Feedback: Delves

In Development The War Within Beta Test
22

Feedback: Fungal Folly

Did Level 5. Wasn’t too bad, my biggest point of contention with this one is the green spell effects on the green ground. They were difficult to see, especially since a lot of the ground was “raised” so the swirlies often appeared “underneath” the ground, so to speak.

Outside of that, the big shroom folks on the salamanders don’t actually do anything but patrol back and forth even if you’re pewpewing them to death.

Edit: I came back through here on level 9 and the big shroom dudes on the salamanders actually attacked me this time.

7 Likes
23

I unlocked Reno Jackson, and it currently up to “rare” level, but I cannot test with him.

Is this only for the level 80 server?

1 Like
24

I made the mistake of hearthing in a delve (the candle one) and now I’m stuck in midair over an endless sea in Kriegval’s rest somehow haha. So, that’s probably a bug, I failed the delve and didn’t want to walk back haha.

1 Like
25

So far I’ve done three delves: Fungal Folly at level 4, Tak-Rethan Abyss at level 5, and The Waterworks at level 6.

Of primary interest to me is whether Priest can do the delves - specifically, whether Disc Priest can do the delves. I did try Shadow for a bit in Tak-Rethan Abyss, but ended up swapping back to Discipline. I didn’t try holy.

Fungal Folly

  • Immediately I noticed that although the UI indicated me and my friend (who were attempting to queue together) could do the delve as a team, unfortunately it only allowed my friend to enter as the party leader. I was stuck outside, with an error that said “only the party leader may queue for the instance.” I’m not sure if this is meant to be intended (solo only), but I remember being told I could do delves with 1-5 people. Perhaps this is a bug? I’d love clarity.
  • Everything in 4+ hits so hard. Obviously the testing has us scaled to an appropriate item level, but even with the scaling, I am frequently taking 1/4-1/2 of my health in hits. On Discipline I found it easier to have Brann be a healer (as his dps didn’t significantly increase the time it took for me to kill things, but his healing was almost critical).
  • I was permanently stuck in combat and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I aggro’d a critter somewhere? Either way, it never manifested, so I wasn’t able to try a bunch of talents/specs I wanted to.

Tak-Rethan Abyss

  • Again, 5 hits so hard on priest! And everything slowed down extensively in terms of kill time.
  • Here, owing to the slowness of kill time, I ended up going Shadow. I died almost immediately - Brann throwing potions is very thematic, but often times they were thrown into hazards and I wasn’t able to get to them. They also didn’t feel like they were healing me for very much.
  • I swapped back to Discipline and resigned myself to a very slow kill time. Everything here hit me for most of my health. I managed it however!

The Waterworks

  • Wow, was this miserable.
  • First - I couldn’t figure out the totem mechanic. I understood that the totem lost air the more I moved around. However, Brann would often spawn his protective shield or health potions again where I couldn’t reach them, and I desperately needed them on 6. I assumed, since the totem had spawned from the first purifier, that every air purifier would refresh the totem - I was wrong, and I wasted a lot of time figuring that out.
  • Unfortunately, the slowness of my DPS kicked in at this level, and by the time I managed to arduously whittle down the elites, everything was respawning. If I ran out of time on the totem, forcing me to run back to one of the two purifiers I found that could give me another one, I lost time and often had things respawn.
  • When Brann would get aggro off of me (not hard to do - I am a healer), he would begin running away, pulling things in his path until he finally ran so far from me that he snapped back to my side - bringing everything he pulled with him.
  • After the third time this happened, I threw my hands up in the air and left.

I definitely don’t mind a challenge! I don’t mind carefully powering my way through a delve, and certainly priest is a softer class so a lot of things without properly statted gear can be “punching up.” But I’d love it if you could consider not having enemies respawn in delves. If the point of the delve is to be an instance where we have all the time we need to explore and try things, then having everything respawn seems counterintuitive to that.

I’m really hoping that these can become an interesting and fun addition to the game! I’m hoping with proper gear rather than being arbitrarily set to an item level in beta, that this won’t be as horrible. But man…that was rough on Disc and Shadow priest.

11 Likes
26

Feedback Kreivgals Rest (6):

I am standing here after 3 attempts staring at this giant Kobold on steroids.

