You can if failing mechanics kills you.
It remains to be seen if this will be the content where that mentality is seen by the devs as appropriate/intended, but you’re not wrong.
I think it has to at some point, no? If the content has multiple difficulties what’s the point if everyone can do the highest one?
We’ve had mechanics in the past like N’zoth’s insanity bar which caused taking avoidable damage to drive you insane. You couldn’t replenish it beyond what mechanics in the encounter allowed, so no matter how much HP you had if you got hit by enough stuff you still died. You could have that but the higher the difficulty the more each hit takes away from you, meaning you have to be better at avoiding.
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We’ve already seen gimmicks in each delve like this. The undersea delve has a breath meter. There’s one where a ward keeps toxic gas away from you. Another where a candle is lighting the dark. Most of the delves seem to have some sort of “you need to respect this thing or you’ll die” mechanic which I assume will escalate in severity at higher levels.
Yeah this is the only way I can think of doing it that a blood dk isn’t just going to waltz in and solo on day 1.
In other threads about it, the candle only went down when you moved, but you could stay stationary for as long as you want. Did that change?
i think the major issue with delves is that if they award ilvl that is equivalent to mythic plus, then people who raid and do mythic plus are going to feel forced to do delves in order to min/max their choices in their vaults every week.
If these delves got the same attention as the follower dungeons then they’ll be gone with the first content patch in the next expansion.
Blizzard have said that the ilvl delves drop will be comparable to M0 and the vault rewards will be comparable to heroic raid. If people do Mythic+ they won’t be needing gear from delves unless it’s week 1-2 and they want to grind to fix a bad slot.
I cannot stress this enough when I say that delve gearing does not replace mythic+, and those who are doing high keys / raiding consistently now do not care about delve gear.
We will be able to make an educated guess about how successful delves are based on the general player attitude about doing them and what sort of changes are implemented as time passes.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops, and I say this as the “delve demographic.”
Conversely, those like me literally do not care about high key or raiding gear. There is a “good enough” point for sane people who can identify their limit and play within it, and I imagine that demographic gets louder the further you get from comparison-based spaces like forums, social media and PUGs running damage meters who decline for their keys based on ridiculous criteria that they ARE entitled to. The only difference is that those in the decline vortex have somewhere to go now (with delves), and I don’t even have to say “we welcome you” because my opinion doesn’t matter for anyone else’s delve experience, nor theirs for mine!
“Play with friends or play alone” is a big subliminal message in a PVE endgame that includes delves and normal mode follower dungeons. I’ve been living in it (minus the delves of course) for some time and it’s blissful, and we can’t wait for delves!
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The complaint isn’t just that M0 is too hard though. The complaint is that heroic is completely trivial and can be solo’d by a decently geared tank. It doesn’t teach the things necessary to bridge the now massive gap between the two difficulties, which is a fair criticism.
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My only concern is for many this is the first time solo content has existed that has the capacity to act as progression. Every piece of solo context, with the exception of mage towers (And even then you had three tiers to overgear them), has been designed to have little to no failure rate.
So it’s going to be interesting to see how many, when faced with a challenge, are either willing to rise to it or happy to accept they’ve reached their limit.
The mage tower only really became a good feature in the eyes of the forums when they could over-gear it in 7.3.
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Even if a lot of people do, there will be a very vocal section who will do neither, and just whine that it’s too hard.
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Given the history of the response when queued/solo stuff being any kind of challenge, I’d bet on very few.
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My guess is delves will be abandoned as a design concept.
Here’s the thing - solo players are entitled. They think their 15$ entitles them to COMPLETE all of the content in the game. When dungeons and raids were where all the difficulty was, they could justify to themselves that they were choosing to not do that content. When you make that difficult content open to them, it exposes how bad they really are and they just cannot cope.
It’s the same reason why Unreal Tournament or Quake Arena died. Solo skill-based games that expose the short-comings of players often result in players just refusing to play when they realize how bad they actually are.
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Please read the links in my post here:
There are 2 things we can be certain of, regarding delves:
- There will be a vocal chunk who complain that they can’t get the top-end stuff the first couple weeks. (They will complain because people who are not them, ARE getting those rewards.)
- There will be a vocal chunk who complain that there should be better rewards available for doing an even harder version. And then, if Blizzard complies, those same people will then fall into group 1, when that harder version does get released.
This is also why large group number content is important, so players have scapegoats and things to blame other than themselves.
Arena is the opposite of this.
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