"We" won't know if delves "succeed," and that's ok

Community General Discussion
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I am glad people are talking about delves. I personally think they are a social paradigm shift for the game, but I’ve gone into that in other threads so I don’t need to go deep on it here.

What I do want to say is if you are excited for delves, like me, please don’t take the loud public voices as gospel when it comes to flavoring your own perspective on them. Delves will live or die on telemetry.

It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of your performance in delves, because other people are optional in delves.

It doesn’t matter what a reward-centric or challenge-centric group PVE player with a platform (some of the loudest people in social media or forum discourse) thinks of delves, because we aren’t mandated to play with each other in delves, can set our own difficulty in delves, and will get what we get in delves and from delves regardless of what other players think.

So much of our participation in group PVE gets subjected to the trickle down of the most elite players’ expectations of their team mates. Delves will be immune to that, because no one you didn’t invite specifically, while having the option to play alone (so clearly you’re inviting them because you enjoy their company) gets an opinion on what you do in delves, how or how often you play delves, or how high you go in delves.

Side tangent: I once knew a WoW player who did almost no combat content. He collected one of everything. That’s what he did. This is was in the burning crusade, before “collections.” He just collected things. His bank, his inventory, heck he got suspended for using his mailbox as storage, but he collected, ran almost no content, and was so happy just to exist in the world and hoard, hoard, hoard. His playstyle affected no one, and it was hard to relate to him on a WoW front because he… didn’t do dungeons or quests outside the purview of his collections. He was a niche, and harmless, but that’s what he loved. You cant’ really build content for that… except they did build something related to that in the collections’ tab.

Delves are developed in response to telemetry. You, as a goal-minded, progression-minded, competitively-minded player might not be able to fathom how someone who dresses and plays endless alts for tiny un-schedulable bursts of time with 2-3 friends tops, but… Delves are designed for those people (among others), whether they come to the forums, social media, any discussion or not… but WoW will see if delves succeed. WoW do not have to read or listen to a single thread, youtube rant or twitter trend to determine the success of delves. They exist because they saw a statistical need, enough to devote time to making them exist.

It’s ok if the opinions of the loud and the eloquent here on the forums can’t shape delves, because the telemetry will speak loud and clear.

I hope y’all are ready for that… Because it doesn’t matter if you’re ready for that.

I can’t wait for delves. This is going to be fun to play, and fun to watch. I’ve been on this topic for a while, and it’s going to be a fascinating social experiment: A self-owned pipeline from level 10 in dragonflight follower dungeons, to the great vault fed by delves.

I’ve often said that the best MMO development on the modern, no-longer-novel internet says “I don’t need other players, but I have the freedom to want other players.” Delves manifest that perfectly.

I can’t wait to watch this happen!

Thank you for reading!

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I personally hope they take over for M+ a bit.

M+ has moved forward to the point where it doesn’t feel as accessible as it used to be, most people who do it are regular KSM masters and whatnot.

I’m personally not that into M+, because it feels too static to me.

Also not a fan of the affixes, I played Diablo 3 for a long time lol, it just feels very recycled from my point of view, I did that exact stuff in another game.

I feel like delves could give me the variety I crave, so I’m looking forward to whatever they give us.

There’s achievements for soloing delves on the hardest difficulty. If it’s anything like Mage Tower in terms of difficulty, I’m game.

Edit: Found it, the reward for is a void-tint for your own personal airship. It’s cool.

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All dungeons and no delves makes Marsius a dull boy.

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Anything to replace mythics. About time.

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Aren’t delves just horrific visions 2.0?

We’ve seen this episode, already.

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Replace seems like the wrong word to use here. Gear orientated players will do mplus over delves as delves cap out at max to be H raid ilvl reward where mplus goes to mythic levels. This is not a shot at people who want to play delves by all means you guys have fun and I hope it’s an enjoyable experience for you but it’s not something that’s going to devour a subset of another playerbase. People who want to high end game have no purpose for it and those who do have a purpose for it are not high end game players.

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I’m looking forward to them, hope they’re fun. I doubt they will affect the mythic scene much though we’ll see. I’ve heard people say the new TWW dungeons are looking good

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They’re doing their best to filter the undesirables out of m+ before delves are introduced precisely so this doesn’t happen I’m thinking. Manufacturing the problem for delves to solve so to say.

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And, again, I think we’ll see the same thing we did with Horrific Visions: Just because H raid rewards are available, doesn’t mean most players will be capable of getting them, at first.

With Horrific Visions, skilled players were getting the top-end rewards from the beginning, while most people were screaming on the forums that Horrific Visions were “too hard” and “only for the 1%” and so on.

We’ll need to see where the tuning is but I’m pretty sure that most folks are going to have to slowly work their way up in terms of delve rewards, and we’ll see another round of intense “this is too hard” feedback at the start of TWW from the people who claim to be looking forward to delves.

Time will tell.

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Oh I 100% agree with you. I interpreted the they cap out at H ilvl meaning thats by doing the highest tier of delve so will be a long grind for those type of players. As for the tuning so far on ptr its faceroll but we only have the first few levels to test so who knows. I will find it absolutely hilarious though when players like youself and I (mythic raiders, mplus players) will be the first to complete the highest tier of delves and the “this was supposed to be solo player content” complaints start.

Wait was this a thing for visions? I remember them complaining about mage tower when that first released (was fine imo) but visions? That was faceroll even at the highest point you still had plenty of time to check the mailboxes, apples for the spider pet ect ect.

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Did a lot of that not come from the fact that it was a timed dungeon? I remember how I always failed to do it, as the time did run out (shadow meter).

If Delves don´t have such a mechanic, it should not matter if someone does it in 1 hour, 30 minutes or 5.

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I hope they succeed, they seem almost like scenarios but with M+ scaling which is awesome.

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They do. That’s the whole candle mechanic, gotta move forward before your candle burns out and get the next one.

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Oh wow, I did not know that.

Playing a bear druid this is a bit of a concern, as I will survive but do less damage hmm. But I am ok if I can just progress slowly, if I can upgrade the candle to burn longer, brighter or so.

I have not yet found a good video about delves, so I keep looking. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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So not all delves have this mechanic. 3 out of the 5 I’ve tested do and the npc companions will not progress with no candle active and your screen is completely black so you can’t see anything except a candle in the distance but you won’t see the 100s of floor holes between you and that candle that will lead to your death and failure (unless hunter and use flare cause that works).

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I think it’s going to be pure entertainment on the forums when people’s expectations meet reality.

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Even if there was no timer, if there’s any doubt about complaints on UN-TIMED content being “too hard”, I direct everyone to the numerous complaint threads about M0, currently. Which has no timers.

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Torgast flopped.

Mage tower succeeded

Delves : we will see if its a success amongst the community, or utterly fails.

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If you mean much of the community losing their minds because it was “only for the 1%” according to them, sure.

(And then losing their minds AGAIN when mage tower was re-released.)

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Ok bud. No need to overthink it.