Zekvir Hardmode is "Almost" impossible for Delve Players

Community General Discussion
1

Hello everyone!

EDIT: This thread was made for the pre September 26th nerf version of the encounter. As it seems to keep getting attention I should clarify I no longer feel this way and the fight's difficulty has been greatly reduced. If anything I'm a little disappointed

TLDR: Fight is extremely hard but tuned to be doable in delve gear for dps, however the inconsistent spell queueing and reliance on brann's abilities makes some parts of the fight super RNG and annoying. Tanks and healers need a tailored version of the encounter.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about Zekvir, both on ? and ?? difficulty, following the changes to Brann. I, like many, was concerned about the difficulty of the finale of delves for season 1 and if it would even be possible. Now that I’ve done it I wanted to talk about how the fight plays out, as well as give feedback on the encounter itself as I want to see it be improved.

Differences between Zekvir ? and ??

  1. The fight has significantly more health. 195m compared to the 85m~ of ?
  2. The eggs have significantly more health, roughly 11m
  3. The eggs recover 50% of their hp when they turn into spiders if they aren’t killed in time
  4. Zekvir has a second kickable cast. A heal which recovers 10% of his HP
  5. Every avoidable mechanic 1 shots
  6. Zekvir has a Phase 2, in which he gains 1 new ability and all of his current ones are empowered.

Zekvir Phase 2

In phase 2 Zekvir keeps all his phase 1 mechanics, gains one extra one, and some of his phase 1 mechanics are empowered.

  1. The eggs remain the same, however their cadence increases slightly
  2. The fear now shoot orbs out of the boss at 90 degree angles that have to be dodged
  3. Before angler’s web, Zekvir spawns portals that the web will travel between. Being hit has the same effect as it does in P1 (Death). As long as you get far away from where he spawns the portals you should be fine.
  4. The heal now recovers 25% of his HP, as opposed to 10%.
  5. The claw attack and enfeebling spittle remain the same
  6. Zekvir has a new ability, in which he stands still and channels to cause spikes to erupt from the ground in sequence that you have to dodge.

Strategy

For dps specs the fight feels tuned around 615 ilvl. Maybe a bit more or less depending how bursty the dps spec you play is. I was 617 as a Shadow Priest, the confirmed Fury Warrior kill was closer to 610.

  1. The eggs are the primary danger on hard mode. You need to plan your cooldowns around how to kill each one every 30 seconds.
  2. Interrupt the heal every 40~ seconds.
  3. Have some way to remove the spittle, or kick it as a priority over the heal if you have no other choice.
  4. Dodge dodge dodge. The fear can be ran out of from melee range if you move quickly, the claw smash can only be dodged if you’re within 10 yards of the boss due to its cone shape unless you have a displacement ability. For this reason as a caster you want to try to play around 5-8 yards from Zekvir at all times.
  5. Grind it down. The fight has no enrage and the DPS check is just the eggs. If you can assign your cooldowns in a way that you get the first one back on the egg after you use the last one you can theoretically play the fight forever.
  6. Assign brann as a healer, and use the Porcelain Arrowhead and Amorphous Relic Curios. Brann will not really be helping you to kill Zekvir or the eggs with any degree of consistency, but at least for me he was able to keep me alive through Zekvir’s Melee attacks.
  7. Once you have planned everything out and are able to kill the eggs, speed is the most important thing to seek out. I used movement speed gem and speed food to get to around 120% base movement speed. The timing for dodging is very tight.

Problems

Whilst practicing, I came across a number of problems with the encounter.

  1. Brann’s kick and dispel were extremely inconsistent and not a viable option to remove / kick the spittle cast. This makes the fight significantly harder / more RNG for specs that don’t have both an interrupt and the ability to remove slows.
  2. The boss spell queueing was inconsistent, making it extremely hard to tell what was coming next or plan things out. Needing to dps the egg at an angle to deal with claw smash without losing uptime, only to have the boss cast fear instead and trap you against the wall.
  3. In phase 2, the spell queueing was bad enough that it sometimes caused the egg spawn to come 3-4 seconds early, desyncing it from cooldowns and causing wipes.
  4. The fight as it’s designed is not possible for a tank or healer, their damage is simply too low to beat the dps check.

