Feedback: Delves

In Development Midnight Beta Test
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In this thread, please reply with your feedback on Delves after you’ve tested them in the Midnight Beta.

All pre-season/leveling delves are available (Tiers 1-4).

Starting November 18 at 20:00 CET, seasonal content and all tiers of Delves can be tested on the Beta endgame realm: Xalatath’s Endgame.

Areas of Feedback

Of primary concern will be feedback relating to:

  • The new Delves companion, Valeera Sanguinar
  • Overall tier difficulty of Delves
    • Both grouped and solo play
  • Length of Delves
  • Clarity of objectives
  • Bosses and non-boss enemy encounters

How to submit feedback

Please post your feedback in this thread. When possible, include:

  • Which Delve was attempted
  • Whether this was a solo or a group run
  • How long it took
  • Any specific moments that stood out (positive or negative).
  • Any suggestions or other critical feedback.

In your opinion, what would you change, or what would clarify the experience or make it more fun?

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Surprising to know there is a new Windrunner sister.

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Quite a lot from what I’ve tried testing so far, here’s a few notes I’ve got:

  • Twilight Crypts will teleport you to Tarren Mill when you try to exit
  • Many delves don’t turn into Bountiful Delves (Twilight Crypts, Shadow Enclave for example)
  • The Companion Supplies show Brann, denying access to changing curios
  • Grudge Pit (Lightbloom Invasion) spawns in 6 groups instead of 8, making the delve impossible to complete
  • Performance Issues, quite likely linked to the Lightbloom flower patches that can be seen in Gulf of Memory or Sunkiller Sanctum
  • As for Valeera herself, her AI is good so far, but I personally think she has far too many voice lines, where she says like 7 different things in a 15 second encounter
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Here’s my feedback so far on the Delve implementation/system:

Why is this again an Alliance character?
Can we please have an option to choose whether we want an Alliance or Horde companion?
Some people still value their Faction and what it stands for.

Mainly going to speak from solo-play perspective here, but I feel that the balance tends to be off sometimes in Delves. I am mainly running them as protection warrior, and there’s Delves where I can basically pull several rooms of enemies and don’t run into enemies, and then there’s packs that will almost destroy me, or mobs that just takes ages to kill due to their HP.

The system isn’t…bad, but I feel that more attention should be spent on the balancing of the Delve based on the person that goes inside, e.g. are they a Tank, Healer or DPS, and make it so that depending on their role, the experience remains roughly the same.

Length wise, I’d say they are totally fine.

Never really struggled with the clarity of the objectives.
I have more an issue with some of the objectives themselves not being fun to do, and just being added to slow you down or waste your time.

An example is the cocoons and the launchers in the Nerubian delves.
You need to carry the cocoons to the launcher and shoot them.

  • Remove the slow walk
  • Remove the timer on the carry
  • Remove them disappearing when you get tagged in combat while holding one.

Mostly fine, with some just being too tedious to kill solo due to their insane HP.

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Are we supposed to be getting scaled to the recommended itemlevel for each Delve we do? I was kind of hoping to see how good or bad things were when under- and over gearing the content.

Cause on live the Delves were very much doable at a much lower item level than recommended.

I did Gulf of Memory on Tier 4 (automatically scaled to 213 item level) as a solo Demonology Warlock.

I did this Delve during leveling on the other realms, and my impression of it did not change from then: This delve is a bit too long for my tastes. Too much walking, and too much trash clearing around objectives. It took me some 40 min to clear I think.

Related to this, combat seemed to take forever. Mobs we know from previous delves (Slitherer mobs with the Vampyric Bite ability) took significantly longer to kill than I am used to. So either the mob scaling is off, the intended gear level is off, or (and this might well be more of the problem than I know) Demonology Warlock damage is undertuned.

The objectives were clear enough, though the Map of this Delve is confusing at first and even this second time running it I had to run back and forth to find the way to get to the end boss once that objective popped.

The end boss was fine, fun mix of abilities, between the tentacles ground slam and the boss’s chase ability. Took surprisingly less time to kill than I was expecting after how long some of the normal mobs took to kill, but even with that in mind it still took about 5 times being chased, so, quite long enough to get on with.

Things that stood out I have already mentioned I think. It’s a nice atmosphere delve. And with the mix of mobs a clear link between TWW and Midnight.

I also want to mention some things about Valeera. I used her in her heal spec. I was going to check if I could see her damage after the Delve, but unfortunately the Damage meter reset all my damage from the Delve. It FELT like she did no damage and just healed a ton. It made for a nice stress free Delve, but I’m probably going to use her in damage spec next time to see if that helps cut down on the long time it took to kill stuff.

One other thing about Valeera, she seems to never shut up. With her lines being tied to her abilities and her using certain abilities a lot, it’s just a constant stream of chatter to the point I was tuning her out to concentrate and that seems bad design cause at some point I will need to know that she;s doing ability X by her audio cue. That can’t happen if she’s just constantly yapping and I start mentally ignoring her. (also probably not good for the long term ability to run delves is she’s already annoying me now, after some 8-10 delves across leveling and End Game realm.)

I should probably add though that I tuned out Brann too, but he wasn’t quite as talkative I feel. I have a love/hate relationship with Brann by this point in TWW, and his repeating corny lines is one of the reasons. Valeera’s lines are at least not corny, but they are still very repetitive.

