Yes, and IO will help groups skip over the players that chose to skip the lower level keys.
But is that really the best design? Some of the players who geared through delves are likely going to be capable in a +7. The group leaders are going to have more applicants to wade through that don’t have the demonstrable capabilities. The players who delved their way to that gear will see a higher percentage of declines to these keys.
Yes, to some degree this is a self-inflicted problem. Players who have any idea how group leaders form groups in M+ could foresee a need to run those low keys as they were delving and/or specifically to build their IO. But even if there are player controlled ways to mitigate the bad, the bad is still the result of the gear design between delves and M+.
I don’t personally find low level keys exciting, they’re akin to farm bosses for me. Yet running them at a lower level is a good idea to learn and practice those mechanics. When we needed both gear and IO from lower level keys, this was fine; players weren’t able to get the gear without getting some exposure to M+. But with delves dropping gear on par with the halfway point of the rewards system from M+, players can bypass the low level M+ and still get the gear.
If the gear per hour commitment were such that low level keys were at least similar to that of delves, it would be much easier for players to rationalize running the low level keys as they get both the IO and gear. But it’s not even close. It takes 2.5 keys on average to see an item, with each key taking an average of 25-30 minutes when factoring in group formation. Until you run out of coffer keys, a T8 delve guarantees a champion item for all players and can be completed in 10 minutes; for those who can solo them that fast, there is no group formation time. Blizzard really needs to find a way to make the appeal of low level keys for gear to not be completely overshadowed by a game mode that is both faster and easier.
No, actually. I want Blizzard to bring back 2-3 of the key levels they removed during DF S4 that will sit between M0 and +2 (possibly with lowering the M0 difficulty a touch) so there is room for Blizzard to put gear commiserate with the effort of delves.
It’s not about whose fault it is. It’s about just how much of an outlier delve difficulty is versus their rewards compared to the effort. Unless there is an iron curtain between delve power gain and the rest of the game, delves do not exist in a vacuum. Yes, there are players that will never touch an M+ for which if they got a full 639 item level set mailed to them it would not impact anybody else.
But there are also players that do delves and something else that has an element of competition. And when delves are this much of an outlier, there are going to be impacts on other areas of the game.