This topic is about the “??” (hard) difficult option. This is not about the “?” (easy).
Before we go any further, here is a take: Some people will say “this is something to do when you get more gear later on the expansion” and this is a lie. Zek’vir is a season 1 challenge boss, the will be others when the next season arrives.
Second point is, although other challenges made by blizzard (Karenthad Ebonlocke, Mage Tower, Horrific Visions) were hard to complete, they were not impossible. Mastering the mechanic means you could complete it just fine.
And so why it is impossible?
I tested it with all 3 specs: Tank, Healer, DPS. And if you look at my profile, I completed the level 11 delve without any deaths solo. So although i’m for sure not the best of the best, I at least know what i’m doing with my class.
Before we talk about each role, let me explain why it is impossible with an in-game issue: Brann dies before the fight hits the 30 seconds mark. It doesnt matter if i’m a tank, healer or dps. He stands in the fear, in the frontal cone, he cant dispell the disease the boss does off himself, so he end up dying no matter what spec you in. This is a problem and it needs to be fixed. Also, Brann does zero damage if we compare him to the normal delve version.
TANK: Zek’vir has the same life of the DPS challenge (???) and he has an interesting mechanic. He will summon a web cocoon that needs to be killed in 15 seconds, otherwise it is a problem. The cocoon has 14.9mi life (also the same amount if you enter as DPS).
Tell me right now which tank does 1milion damage per second. I could endless talk about all the other problems I had while trying, but this speaks for itself.
DPS: By far the easiest version of the challenge. Cocoon managed to be killed, but the damage is way too high to bear. The boss does 3.1mi damage per attack (combat log, so this is after armor).
If I let brann takes the aggro, he dies in 3 attacks, so thats not an option either. I wasted all my defensive CD’s within 30 seconds of the fight, and couldn’t mange to kill the second web cocoon while self-healing from the boss hits.
HEALER: This is something I didnt even wanted to talk about. As I said, Brann does nearly 0 damage. If you have Brann at level 30 in normal delves, you can see he does a lot of damage, but thats not the case here, they nerfed him. And yes, the boss has the same amount of health.
Not to mention again that the frontal cone the boss does which for some reason Brann can’t evade does fatal damage (about 48mi physical) so your damage source is gone within a second.
TLDR: My take here is not that I think challenges are terrible, that they should be nerfed nor be that hard. If you did mage tower, horrific visions and you are a warlock that faced Karenthad Ebonlocked you know exactly what Im talking about. If you mastered those bosses mechanics after doing it a 100 times, you could probably finish all of them with heroic level gear at max.
This challenge isn’t it boys. This challenge is probably gatekeeped by huge amount of ilvl or specific specs. I’m not saying it is impossible to complete, because maybe a blood DK out there could beat him even after letting the cocoon spawn mobs? Brewmaster doesn’t has that much of a self heal so I cant tell how viable it is.
Let me finish the topic with: If they nerfed the boss, probably less than 1% of the player base could still go through it.