Feedback: Delves

Hello everyone, welcome to the start of Delves end game testing on the realm, “These Go To Eleven”!

We’re very excited to have people come in and see what we have in store for our endgame difficulty.

We wanted to start things off with a layout of what we currently have, what we’re planning next, and our goals behind these decisions.

Before Season 1 begins in The War Within players will have access to Tiers 1, 2, and 3 difficulty in delves. We expect players who have been keeping up with the current season will prefer tiers 2 and 3, while newer players will begin in tier 1 before graduating up to 2 and eventually 3 when they gear up.

When Season 1 begins we will open up tiers 4 through 11 along with introducing a few mechanics in tiers 4 and above: seasonal progression, death counters, and Zekvir’s Influence.

Seasonal Progression

Seasonal progress can be obtained from any delve when the season begins. Playing at higher tiers will reward more progress, but players will still be able to complete the season at lower tiers.

We want players to be able to find the difficulty that they enjoy and focus on that without feeling that they need to push higher to complete the seasonal track.

Tiers 9-11 are planned to have a higher difficulty curve as we do not plan on giving out increased power rewards there. They will give out gear at the equivalent of a Tier 8 delve. We’re doing this so we can tune these delves to be particularly difficult without creating the assumption that all players should strive to hit tier 11.

Death Counter

In Tiers 4 and above players will start with a pool of lives. When you release after dying the counter will lower. Players who reach zero lives can still finish delves, but they will miss out on bonus rewards like cosmetics and unlocking the next tier of difficulty. Every death that happens after you reach zero lives while fighting a boss will grant players a small buff to help them with the final boss fight.

Our goal with the death counter is to give players a barometer to measure their success in a delve without being overly penalizing.

Zekvir’s Influence

We have our mysterious 13th delve that we will not be releasing to test during the beta. This includes its inhabitant, Zekvir, the Hand of the Harbinger. However, Zekvir will prove to be a threat throughout delves even if he isn’t physically there.

Random groups of enemies will receive various boons from Zekvir. As you go higher in tiers, more groups will be chosen and the boons will increase in their difficulty. Players who are able to defeat these empowered groups will earn increased seasonal progress at the end of the delve.

Our design behind Zekvir’s Influence is to add more challenges in higher tiers beyond, “number go up”. We want to differentiate this from the affix system in Mythic +, which is why this only impacts some groups in a delve as opposed to all of them.

What’s Next?

On the realm, “These Go To Eleven”, you’ll find a helpful Zandelvari in Stormwind and Orgrimmar who will port you to specific delves. You can also unlock all of Brann Bronzebeard’s curios at rank 1 and set his level to be 10.

Our immediate plans for the beta update after this will be improving the messaging of Zekvir’s Influence, both from who is being impacted by it and how much I am being rewarded for this. We are actively working on this, so expect some more fun things in next week’s update for this.

There will be ongoing balance tuning for the classes and Brann’s abilities as well. Are some tiers too hard for a class? Is tier 11 too easy? Let’s find out!

We’re looking forward to everyone’s feedback. Welcome to the endgame of Delves!

Stopping by again to let you know that we’ve fixed the issue of curios not being awarded properly. If you were previously unable to acquire curios, use the grant option from Zandelvari to properly acquire them.

We are working on fixing an issue that’s preventing groups from entering a delve together. This will be fixed in an upcoming build.

Hi everyone!

Thank you so much for the great feedback so far. We are looking at improving Brann’s survivability and usefulness throughout the delves. It is also a bug that enemies respawn. Aside from some exceptions, once something is dead in a delve it should stay dead. We’ll also be reviewing tuning for different classes, along with improvements to the pain points that have been mentioned here within certain scenarios.

Thanks again, and please keep the feedback coming!

Hello everyone! We’d like to share some updates for you on Delves.

Tuning and Experience

Across the board we’ve increased the XP rewards from delves during level up as they felt a bit too low.

We’ve also done a general tuning pass across all tiers and will continue to monitor difficulty for all specs and classes. From your feedback and from our testing we saw that delves became particularly punishing throughout level up, and that many specs felt like they had to be several item levels higher than the recommended item level to survive.