Suggestions

  1. Fix the spell queueing so the fight is at least consistent with the timing of its major mechanics. Especially in Phase 2.
  2. Add an option for Brann’s Interrupt / Dispel to be a player controlled extra action button, instead of automatic. This would stop situations where Brann kicks / dispels something you otherwise could have handled, leaving you dead to the next one you were relying on him for.
  3. This fight needs at bare minimum custom tuning for healer and tank specs.

Conclusion

One of my major worries with the Zekvir encounter was that it would be tuned such that those who only do delves would not be able to complete it, needing average ilvls far above the 616-620 range Delve only players will cap out at. I am happy to say that with items between 610 and 619 ilvl, and a 636 crafted weapon (Long term possible but probably also unnecessary) I was able to defeat it, meaning the fight is at least tuned appropriately to be an extreme challenge for exclusively delve gamers later on in the season.

However, whilst the tuning is fine, there are some major issues with the design of the fight requiring tools some specs don’t have, and Brann does not himself provide those tools consistently enough to make the fight feel fair or enjoyable on those specs.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed progressing Zekvir this week, I know as a Mythic raider I’m going to outgear it in a few weeks. As are many who enjoy heroic raids and mythic+ as crests cap out and players see more and more weekly vaults. That’s fine by me, as for those who only do Delves the fight is within their reach.

If you play a spec that for one reason or another does not have the tools to complete the encounter, that’s a problem, and I fully hope Blizzard make the changes necessary to either Brann or the fight itself to make it doable.

Best of luck to everyone getting into the gear ranges where they feel comfortable giving it a go in the coming weeks, and Blizzard please learn from this to make sure future Delve end bosses are challenging in ways that feel fair and accessible to all specs.

Ellipsis…

28 Likes
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Nice, thanks for the notes, this is helpful to us who plan to eventually get there. I do hope they tune it a bit more.

3

I think specifically for Zekvir its always his eggs that give the problem, if you ahve the dps check on that , then he should not be problem but thats a BIG dps check and if you blow your cds for one then you don’t have them the next time he calls one

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Wow, who would’ve thought that a squishy, immobile class that has one of the worst interrupts in the game on an absurdly long cooldown would struggle immensely in solo content?

This is a good writeup though, Elli. I really hope this gets some attention, because I refuse to touch solo Delves even on this very geared SPriest because I just CBA.

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Gotta be honest I think Shadow is one of the best specs at the fight.

30s cd burst sequence for every egg.

Fade for spittle.

Kick is good enough to get every heal.

Surprisingly good mitigation because the damage is constant enough for focused will DR.

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Yep. FDK revolves around burst windows that are longer cd than his egg timer (lol) and even if you plan to potion or drums an egg when you don’t have pillar, you’re quite possibly still screwed, especially considering how incredibly easy it is to lose uptime on the egg due to having to avoid one or more of his 1shot mechanics

7

Solid write-up.

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Good write-up. The spell queuing makes this a nightmare for any melee. I watched the Fury’s video and it is excruciatingly annoying to attempt to reproduce the timings they got. If they fix that, it’d still be challenging without such wild swings from pull to pull.

EDIT: It’d also be great if it worked like mage tower used to where all cooldowns got reset on wipe, instead of the silly raid rules that require a CD to be 2 minutes.

5 Likes
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Yeah, I’d like to see a healer specific version of this. I did manage the shadow mage tower, but I’m just not great at the spec and feel more comfortable healing.

10

Triggering P2 apparently resets the egg timer back to the 20 seconds it is at the start of the fight, so if you trigger it right after he spawns an egg, you’re going to have two adds much closer together and likely not have cooldowns. That’s just silly.

I’d really like to know if any of the encounter designers that worked on this played it themselves on a few different specs.

EDIT: Also, Brann just randomly suiciding by standing in back-to-back frontals bricking pulls. :joy:

11

Appreciate the notes. i take back what i’ve been saying about it being impossible, i do think auto attacks doing so much damage isn’t fun design for the fight however.
Will give this guy some more attempts this weekend after i get some gear

12

I can’t do it on this character as a tank. I pop everything to try to kill the egg but he puts his aoe down in top of it, I’m finished. I cannot kill the egg fast enough and then get stunned over and over again. I’ve managed to make it where two eggs hatched and died.

