How would you scale "progression" delves?

Community General Discussion
1

Delves are incredibly controversial.
Some players love them, some despise them.

But one of the biggest battlegrounds has been on how they factor into progression.
Those who love delves dislike that the progression is hard capped at “heroic quality, but worse stats”, while those who dislike delves don’t like that players can get “almost” raid quality gear in solo content.

I for one find them to be one of the areas in which the game has more potential than I’ve seen in a while.
Delves are simple enough that they can be rapidly changed not just from one season to another, but even within a season. They can incorporate huge enemy and mechanical variety without needing to feel as coherent as a raid or dungeon. They offer options for both solo players or small groups.
Most interestingly, as solable content, they offer an opportunity for individual difficulty to be scaled up to a degree not appropriate for standard progression. When you have a raid of 20 people, you can’t expect all 20 of them to be flawless - that’s why most bosses are nerfed after the mythic race.
But a single player is able to bash their head into a challenge as many times as they want without letting people down, so to speak.

With that in mind, Delves offer a peculiar option for progression - massive personal difficulty spikes.

The question is:

How would you implement that?

How would you design a challenge that is so difficult, it should be comprable to the experience of high level mythic dungeons or mythic raiding?

How would you design such an experience in a way that doesn’t become completely unbalanced due to class structure (Such as Zekvir ?? being doable as a 560 shadow priest, trivial as a 580 windwalker and harder than mage tower as a 610 Marksman)?

How would you create a challenge that maintains delve’s fundamental variability without being so repetitive or grindable that the challenge is “solved” and everyone just copies the winning formula each week?

For my 2 cents?
Remember week 1, before the series of nerfs, when you had low item level and the delves seemed dauntingly impossible?
Did you see how some players figured them out? Kiting groups around for ages, CCing as much as possible, finding weird pathing and positioning, while using the dungeon’s own mechanics (like spores or rail carts) to help manage the content?
I think that’s the direction to go in.
Don’t make it a pure numbers game, make it closer to a puzzle - where the solution is unique to each delve layout and requires a use for each of your tools, new items and whatever other restrictions are imposed - in ADDITION to the standard mechanics, DPS and gear checks we expect from end-game content.

Still, I’d love to hear what bright ideas the community has.

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I love Delves and I think the gear ceiling is perfectly fine. It’s exactly where it should be.

The design is fine for what these are. I don’t feel there needs to be a higher challenge than what we already have, due to the audience they’re created for. It’s also impossible to balance higher for solo and small groups.

A bit of a side note that I’d like to add to this as I’ve said the same in other threads: I stay in my lane. I don’t try to comment on how M+ or raids should change, because it’s no longer my content. M+ players and raiders need to stay in their lane and stop trying to change how Delves are designed.

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By nature of allowing solo players, delves can’t really ever be scaled in a way that’s ‘appropriate’ for progression all the way to the max level. They’d have to be turned into group content to be comparable, but we already have dungeons for that. There’s just no reconciling the big difference between doing something as a group and introducing group mechanics versus doing something solo with how different each spec’s toolkit is.

Also, who’s saying this? Stats are derived from ilvl, so anything at a certain ilvl all has the same stats. Unless they’re talking about which stats are on the item, but in that case there’re several things from delves that have exactly the itemization I want so they’re even better than something I’d be able to get from raids or M+.

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Simple answer is I wouldn’t. WoW is a game that derives enormous amounts of its difficulty from coordination and shared responsibility / points of failure. Creating something comparable in a solo environment is simply not possible outside of extremely high effort spec bespoke encounters that don’t translate well into content tracks.

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Question: Here’s a hypothetical, suppose you had to design XYZ, how would you do it?

Answer: But I don’t have to design XYZ

Is… a weird response to a conceptual thought experiment, but you do you boo.

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Good thing that wasn’t my response then.

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For hunter, as an example, almost every delve trinket is demonstrably worse than raid or mythic dungeon trinkets. Separated loosely into tiers, with maybe one exception, they’re all at or next to the bottom.

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They already have good progression. It’s damage based on ilvl. I think they can gatekeep people with that scaling in mind, to low geared? You’ll get 1 shot by mobs so go grind lower levels till you gear score is higher and come back. This is prolly why we will never see a brann tank either.

1 Like
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uhh…

How would you design a challenge that is so difficult, it should be comprable to the experience of high level mythic dungeons or mythic raiding?