From what I have gathered, if you stay in melee range and he gets the Ground Slam cast off, that’s what actually triggers him grabbing you and smacking you to the ground. No big deal, right? Just stay out of range (I am an evoker and all). Wrong! This mofo runs as fast as he is big! I dang near can’t keep him far away! My blue spells aren’t slowing him, hover ain’t recharging fast enough (and I am even spec’d for it to go 40% further) and this is with me using Spatial paradox.

As if that isn’t enough… I have 3.6M health at current scaling (574). If there’s a way to dodge his massive AoE firestorm ability (which, as far as i can tell from the animation is just him exploding from within and me taking damage no matter if I am 50 yards away from him), through Scales it still hits me for 2M damage!

If I get caught (and eventually it’s a fairly large if, cause quite frankly at this ilvl I do not appear to be able to chunk 28M hp within the span of 3 hovers) by ground slam, there is 0 chance to get back to full health before Firestorm smacks me (since it appears cast immediately afterwards).

I am enjoying the challenge, though. :slight_smile:

Edit: Unless there’s a way to slow this dude, this ain’t doable. melee’s for 250k+ (can’t stay out of range cause I can’t slow him and he frikin’ sprints). ground slam is 450k a pop (multiple hits) with a Firestorm for 2M+ right afterwards). If homie could be slowed it would be one thing… but dang, man.

Also, having to manually click the candle is asinine. If you run through the candle it should automatically pick up. It’s very frustrating trying to kite steroid bob, have my candle run out, and then get caught in a ground slam trying to pick hup something 1/8th the size of my character.

Second Edit: I swapped to Preservation since I only had 1 death. Beat it without lust. Required 42M healing lol.

5 Likes
27

Fungal Folly: Tier 4

Only real complaint here as some others mentioned is the spell effects can be difficult to see due to colorization, and also they get “hidden” under terrain which can be frustrating.

Underkeep: Tier 5

Everything seemed to work well here.

Overall

Playing as Slayer Fury Warrior. Enjoyed these two I did. I thought both boss fights were reasonably interesting. Difficulty with the scaled ilvl felt appropriate. However, as a class that has higher self healing some mobs damage output definitely felt high. Obviously only done the two Delves but wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more combat.

I was unable to complete either Delve. The pilfered chest at the end “had been looted by someone else” and clicking the Leave-O-Bot didn’t complete the delve and I didn’t get credit on the great vault track.

Maybe some of this simply isn’t implemented.

Brann

He kinda sucks? lol. I dunno, his healing potions seemed more impactful than anything else he was doing. I tried him as dps role once and healing role once.

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Feedback: Earthcrawl Mines +7

Completed it (only 3 deaths, and frankly one of them was stupid). Went preservation again on the last boss after first attempt couldn’t keep up with the amount of interrupts needed and the curse ended up getting me cause Cauterizing Flame was on CD. It was easier to handle as pres cause I could heal through it while bran did his 300k dps.

All in all, tho, it wasn’t bad that one. Stuff hit hard, but it wasn’t insurmountable (at least when you can change specs lol).

1 Like
29

Enjoying these and they seem to be a decent challenge for solo players. I’m tired of world mobs being pathetically easy and only finding challenges in group content. So I love delves so much at the moment.

I expect a lot of filtered noobs due to difficulty. That said a few things may be overtuned, for example…
In Fungal Folly there is a “cutscene” when the mushroom decay despawns.

Well I actually died during this cutscene. I’m talking like 100% to 0 health during this cutscene thingy when you lose control of your character and it shows the mushroom despawn. Yeah, there was some aoe crap around but still.

Don’t care at all about having lives, I would say if anything you should just “game over” when you run out though. Noobs gotta feel good even if they fail though I guess.

tldr difficulty good but dying during a cutscene stupid

EDIT: I discovered there is a total safe zone if you stand right in the middle of the shroom. Just stand in the middle of it and none of the aoes spawned around it can hit you.
Pic: https://imgur.com/OWSiarz

2 Likes
30

Did up to a plus 10. The 10 was easier than the 9 cause the 9 had an insane duo boss midway.

I think they could award more than 2 crests per. Especially the higher ones take decently long.

2 Likes
31

So I saw a pretty disappointing thing that I probably should’ve seen ages ago.
Doing them on higher tiers it’s just the same layout each time?

e.g. Kriegvals Rest
You go through it with a candle you have to preserve. And you have to find a bunch of objects. I thought we were going to have different doors open, different respawn points and so on in each tier as we run around with our candle trying to find the items.

