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I really appreciate you addressing the problems with the Tier 8 delve rewards rather than making this a "ElItiSTs aRe TrYinG tO tAKe oUR gEaR!" type of video, which unfortunately some other, really bad WoW content creators have done.

Lore, I love you, always have. My problem with delves and blizzard is this: They announced a new solo progression tract, touted it as soloable content, then they released it in a way that made solo play literally the hardest setting. Then, after all that, this multi billion dollar company that built this content for the last year DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE! I'm fine with bugs, but this type of bug screams "we deployed it and never even tried to test it in a real scenario".

This guy used to do tank spot

For me the delves have made it so much easier to get into m+ because of the gear the give. In dragonflight I didn't play until the last patch, and after doing Hcdungeons & lfr I was stuck by a gear wall, no-on e wants to bring a player that has hc gear to m+ or lfr gear to a normal raid. Delves got me into a gear tier where I can get into content, though I do agree that m+ feels harder in order to get the same level fo rewards, still excited to do them though!

I am one of those solo MMO players, and enjoy a moderate amount of challenge. I've been playing this game for 15+ years and delves have genuinely revolutionized the way I play this game. I actually plan on playing long term for once as I grind my favorite classes up to get their ilvl up and get their tier sets for the season, which is never something I've done before. This has taken a game I played mostly for nostalgia nowadays and made it something I'm obsessing over again like I did when I discovered it as a kid.

Great takes in here. Thanks for sharing them!

The upgrade and crafting system are becoming a spreadsheet chore.

I disagree with the notion that more casual player getting veteran track and then stop playing. These are the players that enjoy completing all world quests. They are pet collectors, and do challenging pet battle content. They are working on maxing old factions, and are rolling new alt characters. These players are transmog hunting. They are mount hunting. They are revisiting older content. I do believe that they can be as, and even more, dedicated than the average M+ player.

regarding stat squish, in one of the dev interviews I think it was with ion, but not 100% sure, that they were doing it for Midnight, the next xpac

I beg you to do a video on gear upgrade system.

I think delves are quite easy, even as someone that doesnt basically no difficult content. But i will say u dont think im alone in wanting to try more difficult content. Zekvir was a blast and i want more

Challenges are only fun when you feel you can overcome it. More or less unavoidable auto attack damage isn't a fun form of challenge.

If the system is complicated then understanding it causes a person to be invested, which keeps them around longer.

My T8 delves get my 616 year from the vault. Soloing them as ret pally has gotten me more gear then any group content this xpac due to the stupid dice rolls for raiding and back luck in dungeons.

I don’t think they’re pushing group players into solo content because you can run delves in groups

people saying delves are for casuals are meaning it from the perspective of "the gear rewards from it are meaningless after the first week, to where the only people who have a character power incentive to do them are casual players" It is obviously not a parallel track to pvp, M+ or raids, because the item level does no match pace nor reach the same peaks. It is clearly intended by blizzard to be a "lesser" endgame path atm. Many of the issues of delves come from the "mandatory" chores nature of them, and the repetitive learning of Torghast again, with less "fun" variety of powers etc. It's also a far ways from being a mage tower challenge. The difficulty was "this cast 2 shots you" and some classes not having access to an interrupt.

delves are amazing content for guilds that have a set time to raid but all of their players login and out randomly throughout the week, i was never able to do mythic + keys with my guild because of my wicked work schedule now i can just play from 2 am to 6 am and still be up to pretty much the same standards as the rest of the guild that doesn't play around diabolical times

6:35 That was not what was going on with Brann - had nothing to do with group scaling. Brann accidentily scaled with the tier of the delve, meaning that at tier 11 Brann had absolutely crazy stats even if he was still comparatively low level. 19:21 It's 554 gear, not 593. 20:55 Sorry but that is nonsense. It is not mandatory, and something you - and a lot of other people - really need to understand is that playing an MMO is NOT about racing to max gear as fast as possible and then be bored for the next 6 weeks because there's nothing left to do (assuming that these players do not engage in any other activities like PvP, Pet Battles, achievement hunting etc which most of them don't). It is also not ok to develop content for a small minority of people who like to push keys (which are a stupid concept to begin with by the way) or raid. The majority of players does neither of that, and just because a loud minority invents problems that don't exist is not a reason to exclude the majority of the playerbase from progressing on their own. Not to mention that without this silent majority of "casual" gamers WoW would pretty much loose most of its playerbase and the M+ers and raiders wouldn't have a game to play. 21:30 Correction: You can get hero gear through delves, but only from the weekly chest or if you're lucky enough to find a delver's bounty map which are pretty rare. I've found exactly one so far. 23:43And that's different for M+ers because....? If you can M+10 you also reach the point where the dungeon drops are irrelevant and the only reason to do M+ is the weekly chest with a nice piece of 623 gear inside. Exact same thing. 35:50 Easiest way to fix the gear upgrade system 8which is a great idea at its core btw): Get rid of the different levels of gear. Using a system like in MoP Remix would be much better: All gear can be upgraded to the same level regardless of where you got it. Only the entry level should be different. Let's say gear has 36 upgrade levels as in MoP Remix - gear from the easiest sources could start at tier 1, gear from heroic dungeons could start at tier 12 and gear from Mythic raids or M+10 weekly chest could start at tier 30 or something like that. That would make the upgrading so much easier. Another factor is that there should not be different upgrade crests - only the amount required should increase. Or, even better, get rid of the crests altogether and leave the stones as sole currency for upgrading. By doing this people doing the hard content would still get the max gear almost instantly while leaving the option for people doing other content to slowly progress as well. And the system would be so much easier to understand.

