It feels to me like they set the recommended item levels needed based on lowest common denominators rather than what’s realistically needed. But I can’t imagine the tooltip changing to “Tier 8: 600, but 30+ iLvls lower if you’ve levelled Brann and are half decent with your class tool kit”.
I’d like to see T9-11 giving more crests, and maybe even better crests, but being much more technically challenging not just scaled upwards.
It’s a good idea to add bran recommended level
As comes to ilvl
If you are playing on a damage class and you have 600, on tier 11 you die in two spell attacks.
Obviously blizzard meant for you to have 623 when doing tier 10+
Lets not go into “this mythic raid is clearable naked” land
The problem is not the tooltip its the fact blizzard wants you to go clear mythic+/do raids as well, they don’t let you as a solo player to just do solo stuff, is the problem
Yeah, farming crests there does not seem viable
I’ve not had a problem clearing Delves at 10 ilvl below the recommended, at least on the classes I’ve done Delves with (Ret at t11, dps Evoker at t8, and Spriest and BM Hunter while levelling). On Ret, I did my first t11 solo at around 615, Zek ?.? at 618 and just got the Immortal Spelunker title (i.e. t11 without deaths) playing solo at just under 620. All my gear comes from Delves and Delve Vault rewards (take Vault tokens to buy crests to get gear to 619), so, as with BfA’s solo Visions, it is possible to do the hardest level simply by gearing up within the content if you are a good enough player.
My thinking is that Delve content is designed to allow Delve-focused players to max out their gear at 619 - 620 and have Brann at 50+ a few weeks before the start of 11.0.7. This is when t11 and Zek ?.? should be possible. For players who cannot quite manage it, the 11.0.7 ring will then buff them to hopefully give them that edge to finish at least Zek ?.? before end of Season 1. But of course just like 5 Mask visions, t11 Devles and Zek ?.? are not supposed to be easy, and I expect a fair few players will find the ilvl gap is just too big to overcome with the skill improvements you get through practice. Having said all that, not all specs are equal in Delves and certainly I expect some specs to struggle just because of the nature of their toolkits, so “fix balancing” may be a better request.
Do them on 8 a lot. You will be 619 eventually. After that you can turn crests into Gilded ones and can improve your gear to 626. Problem solved. But tbh I don’t think you need 623 with most classes to do 10 to begin with.
I mean i have done tier 11 on 607, but that’s just a combination of a good delve scenario, good in-delve bonuses and a class, that corresponded to them. It is possible, but is it the intention
If an avoidable boss mechanic kills the character outright, thats fine. If a mob kills the character in two casts, that’s probably ilvl issue. Even though you can overpower with skill.
Similarly, it is possible to get that 620 through delves,Razgard described that earlier, the question is, how much time does it take and does a solo player need it by that point.
Yes, i personally found visions tremendous, idk why they were not preserved as an ever-green feature.
i checked the drop rate and idk if i would advise farming crests via delves
The way I see it the devs have created two sets of player targets for the game. t8 gives you a bunch of achievements and max Delve + Delve Vault gear, requires an easy to achieve ilvl and is for players like Razgard who enjoy the content, but who may not be suited to unusually hard mechanics, high damage spikes and large health pools on enemies.
t11 (and Zek ?.?) is for players who want that hardest challenge, which it does say in the in-game text. It’s supposed to be for players who can overcome a big ilvl gap with skill, practice and knowledge. Players who check which story is up to avoid ones they know they are weak at, who will read guides on how to beat a boss, who use invisibility potions to skip packs and who will try different strategies and different talent combinations.
As for the 620 ilvl, I personally don’t see a problem with the hardest solo content in a season that lasts 5 months taking 3 months to reach the max ilvl. That’s not even needing 8 delves a week once you’ve got a set of 603 gear, as you can get crest Vault tokens from any content.
It’s not realistically viable to farm crests in delves. I run 4 delves per week on 2 chars since pretty early in the season and I don’t have enough gilded crests for 1 upgrade on either char.
The easiest way to farm ilvl if you are only going to do delves is by using champion gear and getting only coins from vault to buy crests. They cap at 619 which is pretty good for delves.
The only way for delves to be stand alone content is to drop specific gear like pvp to have lets say extra ilvl when you are not in a group. Then they could scale according to that ilvl. Otherwise people that do all content will always have advantage over people that only do delves.
WoW bosses don’t really require strategy guides, because they are too simple for that
Its just a big health bar and some lethal attacks
This is not a complement
This is bad by the way
Its a sign of bad design, when the difficulty is increased by +%hp +%damage
Yes, like i said, if you cherry pick, that ilvl is not needed. This means, i pick this class, this speck, this delve, this scenario, this pack of mobs etc.