But it’s just the same layout each tier and only the mob numbers go up. I know they weren’t meant to be fully random but it’s not even different each tier?
Or is it just unfinished or something?
:dracthyr_shrug:

1 Like
32

Delves only change daily. Layout likely doesn’t change much but the tasks/mobs inside do.

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Flamethrower trap rooms, permanently locked doors, unreachable ledges, doodads that make places look similar, repair salesman, vision obscured in the dark, underwater breath bubbles you have to swim between, obscured treasure objects…

The whole thing is loaded with exploration mechanics that make no sense if it’s static.
May depend on the delve but I’m pretty sure I can even see where the lego pieces connect.
I don’t think I interpreted this whole feature wrong. There’s a repair guy I found who ran off to the meeting stone where there is already a repair.

So either the worst hand-designed dungeon I ever saw or the randomness hasn’t been turned on. I didn’t even notice I was running the same thing because of how chaotic the place is.

If no blue response I will see how it looks after daily reset I guess.
Blue please respond lol? Not turned on because of bugs or testing right?

1 Like
34

So after doing some more delves, they are too punishing on solo dps and healers vs tanks. A tank was never threatened even in a +10 with a dps Brann. Healers and DPS have to panic every second cause your health yo-yos constantly and Brann is a weak healer.

Nightfall Sanctum was likely the worst on clarity on why some mobs were immune and thus packs couldn’t be killed.

Running out of revives and thus the delve not counting for the vault is a bad feeling. Losing out on cosmetics likely would be a punishment enough. 1 crest from a fail in particular feels super bad.

9 Likes
35

Kinda in the honeymoon phase with this because I love old school dungeon crawling. But removing the “fail” criteria would change a lot.

I want to be lost looking for wax and have my candle go out, no longer able to see or know what is in front with one life left. It changes the feeling entirely if you aren’t really able to fail. Diablo has dungeon crawling but never this level of atmosphere as it was birds eye. Just need that randomness and retailchads will be winning with this god tier new content feature.

After playing a bit more I think death count is a good compromise. Sometimes you don’t want to quit the dungeon you failed in either. So it felt good actually that I wasn’t kicked out entirely at 0 lives.

The dungeons aren’t that long and with the layout the same each time at the moment it’s pretty easy to learn even from a failed run. From what I understand the run only doesn’t count for the vault in terms of ilvl adjustment. You know how if you clear a mythic at 10 compared to 0 you get better rewards? It will count as a delve clear but only a low tier clear if it was a 0 life clear on tier 9 or whatever. Correct me if I’m wrong. It could make sense to tweak it though so a tier 9 “fail” is equal to a tier 4 clear and so on.

2 Likes
36

Having now obtained the Immortal Spelunker title, I wanted to share my initial thoughts on delves. I will start though by saying that most of the delves were fun, tuning aside, with the exception of one i mention later.

First: The bug preventing groups from entering delves on the max level realms needs to be fixed soon. Delves hurt, not all classes are made equally, and people want to play with their friends. This is severely limiting the number of people testing delves.

Second: Brann’s potion healing is neat, but aggravating. In many high delves the ground is littered with traps or webbing, so having to walk over randomly thrown potions could do more damage than it heals. Also, 2 delves have a mechanic where a timer goes down with every step you take, every move you make, every vial you break, you’ll be losing time.

Third: Brann’s range when healing is usually too far for melee specs. The problem is the massive sphere (that i assume provides dr?) is a good distance from the player. Even if the player could kite the mobs to the sphere, Brann often positions himself near other packs of mobs which would get pulled. Either keep Brann at the player’s side or center the sphere on the player.

Fourth: Like i said above, not all classes are equal. This is fine to a degree, but all should at least be reasonably able to complete these delves. Unfortunately, i doubt all specs or maybe even classes can. I was getting absolutely manhandled on a ret paladin up to delve 6, then swapped to havoc and walked through a deathless 11 (because soul shards are basically like branns pots anyway). I cant imagine how bad a shaman would feel in there right now. The reason this is this low though is this is less of a delve-specific problem.

Fifth: This may be Demon Hunter specific, which is why it’s fifth, but the underwater delve is awful with movement abilities. Vengeful retreat is a 20 second cd used even in “low mover” builds, but using it here sends you 3+ times as far. I’m fine with gimmicky effects until it actually effects combat mechanics.

7 Likes
37

I agree but honestly, I think a lot of it is a straight up class balance issue. There are open world pvp vids in Dragonflight where Havocs go 1v9 people because they can just kill nearby mobs to recover health and they speed all over the zone. Blizzard never balanced for solo at all, only content such as Arena, raids and mythic+. So what you are seeing here is just the dog turd state of solo play balance in general.