I agree to some comments that the no timer concept is very pleasing. After reset today i Started to do T-9 Delves, solo. Probaly Poke to T-10. I delved solo till t8 and also did them Pre-Fixes etc. Delves are a great mechanic, and believe me, day 1 i was very Sceptical, but now i Like to do them. No time pressure, you have to watch mechanis and counterplay some mobs. I Tried some m+ Content on tier 2 and stopped after 6 of 8 dungeons. M+ is not my area anymore.

Delves are NOT parallel to M+ and Raid since they have no possibilty of acquiring same rewards (Mythic track pieces). They are a gearing assistance first and foremost.

The other thing Delve rewards have stepped on is early season spark crafting. Used to be I couldn't get sparks fast enough to craft the slots that weren't dropping. Now I'd be crafting downgrades.

Delves taught me that i play better PVE than most players. I was afraid to que for group instances before this knowledge.

Think you might be underestimating how much harder keys can be for someone that's never done them. There's lots of knowledge gained over the years that new players just don't have. And every dungeon requires knowing lots of pulls and boss mechanics. Delves? Tier 8? I've died in them. Never failed one. Main challenge is dealing with whatever mess Brann feels like creating.

I'm not upset or mad about the delve scaling issues, I am just disheartened by the disorganization of the dev team (probably due to their managers/leadership). My choice to skip TWW season 1 seems to be a wise one. Game seems to still be in a state of flux. Which, that isn't new for WoW, but it's especially pronounced these recent expansions. Season 1 is always a dud basically. Same was true in Dragonflight. Like for real, it took them like 4-5 months after launch to finally get Brackenhide Hollow in a fun/playable state as a dungeon, despite PAGES AND PAGES AND PAGES of negative feedback about that dungeon during the beta and allllllll of season 1. The thick-headedness of the dev team just bothers me more than about anything else. I've lost trust in the quality of the work the devs on this game do. Things are just so often buggy and messed up on launch, but are almost always in flawless condition about 4-6 months later. So I've just learned, don't rage at the devs, just avoid the times when the game is bad, such as the start of each expansion. It just feels like they have this long beta cycle and they don't do enough with it =/ and then release the game in a buggy, messed up state. It feels unfair so I don't pay them $15/month during the bad times, I just unsub until everything is cleaned up and working properly.

I think it will be well into the Mythic+ Season before hardcore players will no longer want an entire row of Hero Gear choices in the Great Vault. It's there for the taking and is not hard to obtain solo. If you run with a dedicated group for Mythic+ then why not run the same group though delves to quickly knock out Hero gear for your vault the next week?

The only thing I dislike about Delves is the reward system. There’s no reason to run non-bountiful T8’s unless you just need to fill your vault. The gear from non-bountiful’s is quite bad and is just vendor trash.

Brann was scaling with the mob difficulty not the amount of ppl in the group

One thing delves have shown is that M+ would work absolutely fine without the timer, and would be better for it.

Isn’t there a Delve season track, the book next to Brann in Dornogal shows it, and it unlocks from doing more and more delves (don’t know if it progresses faster with higher tier delves) that eventually unlocks champion(?) gear from the vendors there

As the type of solo player who doesn't do group content, I don't mind the concept of spreading the time it takes to acquire ilvl upgrades beyond, say, what WQ and now Delves, offer, but attempts to do so in the past, using tokens really isn't that much fun, frankly. I'd like to see them come up with a better way...a way that offers more than: wow, but just beat this tough open would boss! Here are a couple tokens, and hey, you only need a couple of hundred more for the item vendor. It gets old, fast. We all like that one huge loot drop.

There has always been confusion with the MMO game concept, popular thought when you mention MMO is that it is a game that requires a group of players working together to accomplish a goal. The term actually is describing a game that a massive amount of players are existing in the game world at the same moment in time and are able to interact with each other like one would in real life. We live real life in this manner (solo) 90 percent of the time. Example: I don't step out the front door and call 5 friends to get groceries, but I might call a few buddies to help me build a shed once every 5 years. It is refreshing that Blizzard is finally pushing the game in this direction. IMHO, delves and follower dungeons are the bees knees.

It’s funny seeing m+ players now making the same complains about delves that raiders were making about m+. Even if you love Content A, if Content B gives rewards more efficiently, it lessens the enjoyment of doing content A.