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Yeah, that’s not the case for shadow at least. Delve trinkets are very competitive with raid/M+ options, even accounting for them being capped at 626 while the other sources can go up to 639.

Except for spymaster. That thing’s on a whole other level.

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If said Hunters are only playing open world content, then the trinkets are fine. None of the Delve trinkets are BiS for me, either. But I’m not doing content where that matters.

Thank you for quoting half of my response and still not reading it, I guess.

This…

Does not equate to this:

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I think a lot of that has to do with MMs frankly comical aversion to haste. Quickwick’s candlestick is, compared to dungeons and raids, an objectively above rate on use dps trinket. Shadow binding ritual knife a similarly above rate passive, and familiar a similarly above rate direct damage option.

Admittedly there are some truly terrible ones too. But the same can be said for dungeons and raids.

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There are a lot of factors one would have to take in because Delves are solo content as well. So before we can work on making them more difficult we would need to even out the playing field between class/specs. I would make the Delve companion more customizable but also make some of them class specific.

After that is done I like how difficulty was done with horrific visions and the mask system. Keep Delves as they are but allow for players to add extra elements or debuffs for added rewards.

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I’ve brought up progression too OP.

Was met with pushback.

Someone made a Delves + thread, I think I was the only player that liked the idea.

I think Delves have a lot of room to experiment, the issue is Blizz tends to get locked into a concept and it stagnates.

Nightmare Dungeons over at Diablo suffer the same fate, little variation, got super boring very quickly and Blizzard just sits on their hands.

I hope they don’t do the same with Delves.

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I think there is an innate contradiction at play that’s hard to get past.

Delves are meant for those that don’t want to do group content, or, just do it with a friend or two. They are, as I understand it, meant to be an end game content designed for the more casual player. There is a small subset, Myself included, that is not a casual player by normal means (I play like 4 hours a day, nothing even remotely close to casual) but I am also not a social player, I don’t like doing higher end content with PUGs, so delves are my default for my progression. I want them to also be more challenging in terms of mechanics, not in terms of just raw numbers.

You could make bosses in delves be incredibly difficult by adding just more stuff to deal with. Less number increases and more places that are unsafe to stand or mechanics you have to counter as is common in raid encounters. I would LOVE to see that in delve bosses… but then you ruin it for the casual players, the actual casual players that maybe run one or two tier 4 delves a week and that’s all they have time for. Like for those that have played it, I want Savage Raid from FFXIV levels of challenge for delve bosses, but that would never happen.

What I would suggest is merely splitting them up. You have tier 1-8 which is the delve for those that want to have a relaxing time. Then above that which currently are the “for fun” delves, you start through in heroic raid level of boss mechanics and mini bosses through the delve. Or just make mobs more exciting than “It’s casting another spell you can’t possibly counter for the 5th time in 10 seconds” Then, at tier 12+ you add more mechanics to make it mythic level. Where you make a mistake, you dead." Increase the gear rewards to go along with these changes and, I hate to say this, make it Solo only (Otherwise it will probably full on kill M+… not that I care about M+ but still, wouldn’t want one pillar to override another one.)

As it stands, the gear cap fits for delves. The people left doing them, like me, are people that don’t want to do M+ or have the care or time to do Heroic/Mythic raids. Hell I don’t have the time to do NORMAL raid as I refuse to live my life on a raid schedule ever again. And the gear we get is enough to do the content we get it from, we don’t need lvl 630+, we already out gear the delves at 600, let alone 616.

The most complicated thing for them to do is to balance a delve based on what spec you enter as (And you won’t be allowed to change it until you finish the delve) this would in theory create 39 different delves based on your chosen spec and that’s just… Yeah I can’t ask the devs to ever do something like that that’s insane. So splitting it into Healer/Tank/Melee DPS/Caster DPS would be what I would go for. Right now there are changes for Healer/DPS/Tank but I think they are a bit… Bandaid-y and need some adjusting to mechanics as well as the numbers.

1 Like
16

I would add a moderately aggressive timer to solo bountiful delves in addition to the lives mechanic. If you clear the delve AND kill all of the Zekky-enpowered packs within the time and with lives remaining, you get a bonus additional chest and at t11, that is hero track and gives mythic track vault loot.

Basically incentivize delves past t8 while allowing them to be run for their ultimately subpar rewards if left of bell curves want to stay at that level.