We’re continuing to review the tuning for classes that are struggling in delves. We’ve seen your feedback on which classes are having a hard time. We also have our own data that shows performance in each delve by class and spec. We’ll be using your feedback and our data points to help improve the experience for players that are struggling. Keep it coming and we’ll keep you updated!

Bountiful Delves

We are in the middle of reviewing how we want bountiful delves to work at max level. Here’s what we’ll be rolling out:

• Bountiful Delves will be consumed upon completion.
• Bountiful Delves base chests are upgraded in quality.
• Locked chests are still there, but will go away if you lose all of your lives.

Our goal with Bountiful Delves being consumed is to encourage players to see more delves and their variants. We’re modifying how many keys players can get per week while also increasing the base rewards from Bountiful Delves so they’re still worth running even without any keys.

We’re still working on balancing these numbers so please give us feedback as these new systems come online!

Brann Bronzebeard

We’re continuing to do work to tweak Brann and improve the experience with him and understanding what he’s doing from the moment to moment gameplay. These will be rolled out throughout upcoming patches.

• Moved several of Brann’s “big” abilities to be unlocked at earlier levels.
• Modified the number of abilities Brann has to be more readable
• Brann’s “ultimate” abilities will now go on a rotation with each other to ensure he consistently uses them throughout combat. This means Brann’s use of his bigger abilities will be more focused and spread out to avoid a situation where it feels like Brann isn’t doing anything.
• Dwarven Medicine will now heal player pets.
• We’re aware of an issue of curios and Brann’s levels being reset and are looking into the root cause of this.

General

• Player class cooldowns will now reset after wiping to a boss encounter.

Tak-Rethan Abyss and The Sinkhole

• The Aquatic Hex will no longer apply slowfall.

The Dread Pit

• The Skardyn Lure for one of the variants will now pull skardyn even if they’re in combat. Other parts of this mechanic have also been tweaked.
• Removed the nerubian web spreaders from the skardyn variant.

Skittering Breach

• Moved the web spreaders to be within the cave system of the delve to give our other mechanics some breathing room.

Hello everyone! You can now obtain Restored Coffer Keys from Zandelvari for use in Bountiful Delves on the This Goes to Eleven realm.

Hello everyone! We’ve got some more delve news.

We’ve activated Season 1 of Delves on our Alleria and Khadgar realms. This means players can begin to access tiers 4 and up naturally to experience our seasonal progression. It also means the Great Vault is activated for players to see our new World slot! Xekvir’s lair is still planned to only be accessible when the season goes live after the expansion launches.

Please hop on in and try out our sneak peak of Delves Season 1!

Known Issues:

• Delver’s Journey may not properly fill up your seasonal progression bar. We’re investigating a fix for this.

Hi everyone,

We’ve got some updates for you as we’re nearing launch. Thank you for all the great feedback so far.

The issue regarding not being able to leave a delve should be resolved with the latest Beta build. We’re also working on better messaging for you when you’re on a team, regarding which teammates are eligible for delves. You should see some progress on that in the current Beta build.

On the content side of things, we’ve flagged objects that Brann should never attack – specifically the Nerubian cocoon. No more Brann surprising you with a face full of webs.

We’ve continued doing tuning to make sure certain classes don’t feel like they’re having a vastly different experience in the delves. Most notably, we’ve reduced unavoidable damage for casters wearing cloth armor.

On that note, we’ve introduced a new curio designed to help Brann feel more impactful for healers. It’s called the Rage-Filled Idol, a combat curio. Players in a healer spec will find they have an easier time acquiring this. With this curio, Brann will do noticeably more damage in combat. However, he will take damage every few seconds while in combat. Our goal with this curio is to have healers engage more in healing Brann while also increasing his damage outpost with a cost associated with it. Healers should spend less time having to juggle between damage and healing themselves if they choose to equip this curio.

We’ll continue to work to improve the experience of delves, and we’re hard at work determining what’s next for the feature after Season 1, based on everyone’s feedback.

Thank you very much!