However, in the general case it may be needed
To reiterate, on 600~610 some DD will die from two spell casts. Its obvious this is designed for higher ilvl
Another point is
If the system you described worked universally, maybe it would be fine
Like max raid ilvl 600-610, max mythic ilvl 600-610, max delve ilvl 600-610
Sure
But the way it stands, people can just go to mythic, get required gear and complete the delve on it. Which is what blizzard seems to incentivize you to do, which is the problem.
Also, everything you described, i.e.
-Suffering dumb trash with big health pools
-Avoiding two shot attacks from trash
-Finetuning talents
-Cherrypicking enounters
Etc
And you get reward much lower than the corresponding dif level in raid or mythic+
You should be able to fully gear up in one month from one designated activity
Ilvl thing is a mistake to start with, but making it where you have to treat it as a job, for 3 months out of 5, come on.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree here.
I believe a game like WoW should have a challenging element to it. You’re obviously either unwilling or unable to engage in that challenge.
I dont understand why do T9-11 exist when you cant get better loots like myth or farm gilded!
yaknow something can be a challenge for fun, it doens’t have to reward gear…'s why everyone tells you to do 8’s for gear, anything above that is for the avid delver and achievement hunter.
in short, OP, why are you doing the higher level delves if you don’t enjoy them, just to complain about the reward that you want not being there…
clearly you shouldn’t be doing delves if you want the better gear.
Better gear means diffrent activity in this case, it’s a choice you can make.
There must be absolutely a solo challenge to wow
i just dont think the challenge should be not to die from boredom, while you chip 10mil hp down on some local cockroach
ready good 99 cockroaches to go
By this logic, solo players should not be playing it
Its surely easier to just quit the game, than write some critique on forum
But then whos going to play the game
raiders?
You think thats enough to sustain wow economically?
Come on man
Delves could be tuned harder, but due to the restrictions placed on their design by the expectations of those they’re aimed at I doubt hard delves would be fun overall, even for those who enjoy more challenging content. They’re too low mechanical complexity and lack any need to optimise or understand how to maximise the output of your class.
I expect we’ll get more challenging solo content this expansion, with greater gear rewards. I just don’t think it’ll be delves.
Blizz will be trotting out Horrific visions again in S2, but since that has time-pressure added (One of the big improvements in Delves is the lack of time pressure), i’m not entirely sure if it will catch on with solo players as much as Delves did.
I’m curious where Horrific visions will fit into the whole gearing-picture TBH, the first time around they were the most rewarding soloable content (Well, pretty much the only rewarding soloable content), so they were popular by default, but now they have competition from Delves, so reward-level will be key to how popular visions are now.
The time pressure of visions was VASTLY overblown by people’s initial impression in the first 3-4 weeks. The biggest thing that visions did was they meant your mistakes mattered and lasted, they could remove the gradual drain of insanity completely and just keep the bar and they’d feel pretty much the same.
Having an external bar that takes damage when you mess up helps avoid damage scaling reaching one shot levels for some classes but not others, whilst still giving a tuning knob to make it harder.
I also think time pressure in some capacity is important in difficult content, even if it’s not explicit. The absence of a DPS check of any kind in delves is a big part of their triviality. Zekvir sort of has a DPS check but it got nerfed by roughly 50%.
We don’t need ticking clocks or draining bars or w/e but we do need some mechanics at some point to stretch player’s capacity to optimise rotations and allocate cooldowns / resources.
No we don’t.
If that’s the kind of thing you’re into then go do m+ and/or raiding
Delves should give myth track gear, at this point who really cares, it would help the more casual playerbase slowly keep up with the increasing difficulty within raids/M+. High end player would still gear up a lot faster and be able to quit the season sooner, this would just allow the stragglers to keep making meaningful progress instead of hitting a brick wall in progression.
For a challenge.
Yeah, I laughed too. As you’ve proven, most wow players don’t do challenges they do it for loot. M+ reinforced this point of view.
The challenge is going as high as you can until they kill you no matter what skill level you have. If they don’t kill you, they either have too much health, or your overgeared and dps is terrible.
being carried by a team is not that difficult tho
idk i think people are watching youtube in a different window, get dised, miss a two-shot and die
Skill tested here is patience and concentration, since you have to mow down fat adds, that add 0 value, except to substract your time, and thus give blizz more value in monetary value of subscription
What i’d like is some way to reliably get Gilded crests (So not dependent on “Delver’s bounty”-RNG) for people who do Delves, it doesn’t have to be much (In another thread i suggested a 15-crest set for 6 vault coins or something), but something for Delve-players to slowly upgrade hero-track gear further than 619.