Lets be honest, for a lot of people, m+ just isn’t fun
Delves kind of help but stopping the grind able gear at 603 and the low amount of crests makes it less beneficial by a long way
Raid is once a week and group loot instead of personal loot seems less rewarding, maybe stats show otherwise, but that’s my experience
I’ve often wondered about a queueable scaling dungeon mode (yes in the ball park of m+)
- no timers
- queue level available based on ilvl instead of players discretion
- Stiff penalties for leaving
- Focus on slow and steady, cc, group coordinating
- Scaling loot like m+
Dungeons would get harder and harder but instead of ERMAGERDZERG SPEED AGHHH, it would be a focus on calculated pulls and control over the dungeon
Or maybe we need something that’s not dungeons, just throwing this out there, what do others think, what are your ideas?
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There are two major factors present in content that awards the potential to achieve over 620 ilvl.
Requirement of character optimisation: doing more damage doesn’t just make things faster, there is a non trivial minimum necessary for success.
Coordination / collective responsibility: Players organise implicitly or explicitly and difficulty is derived from multiple players doing things together and each one being a potential point of failure.
Untimed dungeons as they exist now fail criteria 1. Delves fail criteria 1 and 2.
What you’re really looking for is 5 man mini raids.
14 Likes
It’s more likely Blizz will keep iterating on Delves then add another pillar like you suggest.
I think eventually they’ll increase the number of Tiers for Delves and with that the rewards which covers all the issues you mentioned.
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I think they’ll struggle, given delves have no focus on optimisation at all and as solo content are severely limited in options for mechanics, as well as lack any element of communication. Simply by enduring you will eventually succeed.
Higher tier delves as they stand are just an unbalanced mess of extremely simple / easy mobs with overtuned melee swings / unavoidable damage. They’re a long way from anything resembling a mythic content track.
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Does that really matter? Prestige comes from beating content not from iLevel or at least it should. In particular because Blizz will never be able to balance Raiding, M+ and solo Delves.
I used to think like you but now I could care less if someone gets max iLevel for a Season from Delves if it makes them happy and keeps them subbed. They aren’t getting any Raid or M+ cheeves with that gear if they weren’t already which is the real badge of honor.
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People love to complain about the M+ timer but it’s like… it’s not as if people are doing careful, calculated pulls and CCing every mob in high delves or M0s or any other content. Everyone wants to optimize it for speed even if there’s no timer.
(And you can still complete an M+ dungeon as over time as you want as long as all 5 people are in agreement, and you’ll still get loot and vault slots from it)
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For this to be meaningfully difficult over M+, which doesn’t change anything about the timer with its scaling and is literally just getting harder and harder anyway, you’d have to give mobs so many mechanics and much higher scaling than what M+ currently does that the people who currently don’t like M+ because it’s too stressful or whatever will be the same people who don’t like / can’t do this.
If you don’t do that, it’s just M+ but easier because you’re allowed to split pulls up and wait on CDs and deaths/failures don’t matter.
Delves drop Champ Gear with a chance at the Maps for Hero Gear, with Hero Gear in the Vault.
For what they are, that’s incredibly lucrative. Rewarding any more would be even more of an insult to higher group content than it already is. Solo-oriented content is inherently easier to be successful in than group-oriented content no matter how you tune it.
(I also feel this way about M+ vs Raid but obviously that ship has long since sailed)
This entire game is based on the weekly lockout. I’m 90% sure that’s why they won’t do Raid+ content, you know, an infinitely scaling raid that can be 10 manned.
They want everyone gated for a week, period, bottom line and they want keys to be “punishing”.
If punish is in your vocab as a game dev and you aren’t doing a rogue like or a survival sim, then wtf are you even doing? If they wanna remake Everquest, then just remake Everquest, stop wasting our time.
Given that you don’t have to time keys to get the loot and Vault Credit, this seems a bit exaggerated.
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That isn’t the full meaning of them being punishing, you cherry picked.
You get less crests, your key depletes, your IO suffers, you get demoralized, etc.
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As opposed to hitting enrage in raid, which means you get no loot, no crests, and no vault.
As opposed to hitting 0 lives in delves, which means you get no loot.
M+ failstate is the timer. Yet you can fail that and still get consolation crests, all of the loot, and all of the vault. Your IO also does not suffer, you just get less score than if you timed it. Suffering would be if it worked like PvP Rating.
Point being, M+ is more or less already what OP is asking for if you ignore the timer. Sans the queues, of course.
7 Likes
I was going to say the same thing which is why I think all the end game tracks will eventually have normalized rewards.
Blizz will never be able to balance Raids, M+ and Delves because there are too many variables.
I never used the word “suffering”. Stop replying to me please, I’m not reading anymore. I don’t even know wtf you’re talking about.
They don’t mean the same thing lol. Good bye.
Content at least has relatively comparable difficulty. Delves not only fall short of that, they lack the tools within their design to achieve it.
The closest thing to a DPS check delves had was the cocoon on zekvir “??”, but after only a few weeks that DPS check was all but removed.
You do not need to play your class / spec well to complete delves. You only have to survive.
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I’d give it a whirl. Could be fun.
Just don’t make me wait for sunders. Lmao.
Not when you factor in logistics which has been the sore point about M+ from a Raider POV for years.
In the end if someone only does Delves and they can get max iLevel each season I’ve come around to the “who cares” camp. If it keeps those players happy and subbed that’s better for the game.
Getting a higher iLevel won’t give them Portals or Cutting Edge, etc which is all that really matters for PVE content each Season.
2 Likes
Yes. You can hit 80 and clear T8s with trivial difficulty. Every major source of damage is completely avoidable and there is nothing approaching class balance, much less role balance. If they could drop myth track gear, they’d have to be on par with at least +10s or Bloodbound horror, both of which are group content with fail states and which require some measure of skill expression. Delves are, quite frankly, extremely generous with the difficulty they provide.