If dungeons are hard, is it because delves exist?

Community General Discussion
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I’m seeing a LOT of discourse around dungeon tuning, whether it’s M+ affixes, melee-unfriendliness, the usual overanalysis that comes with people making KEEEEYS their whole personality, or folks citing that “OMG PUGs are doomed.”

I’ve talked in other threads about how the new M+ difficulty paradigm introduced in DF season 4 was missing delves, that it’s ok for M+ to be less approachable IF delves exist. What if that idea kicks in earlier than M+?

…Because in TWW, delves exist. They are for one to five players. Where does that leave dungeons, hardline 5-person content, beyond (or even during) the leveling game?

I’m not saying that this is where the devs’ heads are at, but it is conceivable that the existence of delves frees the game from being traditionally approachable with the post-leveling dungeon game, and even treats leveling dungeons as like… “an event you’ll remember completing once.”

All I’m saying is, if you find dungeons to be ridiculous, like “Cataclysm heroics at launch” ridiculous, bear in mind that you are choosing to PUG dungeons repetitively, and that’s a choice you make in a reality where you could take yourself and/or your group of four or fewer friends and go do delves. They reward XP for leveling, and relevant loot and great vault progress at the level cap.

I sincerely believe and expect there will likely be tuning passes and we’ll all be AOE pulling with randos, at LEAST in leveling dungeons in no time, but like… random heroics are going to be season-locked. They’re “relevant” and part of the dungeon progression ladder now. If it “stays harder” longer than usual… you could have played delves instead. WoW might want delves to be REALLY relevant as a “path of least resistance.” I’d be ok with it, because I’m all about observing effort economics and owning my time, which delves are great for, but like… PSA: there might be a lot of “looking in the mirror and being real with yourselves” ahead.

This doesn’t necessarily fall under “players won’t improve, they’ll just quit,” (which I believe in and in a way practice) because It’s not a progression brick wall if they just… point out that “you don’t have to PUG dungeons, you can run delves.”

If dungeons of all stripes are made to feel like “real content” that you do once with followers on a questing-to-level character, or LFD randoms after a few weeks, that’s actually not the end of the world if delves exist to pick up the slack. That might be what we’re looking at.

Just, you know… maybe be ready for that.

Just sayin.

Update:

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I think that’s part of it, I think the other part of it is blizzard fighting the arms race and getting the wrong end of the stick. Certain abilities that used to be disruptable in the original mists instance no longer are, and instead just do huge amounts of unstoppable damage.

Personally I really enjoy where the DF dungeons have ended up after 4 seasons. It took too long to get here that’s for sure, but I don’t feel like the mechanical complexity or tuning is unfair relatively. There was just a relatively steep burden of knowledge which took time to disseminate.

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It’ll be nice to get loot from Torghast 2.0 with varied map themes this time. It’ll also be nice that loot will be upwards of Heroic raid loot in the vault if that’s still a thing.

I think it’s good to have varied content for people with different levels of time commitment. But in the end, unless bountiful delves reward insane loot, M+ will still be the go to in order to gear up faster. For the rest of us Delves will be a nice side option to get great loot to progress and do whatever with.

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Personally I think anything run on a high difficulty should be genuinely hard for most players, particularly if it’s going to be one of the pillars of endgame progression.

They should obviously have easier modes, but let people who want a challenge have a challenge. Delves should have this too.

Also, Cata Heroics at launch were some of the most fun dungeons I’ve done even when I was pugging them and trying to teach the pugs how to not wipe on things.

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random dungeons are irrelevant beyond leveling

so…who cares?

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They did this with a bunch of abilities in recolor dungeons this expansion.

Tanks are indestructible, which has lead to all the other problems in lower end content where they just runoff and do their own thing.

It used to be everyone depended on the tank to hold aggro and keep them alive, the tank relied on the healer to keep them alive and the healer relied on the DPS to kill things before they ran out of mana.

