”

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  • I plan on only doing delves solo. So I hope, I don’t get pressured into groups for balance purposes.
  • I wish I could turn off companions or they improved the pathing. I never want the companion between me and the mob but that is what invariably happens all the time.
  • The progression seems okay to me but not really counting on it. I am guessing it will take me a long time to get anywhere near max gear.

I do wish that Delves had been more randomly generated instead of just plunked in static locations. You’re wandering around and… On look what is in this cave, a Delve. Clean it out. Carry on. Next week, it could be a different cave or some rundown building.

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Don’t get me wrong, I would love some decent solo content. However, I always grouped up for things like Torghast because it was much faster and less sleep inducing.

I suppose if Delves are much more fun and interesting to explore, I will be less likely to want to super-speed them. However, I can see a lot people looking for groups on this to make it as fast as possible.

Delves are going to have their own reward system in the weekly vault. Which means people will do them regardless to have a better chance at getting a decent reward.

This is a really neat idea, and I would love that too.

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I love your idea, getting follower npcs to do those delves with would be so cute! And leveling them up would be even cuter, that is the part I liked most about mission tables. The best case would be if the follower npcs were my own alts!

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I expect that, like Torghast, some classes will have a significantly easier time in delves than others. So the lower tiers of difficulty will likely be very easy to ensure everyone can get something out of it regardless of class or build, while higher tiers start feeling tighter and most of us will plateau in different places where pushing higher on a particular character stops being fun.

The seasonal companion is bit like a fancy tier set to me. I can understand the worry about getting a Jar-Jar companion … but I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

I often come back from Darkmoon Fair with a shark head. I’m not afraid of silly hats.

(most of my worries are just about the flavor/fun of delves being iterated into too monotone an experience while the devs try to tune a true “challenge” at the top end)

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So what?

Delves can be done solo so players are not dependent on other players.

So what?

If a player is that persnickety, they deserve to miss out on the content.

And if it is the gear they want, they can go do M+ or raid.

Or they can do without.

What they won’t be able to do is cry that there is no solo/causal progression path.

Personally, I don’t like companions, period, and wish there was an option to not have them but it is not such a big issue for me, that it is going to prevent me from doing the content.

Then I will ignore it.

Along with the silly hats which I also find immersion-breaking.

My impression is it will be at slower rate, although I could certainly be wrong.

What are you talking about?

Delves are being added so solo/casual players have a progression path, not to supplement a M+ player or raider’s progression path.

So any solo/casual player who wants to have a progression path will have that reason to do it, regardless of its speed.

And any M+ player or raider doesn’t need to because they have their own progression path.

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My concern about that is that the devs won’t try to make the content interesting. They will just do something gimmicky like adding a timer or an affix that blasts water up your butt every two minutes to temporarily stun your character. Those things dont make M+ or Torghast interesting to me. I want the game mode to feel more like an interesting adventure that I am excited to undertake, not an arcade mode of gimmicks.

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I’m not feeling particularly afraid of gimmicks. On the contrary, I like the idea of each delve having some quirk that makes it feel unique. I am a bit wary of things that are timers in disguise, but overall I’m feeling optimistic.

(whether I’ll still have this same opinion a year from now … well, we’ll see)

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And that quirk can change too. They gave the example of the candle delve and how one week it might be that and another week it could be something different due to story reasons

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A fair point so long as they are balanced around solo play. I often got into groups with Torghast despite it being optional solo content, because it made the content far easier to do, especially since at the time I played healer. I feel like it might end up in a situation where solo play is too hard (especially for certain specs) so people will gravitate towards groups. But admittedly, that is all just overly-negative speculation at this point and I have no idea how blizzard is going to implement balance.

Personally, I am not too fussy to completely avoid the content if they attach Jar-Jar Binks to me. However, I still prefer being able to customize my experience to not have Jar-Jar Binks, so it’s still a concern for me. I agree that having the option to not have a companion would also be nice.

Which is what I tend to do anyway, I guess having the trailer highlight the silly hats just reminded me of all the strange immersion breaking things in the game and gave me a knee-jerk reaction.

I would hope it isn’t, at least not too much so. If it’s too slow, then the content will just be boring.

A fair point, but I think people will do the content anyway and complain that they don’t like it because it will have cosmetics they want OR just to get the extra choices in the vault every week. We will ultimately get the wave of people feeling “forced” to do it. Although I admit that the feeling of being “forced” is a player created illusion, it’s still a major perceived problem.

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:roll_eyes:

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I’m not talking about people who don’t mind grouping up. I’m talking about the ones who have made it very clear that they’re not doing that and have wanted something they can do solo or with groups of less than 5 if they just play with a friend or two.

Regular m+ players will be able to ignore that slot pretty quick, given it’s low ilevel comparatively. Maybe worth it for a desperately needed slot.

I guess the whole thing goes back to why you’re doing the delves in the first place, and if you can manage the self control to do them slowly if rushing though for the rewards isn’t the only reason you’re there.

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Yeah, that’s true, it’s definitely good that people who lean much more on solo play are getting content and I hope it’s good.

A lot of WoW players seem to have a self-control problem, so I guess we will see how the community handles it. I have this problem sometimes too. Even now if I am playing WoD I sometimes find myself caught in a loop of garrison chores and have to remind myself that I am ruining my own experience and to slow down.

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my hot take is that nothing kills raiding more than the attitude of people that raid a lot

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