Spend half hour doing your delves then waste the next 10 hours farming your mythic+ .... I see no problems just people whinging for the fun of it.

I think delves gear needs to be scaled back to veteran and they need to have a heroic version of there that gives out champion track . And maybe in future seasons have a tier system like Diablo 3 scaling

21:05 technically you can get hero track 610 gear from a delver's bounty map, but those are rare

Nice episode. Couple things for me . 1) Delves have been fun. Really hope blizzard expands and adds new companions, maps etc. Really enjoying it. However, imo, lets make all the rewards Pets, Mounts and Cosmetics. I dont think progression gear should be obtainable there. But i do see Uziels point in obtaining gear. (maybe the answer is make delve gear only that ilvl in open world questing etc? then lower its ilvl if in a raid or grp etc? idk) 2)M+ . Please keep in mind its not usually my shtick. However it seems very overtuned. As a holy priest there are times I do nothing but spam heals with next to 0 downtime. And thats in 4s and 5s. Like are we not supposed to be able to help with dps just a bit? I know its only 7s for the mount and keymaster, however I just dont see getting to that unless i recruit a good preset team. So this is the debate. Of course we should have friends to play with but not all of us do. So the mount imo should be obtainable pugging. Right now i feel like its out of reach. Even watching Sloot or Datmodz doing them, they seem really rough. And im thinking maybe the +10-+15 should be amazing cosmetics (like the old pvp system) and make the keymaster a little less elitest. Imo Look forward to the next episode. PS There looks like some balancing already happening to M+ so maybe things will change.

If people don't want to do higher than a delve 4 they shouldn't get better gear. WTF are you wanting to do to this game?

Hey Devolore, here is a question for you and some discussion after: As stated in a previous episode, you are not a profession person, but how have you felt about how expensive this xpac has been? Delves have been a welcome addition to the endgame for me simply due to the fact I use few, if any, expensive consumables to meet my vault, and I can choose to use them when and if I try harder than 8 content. I feel they should lean hard into making powerful delve only consumables available for non gold currencies for those trying to endgame on a budget. This is coming from someone who has leaned a lot into goldmaking for this expansion. Been making quite a killing, and not having to set aside a large amount of stuff for content has helped profits. Now, I still think it has been outrageously expensive for the typical player. I remember feeling like a high roller when I broke 100k gold for the first time in Legion and then realizing that it wasn't much of anything in the grand scheme of things, and I know many who are there right now. Expecting people to casually drop 100k for enchants and maybe a weeks worth of raid consumables isn't a good experience.

choreghast

torghast good yeh it was until they screwed it up

Damn !! standing in em is my favorite thing to do 😂

Im not convinced you played these dungs the most overtuned one you call great stonevault the duo boss specifically Then dawnbreaker is literally free having to dragonride isint a good reason to call it divisive

Delves being equal to a +8 mythic key makes mythic feel pretty bad rewards wise

Question: Health and damage numbers in WoW are already in the millions and the first season just started. It's kinda crazy imagining what it's going to look like going into Midnight. In your opinion, why is Blizz waiting to do an item level reset, instead of doing it at the start of TWW?

gust of wind, blink, heroic leap, defensives that make you immune to forced movement (i.e. DK defensive) can be used to ignore the puddle mechanic as well. Some harder to do than others.

Would you return to working at Blizzard with the stipulation that you also had to go back in time to when Diablo 3 first launched and had to be a CM for that game?

QUESTION: I am seeing some pushback to the loot that Delves drops, specifically that it is too high. I will admit I am biased. I used to play 40-50 hours a week during LK. I am older now, don't have that kind of disposable time, and a lot of friends have quit the game. I have never been a fan of LFG or LFR. Myself and my wife both think the follower dungeons and delves are great for us. We can get in and get out. I am sitting on 587 gear and doing level 6 delves on my BM hunter. I do 8 delves I get 1 piece of 606 gear and I am happy for that. People who do heroics are crying that delves gear is too high and/or they're it's not difficult enough. Firstly, they can get heroic and mythic loot soooo much faster than I can. Secondly, I don't think delves were made for the "sweaty tryhard" players. I think they were made for the casual players who this is the only content beyond questing they'll probably do. I am hoping their crying doesn't cause Blizz to either nerf ilvl drops or increase their difficulty going forward. I really think the delves really addresses a very large part of the community. We were players who would do the questing when a xpac would drop and then unsub and disappear because the LFR/LFG wasn't our jam. Now we are really engaged and having a great time. Thoughts?

Tirna Scithe checkpoints were tied to covenants. But since that system is thankfully retired, they instead made it so you need to be one of these to activate them (I think?): Druid, Night Elf, Tauren, Herbalist. Same for the buff mushroom grove before the first boss. Edit: I think the first checkpoint can be activated by anyone but the skip at the very start, mushroom grove and the 2nd checkpoint after 2nd boss all require one of the above.

Hey Devolore, got recommended from this weeks The Starting Zone episode. Really like the content and am slowly listening to the backlog to pass the time :)

Dawnbreaker is the new Oculus