Delves were announced as a separate pillar of content than dungeons and raids. Meant for the solo player that wants progress. Now in an interview, Ion is claiming that they don’t like that players are gearing in a +8 and then hopping into a m7. So in season 2 they’re going to do something about that.
The thing is, instanced group pve and delves NEED to be treated as separate, and they both NEED to be rewarding. It’s not like warfronts or islands or torghast where the intention was to get you some starter or catch up gear then funnel you into group content. Delves were meant to be their own thing. Similar to the divide between pve and pvp. If you get gear in one that helps you in the other so what?
If blizzard nerfs rewards from delves, zzzt, there solo/outdoor progression. No one will care or bother. There’ll be no point, and we’ll go back to either sit in the city and queue, pvp, or quit.
I know they haven’t said HOW they’re going to change it, but nerfing rewards isn’t the answer. If anything buff delve difficulty, so t8 or whatever the “endgoal” tier is next season, is actually and an endgoal. Make the difficulty match the reward, not vice versa.
To embrace delves as a system for solo players, you can’t in any way shape or form make it into a separate system to the degree you are talking about. Because here’s a fun lingustical thing about solo players in WoW: a solo player is more a category of players that avoid organized group content and stick to stuff you can queue for with friends … not actual solo-only players.
Group content can be solo content. Because “solo players” is an entirely different thing than “players who play solo.” I know it isn’t logical but that’s genuinely how this category is distinguished, it is just a case of that “solo players” doesn’t really mean much other than “I don’t engage in endgame group PvE/PvP content.”
That’s all. There’s nothing more or less to it than that.
Which incidentally also puts a ceiling on what delves can be. Since they have to be accessible to players who don’t engage in most endgame content, so it can’t be difficult on the same level (which any soloable experience by definition cannot be) which in turn puts a hard-cap on what rewards a soloable or “solo player”-content can provide.
All of this is important because the solution to most of these things is typically to nerf the rewards if they are too good. They do it for other endgame pillars, so why wouldn’t they do it to delves just because they are solo-content?
We still don’t even know how they would nerf them, only that they would. Which honestly makes sense with the premise of “gears up in +8 delves to then jump into a M+7” when those are STARKLY different experiences. But still PvE so the gear still need to be good, the question is just how do they make it so it doesn’t break the game as to how Delves has the potential and have done?
Mind you, I don’t say any of these things are good or bad but simply under the premise of “Gearing in +8 Delves and then going into a +7 Mythic+” doesn’t make ‘that’ much sense, at least not if you haven’t done any other M+ prior to that.
In short, we gotta see what they want to do before it is even possible to discuss this.
Wait, these things were just speculations? Where? I hadn’t heard of it but I just wrote out my response if the OP had been correct, but now I gotta know what the OP is even talking about in that case.
If that’s the case, why is this even a thread if it is just speculations in that case as this makes it speculations of a speculation… this just got really weird.
… I just read the interview and if this is seriously what OP was talking about, then this is less than a nothing burger. It is literally an imaginary nothingburger.
No, the interview actually makes it worse. Because it is speculation on an assumption of them saying that they are happy but need to continue tweaking it, aka. improving it.
It is an imagined imaginary speculated nothingburger.
I mean yes and no. Solo can mean someone who only plays with friends but also absolutely means someone who just plays solo.
Think of the split between pve and pvp. Both are separate pillars of endgame, but both are equally rewarding. At the same time you have things like pve trinkets outperforming pvp ones in arena/bg’s, or (at least until they put in the 2 tier ilvl system) certain pvp weapons outperforming pve ones. And people just lived with it because it was the cost of having both pillars offer worthy progression.
Delves NEED to be split up like this. It’s for solo (actual solo, not play with friends solo) and open world players, who up until now, have been severely lacking any kind of endgame. It was basically sit in the city and pug, or get to max and quit. And if they boost other forms of content, honestly, who cares? You just live it with like with pve/pvp.
And to get ahead of the “it’s just an interview” yea but how many times has the cycle of “oh it’s just development, oh it’s just ptr/beta, or they’ll fix it next patch, oh they’ll fix it next expansion” have we gone through? The feedback NEEDS to get out there right away or else it’s too late. That’s why they do these interviews, to get that information out there.
No, it isn’t “getting ahead of it” - this is you imagining things to make a clickbait titled forum post. There’s nothing to discuss and even on the premise of the interview, there’s literally just positive things mentioned in it!
Literally EVERY single activity in the game needs to be constantly tweaked when it receives updates! This “concern” of yours is based on absolutely nothing substantive.
For a lot of players hitting level 8 Delves, you’re getting very powerful rewards at that point. When you look across from there to Mythic+, it can feel like there’s no point doing anything below a Mythic+7, and 7 and up is actually quite hard. If you’re someone without experience of dungeons to begin with, +7 is not the best point of entry, and it certainly wasn’t designed to be a point of entry, so we think some players are hitting a cliff wall. So we see a lot of people bouncing off that would have previously had a home in early Mythic+ tiers. So, for Season 2, that’s one of the big things we’re going to address there. It just wasn’t something we could change in the middle of Season 1.
The problem is making delves harder goes against the design players who wanted delves asked for the content to be. Delves as content lack aspects of difficulty that are present throughout all challenging content in WoW and that those who enjoy delves pretty categorically did not want the content to be.
They wanted to be able to do it solo on any spec, they didnt want enrages or dps checks, they didn’t want to have to think about optimising cooldowns, they didn’t want to rely on other players, and they didn’t want complex mechanics.
There’s a limit to how hard you can make something like that, and turning up the scaling isn’t going to solve it.
Visions however, there’s an opportunity to iterate on challenging solo content and provide higher levels of gear.