Havoc just needs nerfs in this department period.

It’s just that solo and open world is so pathetically easy it has never actually been considered even by players since you can’t do anything but meme content and impossible to fail quests. We are about to find out which classes are actually broken solo.
Probably tanks too.

2 Likes
38

As a player who is on my second season of getting into Mythic+, I felt that delves would be a good solo experience to practice the same sort of skills I’m developing in lower keys with group content; things like movement and dodging boss abilities, timing interrupts and cooldowns, when to use personal defensives.

These skills are hard to practice in non group content in current WoW; open world rares are a free for all or outgeared, and open world content in general is tuned very differently.

Delves looked like the perfect place to practice solo for the kind of increasing tiered difficulty group content I’m getting into.

And they were; on my DPS characters. I felt like I was developing the same kind of skills and reflexes that I learn in Mythic+, and in content where I didn’t have to pretend that oops standing in that is a “wipe” when it really was a death on an appropriately tiered delve.

Then I tried my hand at Mistweaver, a spec I’m still learning in group content, and find that practice is difficult as there’s a level of expectation of performance in the group content that is pushing my personal skill level; especially now with the larger gap between queued heroics and even Mythic 0 dungeons; in terms of mob/boss difficulty and mechanics.

What I wanted as a healer in a Delve solo and kind of expected to be the case was an experience where I had Brann as a DPS, in a party frame (so I can see things like, is my Mist on him? Can I cleanse something?), and he would reasonably take and hold aggro and as a healer I would be healing Brann, managing my healer threat in a party situation, doing some DPS alongside Brann and mechanical work, like a healer would in group content.

Instead what I got was having to set Brann as a focus, he never took aggro and I got a boss wailing on my healer while I tried to survive via healing myself, dodge primary target aggro mechanics (ie, I couldn’t sidestep a frontal like a healer would in Mythic+ as the boss would just rotate onto me like I was the tank)

It felt like a frustrating experience of trying to simulatenously fill the tank and healer role, which no class is built for, while contributing some DPS alongside Brann.

On my DPS class I did several delves, learnt from deaths and honestly feel like it honed my skill in the game.

As a healer, I quit in frustration because I wasn’t having a good experience and what I learnt from having a boss wail on me while Brann was on the sideline would in no way translate into me being a better healer in group content.

4 Likes
39

The underwater one definitely has a few quirks.
I’ve noticed

Brann making a campfire (underwater)
Nerubian King casually “walking” over nothing but water (Because no swimming animation?)
Other mobs including Brann can’t decide if they are walking or swimming
Weird Brann pathings

Two female Nerubians, Tala and Velo or something? I don’t know what the mechanics were but they just destroyed me in seconds. I had to leave that delve totally uncompleted.

What level was he and the delve? He seems to go a lot higher than what the test troll grants him in power and can be heavily upgraded beyond what we can test.

40

Brann was level 10, as granted. In fact, I deliberately regranted level 10 after gaining one or two levels on Brann with another character (yes, this isn’t true to live and account bound Brann, but is a cleaner test)

The delve was the first tier at level 4, and I was a Mistwalker with all greens at the test granted ilvl - didn’t pick up any tier set or trinkets to try out; just as fresh as possible level 80 with talents and hero class setup.

It was as close to first walk into an endgame delve as I could in the test environment;

And if I had to upgrade Brann on another class before I could play as a healer mainly healing alongside Brann in delves, that kinda defeats the purpose / proves the point I want to make about performing the role of healer / practicing as a healer would in group content in a Delve

1 Like
41

No offence, I don’t think tier 4 is meant as the practice tier. Tier 4 gives what seems to be equal to wyrm crests in DF. Same rewards as mythic keystones and above average pvp rank.

You can do Tier 3 at low levels really easy because of scaling making you OP.
Your experience actually sounds about right, tier 4 is actually endgame. Maybe they should give it the same name as dungeons difficulties?

Tier 1 - Normal
Tier 2 - Heroic
Tier 3 - Mythic 0
Tier 4 - Mythic +2
and so on

Fits perfectly anyhow.

If anything your experience sounds too easy since we can overlevel Brann and get addons going as time goes on. I’ve never done past Mythic+6 (old 16) and I already rolled up to delve tier 10 in a night before getting filtered.

2 Likes