I don’t know how to play havoc, I’ve never done it. So I’m either going to have to outgear this fight which is stuck behind time gates or skip it all together.

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Going to have to wait for fixes probably, because I’m not sure all tanks will be able to kill every egg even in max S1 gear. This is a season 1-only boss, so there will be no outgearing with next season’s gear.

1 Like
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What speed food?

16

Saw your post on the other forum and thought I’d reply here. Make sure you are properly staggering staggering Brann’s healing (I assume you have him in that mode). I haven’t done him completely solo, but I have no problems with him when he spawns randomly in T8 Delves. With staggered potions, I’m getting over 1M HPS from the buff even with the nerf that caps stacks at 4 which makes me very hard to kill outside of 1-shots.

The trick for stacking potions is to make sure you pick up the last potion around 15-20s after Brann throws the first potion and don’t pick up the 2nd potion until the 1st one is going to fall off or at the same time you pick up the 3rd one.

If you want my WA, search for " Dwarven Medicine Tracker weak aura" and install the one that mentions the 20s timer. It doesn’t work with Brann’s idol that gives extra potions unfortunately, but it makes tracking the potion buff way easier.

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Eviscerated Muscle, gives about 3-4%

18

Can confirm, this is not possible as a tank. The egg is too much of a DPS check for it to be even feasible.
I’m 610 ilvl currently (which is below the 615 you’re saying) but I can’t even defeat ? Zekvir.

The best ? I’ve done is 77%
The best ?? I’ve done is 92%

I die each time because there’s eventually 2 or 3 spiders up and I become focused on interrupting them and the spittle just wrecks and I can’t stop it. (Because it usually casts at the same time as the spiders’ casts) There is no way for a tank to do enough damage to break the egg before a spider shows.

The eggs are ~ 6m and 11m on the 2 difficulties, and I’d say the best single target damage a tank is gonna be able to get is 300k (from what I’ve seen). And that’s with temporary buffs like Avenging Wrath, Moment of Glory, and Sacred Weapon.

I don’t know how long the egg takes to hatch, but let’s throw out a number and say 20 seconds.

The maximum damage you’ll be able to do is 6m (300k x 20). So MAYBE you can break 1 egg before a spider spawns, but that’s with ignoring interrupting Zekvir’s spittles and pouring 100% of your focus into damaging the egg.

The only way I could see this being possible in its current state is if Zekvir and the spiders were guaranteed to never cast anywhere near the same time so you could always interrupt both, focus damage the spiders (so too many don’t spawn) and kill Zekvir with almost nothing but cleave damage.
But this would only be possible with enough interrupts, and short enough cooldowns.

(Protection Paladins have, in a way, 4-6 interrupts. But not every class/spec is so lucky):

  1. Avenger’s Shield (12 sec CD with high haste)
  2. Rebuke (Melee Range (15 sec CD))
  3. Divine Toll (Casts up to 5 Avenger’s Shields at once with each subsequent bounce also interrupting, as well as casting 1 every 5 seconds for 15 seconds (1 min CD))
  4. Moment of Glory (makes Avenger’s Shield CD 3 sec for 15 seconds (1.5 min CD))
  5. Hammer of Justice - Stun (1 min CD, but can be used every 15-20 seconds with 2/2 in Fist of Justice)
  6. Blinding Light - Blind (1.5 min CD)/Repentance - Incapacitate (15 sec CD)
19

Spittle can be removed by freedom, it’s a slow so it gets removed.

20

Still, if it is possible, you’re killing Zekvir with almost nothing but cleave damage, just so you don’t get overwhelmed by the spiders.

21

Taking a very quick look it seems the curio that drops from zekvir’s random delve appearances is quite good for tanks because it’s consistent raw damage and your HP pool doesn’t matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiPjlnVeQbs

Post nerf kill at 594~, 11 days ago.

Agree that “??” isn’t possible for tanks though.