I think the consensus is DF dungeons were the least fun group of dungeons we’ve had. And it’s all this new game play paradigm with indestructible tanks, massive damage dished out onto the group, dance dance forcing melee out of melee range, hoppers forcing ranged into melee… It’s all one massive nonsensical mess of gimmick mechanics and game play.

I was hoping they might be toning this down and maybe moving back to a more traditional trinity game play. But I’m starting to suspect they’re taking all the knobs they turned to 11 and trying to crank them to 12 now.

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Why would dungeons be hard because of Delves and why do you want it to be easy ?? Isn’t the entire point of doing hard dungeons is because it is to be hard ?? :rofl:

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This seems to be the case based on a TWW video I watched about Healing dungeons. I already quit healing (at least mid-high keys) in S1 of DF so it doesn’t really affect me all that much. Someone else’s problem now, mostly. But I do not like the design, that’s for sure.

It’s like it’s built around the mass pull and clump everything into AoE Crowd Control spam idea, such that if you don’t do that successfully you just die. And that’s awful.

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If dungeons are hard, is it because delves exist?

I honestly don’t think the current season for dungeons are hard because of delves coming for the next expansion.

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Idk, all I do know is that I’ll be slamming myself into the wall that is Delves, Solo, on the hardest difficulty, until I succeed for the cosmetics lol.

And by golly, I will succeed.

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Random heroic dungeons (which are random dungeons) are literally not available until season 1 of TWW. There’s a reason for that.

This isn’t just me being petty with semantics, my point is there is a theme of dungeons being “sit up and pay attention” content before Mythic or Mythic plus.

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Blizzard nuked survivability across the board.

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Worth noting queueable heroic dungeons provide a 20% damage healing and hp boost to players, as soon as something hits the queue system it’s no longer expected to have any realistic degree of failure.

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They don’t need to, they just need to provide “seasonally relevant loot” for players potentially willing to say “eff it” to M+ at the cost of a slightly lower item level for content that exists on their own time.

In a world where delves provide that, and they will, M+ can conceivably be as brutally hard as Esports people can take it, and/or casual groups of five actual friends can push as far as they feel is worth it.

Item level is the one thing WoW can gate in this way (that’s actually a potential thread that should exist too), and that’s ultimately all they are doing. Every dungeon eventually makes its way into solo-queueable heroics or has a follower dungeon option.

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I can (and do) also take my friends and do M+. This is the option you always gloss over in your numerous rants about dungeons and the people who don’t play them in your preferred way.

The same people who complain about M+ and challenging content will complain about the difficulty of delves until they get nerfed (and the rewards along with them). Then they’ll complain that there is no challenging content for solo players.

Delves in the beta aren’t trivial currently.

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people love to complain when changes happen but then you learn how to play and things are fine

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I read that all in a deep movie voice tone, especially “in a world where” and it made that entire post of yours even better!

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Ok, today’s “tank nerfs” just double down on the concept of this thread. “No one wants to heal tanks” is all over twitter and like… that’s literally their job. Those traditions slipped for a time, and I would not be surprised if delves are meant to be a pressure valve of freedom for WoW to go back to actually interdependent trinity dungeon design: Tanks take damage, healers heal it, and DPS shorten the time under pressure.

If you don’t like that vision, there is a brand new content type with customizable group comps, servicing 1-5 players, with variable difficulty, but dungeons… may actually be trinity content again. Because delves exist.

Again, just an opinion and an observation.

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I love the change they made to mplus in season 4. Having mythic zero truly be a relevant difficulty that I can and will have actual progression rewards from feels amazing esp for the alts that i dont want to push into higher keys.

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The re-definition of M0 and heroics was really a genius move. Furthermore, the hard trinity returning to dungeons in general is all allowable because, again, delves exist for people that don’t want that!

This all falls apart if dungeons are the only option, but they’re not, and people need to start looking at this whole paradigm (especially after today’s pointed expression of bringing back an interdependent trinity design) in the lens of “or you can play delves,” and that’s ok!