This is the fundamental issue. It’s really sad seeing so many delve-only players be so dumb or disingenuous.
Content participating in the PvE gearing ecosystem needs to be balanced as well as possible with regards to effort/challenge:reward. Delves are currently the easiest and most efficient way to get all of the gearing tiers it provides, and it’s not even close. They are a wild outlier.
To fix this you can increase the difficulty of delves to match their raiding and m+ counterparts, however this difficulty has to be equitable between all specs, which means an absurd amount of spec-specific tuning. There’s no universal way to scale delves up to the appropriate difficulty without leaving certain specs behind or disadvantaged, which is an unacceptable state for the reward-bearing tiers of delves to be in. These realities make this option a de facto nonstarter.
The alternative, and much more reasonable solution, is to nerf delve rewards to match their difficulty. This doesn’t affect delve-only players at all because they aren’t in competition with anyone. All they need is for there to be a satisfying progression curve, and for that curve to end at a point that is appropriate for their aspirational content (Zekvir). This is entirely achievable by lowering the entire gearing curve that comes out of delves. There is no logical reason to have an issue with this.
In group content players are inherently compared against other players. This is an utterly immutable fact that exists irrespective of any individual player’s opinion. Because delves exist the barrier to entry to M+ is higher than it otherwise would be. They’re so easy that it’s outright disrespectful to not take your gear shower before starting M+, and if you don’t people are unlikely to invite you or join your keys. The other side of this coin is that it’s so easy to get gear that M+ players can leapfrog over the earlier keys that they would have otherwise needed to spend some time with for the sake of gearing.
These issues are due to delves, but entirely contained within the M+ community. The issue is not delve players having gear, or delve players taking their gear into higher keys, but rather the deleterious impact of delve gear on the lower key range. I imagine this impact exists in the raiding scene as well, though I didn’t have the consistent schedule necessary this season to raid, and so don’t know what the specifics are.
Delve players have the luxury of being able to ignore other content, but the same is not at all true in reverse. After the reality of how much effort it would take to scale delves properly to the difficulty their rewards should require, this fact is why nerfing delve loot makes the most sense. You can remove delve’s impact on the other pillars, while retaining the integrity of its own internal progression track, by lowering the gearing band that delve progression spans.
You’ve been incredibly obtuse in this thread, and slung around bad-faith accusations of people caring that other people have gear, but it is actually true that the only people who would have an issue with delve gear being nerfed are those that are salty that other people have better gear. Because the only real change from a delvers perspective would be that the pool of those with higher ilvl gear would grow. For anyone who just cares about the health and integrity of the game’s systems that fact would be utterly irrelevant, but for people who are jealous children it’s an issue.