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Hi.

So far in the beta I have tried Collegiate Calamity and The Darkway, both as a solo player and tanking (prot warrior) with Valeera set to damage. Both were engaging and took around 20 - 25 minutes. They didn’t feel any longer or shorter than current delves in The War Within.

Collegiate was pretty standard as a delve, not in a bad way. I ran the variant where I was given a bomb to destroy the lightblooms. They were spread out in the delve enough to be engaging but not boring.

The Darkway was mostly balanced and enjoyable, but one thing to mention are the adds during the final boss (forget their name, sorry). There were slightly too many adds spawning at the same time and they all cast their interruptible ability at once, however that ability’s icon (on the built-in nameplates) is a shield icon which is the same, or very similar to, the icon shown when abilities spells cannot be interrupted. So to begin with in that boss encounter, I didn’t interrupt / CC the adds. If I was a DPS or healer spec I think that phase / adds would have been somewhere between very tricky and a manifested nightmare. After a while I realised they could be CC’ed so was then using shockwave, but the issue I wanted to mention here was the spell icon. Could that be changed so it isn’t similar to the ‘can’t be stopped’ icons we are familiar with? Perhaps I didn’t understand what the built-in nameplates were telling me, in which case that is a point of feedback for the new nameplates, not delves.

Another point of feedback is Veleera. Throughout both delves, but more so in Darkway, she kept placing campfires during combat, would leave and re-join the instance, and would sometimes take aggro. I am aware that could be an issue with my tanking however I never once noticed Brann taking aggro during a delve. Once in Collegiate, Veleera ninja pulled but that may have been a bug with her stealth. Also on that point, she seemed to walk all over while stealthed (in and around packs of enemies) instead of following or sticking close. Also, her voice lines were shown in the chat but I never once heard the actual voice line / sound at all. Reading the comment from Quady about her being too chatty, perhaps that was a ‘me’ problem but I definitely had the game sounds on :slight_smile:

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Had some time and did Sunkiller Sanctum on Tier 8 (scaled to correct level automatically) with a basic Warlock in Demonology Spec, with Valeera in Damage spec.

Super fun, and very short Delve. LOVED the mechanic that allowed you to zoom around the room with void portals and a general ability to float until you got too close to the floor. It looked amazing too. It feels like with some practice this Delve can be done in very, very little time, sub 10 min. Not sure if that is within parameters of what you want, but the difference with Gulf of Memory delve is quite jarring. (I like shorter more than longer, to be clear)

Objectives took a min to figure out (first time there) but were pretty clear once I;d done them for the first object I needed. Not sure I would have figured it out without glow around the objects though, but then not sure why anyone would play without that.

The mobs were easy enough and killing stuff was MUCH better this time compared to previous. Not sure if this was cause I scaled to 250+ or if it was due to using Valeera as a damage dealer.

The Boss at the end was a little odd though. He spawned adds at some point, who did nothing that I could tell, and eventually he used an ability called Gorge, which seemed to eat/destroy some of the adds. I figured this would heal the boss back to full or something of that nature, but nothing seemed to happen and the boss just died shortly after. Not sure if bugged or just not very impactful, but this didn’t really feel threatening in any form.

Lastly about Valeera: not sure if a hotfix went out to not make her talk so much, or if her yapping is tied to her Heal spec, but she was much less talkative it felt in Damage spec. The downside whoever is that instead of talking she now had this weird grunting noise that she kept doing, which was not much better than the constant audio cues for her abilities. I’m sure you’ll get her to some happy medium between yapping/grunting and being too quiet, but not there yet IMO.

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Having done a couple more delves, and swapping between Heal and DPS Valeera, I definitely feel there’s a problem with how much damage is needed to kill things, and how that reduces your choices.

I can understand that the idea is to not have the TWW situation where Heal Brann is basically just always the best choice, but I feel current balance is too far towards the other extreme where there’s definite situations where you want one vs the other.

Because Heal Valeera as it stands does very very little damage. To the point where a delve scaled to the proper level will take significantly longer to kill anything, ANYTHING, from the smallest to the most dangerous mobs. And it takes so long it just ruins the feel of the delve. You spend several minutes killing something that is not really of any consequence, it’s just in the way to your next objective, and it needs to die, but there’s no fun or anything interesting or anything important about this long kill.

I’m the opposite of a rush rush rush person, but Healing Valeera makes things just take too long even for my tastes.

DPS Valeera makes the Delve feel like it should. And that’s a problem cause not only does this make DPS Valeera the default choice, it also means I am doing these Delves by the grace of Valeera helping me, instead of me being the Champion and leading the way.

I feel if the gap between how much damage you need to kill things and how much you do by yourself without Valeera’s help shrinks, it will also make DPS Valeera vs Heal Valeera a more interesting choice again.

Because I did an end boss scaled to level that did a LOT of damage with random abilities, and in a world where I didn’t need Valeera for Damage I might have opted for her heal there, just to be safe. I think as a Warlock my self healing is such that I had that choice but for some classes that end boss might be a legit problem where it becomes this difficult to figure out problem of needing heals to survive but also damage to not be exposed to quite so many damage events.

(These Delves and this insight coming from doing T8s with a basic endgame warlock in Demonology spec, no gear changes, just scaled.)