My top 5 beginner tips for Delves

Community General Discussion
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If you’re just getting into delves, these are especially things you want to know…

#1 - Always check your mini-map for objectives

When you go through the delves, you’ll have objectives like rescuing people or activating this or that thing, do not make the mistake of going through without consistently taking a peak at your mini-map and missing an important objective, having to retrack your steps back to the beginning for one thing you missed preventing the final stage from activating. Objectives appear as yellow marks on the map

#2 - Always rotate your camera/look around you/behind you

As you go through the delve you’ll find it easy to miss key items you’ll want to pick up and this is surprisingly an easy and fast way to resolve by just developing the habit of rotating the camera as you move through the delve. You’ll see a lot of items you would have otherwise missed. If you are like me and don’t have to go wandering around searching every crack then this will help you quite a lot on the main paths.

#3 - Upgrade Brann, he’s OP

An important reason to collect items in a delve is for the experience alone that you’ll find for Brann. Brann scales really well and will help you immensely in a delve. So do not just race through the delve skipping over items. Brann will help you complete delves above your ilvl or make you current delves much easier. You can do delves among multiple alts, which that experience will count account wide for Brann.

#4 - Wait for CD’s/do not die

There isn’t a time-limit in delves so take your time and be tactical about it. When you die you lose out on extra loot. If you’re low on health, stop and eat. Take food with you to the delves, potions, etc…and use them to help get through it without dying. This might be difficult for the people who want to do zoomies throughout WoW content, but you’re only hurting yourself by doing and passing up loot. Take care on the last bonus especially, as you might be frustrated by not having an important cooldown ready mid fight.

#5 - Use environmental/neutral mobs to help you in your delves

You’ll come across things like exploding spores, moving carts, random mobs running through the delve that do damage to you. You might find these initially annoying, but these also do damage to the enemy and therefore it can make it a lot easier/faster for you to clear it. Get used to fighting with these mechanics in a delve as part of your normal run-through, rather than trying to avoid them or seeing them as a mere obstacles, Just be careful about it as although the damage is good that it does to enemies, if get overly confident that can backfire. Otherwise, they can be a great asset.

Bonus tip

While it might be tempting to use Brann as a dps and that can be effective when doing a non-bountiful delve or delve tier that you’re very confident in, a lot of buffs you collect in the delve have a health % requirement, meaning you need to keep your health above that %, which can be as high as 80%, so if you take damage below that you’ll lose the buff. That can be a lot easier to do with healer Brann, collecting the health pots to keep your hp high, however, if you’re relatively weak compared to Brann and he’s doing a lot of the deeps and you’re just keeping yourself alive, then it might be worth sacrificing that extra dps that would go to you with those buffs.

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Another tip would be to use your crowd control(CC) and class abilities you may have forgotten. Dominate mind to mind control an enemy, make it kill itself in an enemy pack or use it to throw 1 million(T8, T11 goes closer to 3) casts or AoEs that hurt. That comes with the risk that losing it can get you killed but it’s worth playing around with.

Speaking of CC, learn enemies’ skills, their threat level to you, so your know that a threadmancer would be sort of a priority target to kill or crowd control to make your life easier.

Skipping packs and avoiding patrols would be amazing. You can also play with the environment if you have skills like invisibility, some sort of leap, gliding(also the mage ability&priest levitate if you first use a movement speed buff to glide through everything and right click the buff when you’re close to your desired position) to skip entire levels of enemies. Just utilise your kit or even change your talents around a bit to see what fits you. Results might be surprising. Oh, also, consumables like invisibility potions, the potion that makes you do a long jump, etc. Use them if you want. Esrin who’s pretty active on the forums said they could skip the big elites added on T9+ with them, for example.

The content rewards personal skill, creativity with the environment and you can even use consumables to further ease your way into things. Just try to think outside the usual box that wow kind of fosters.

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If you’re a completionist and you want the ‘Seeker of Loot’ title, using HandyNotes and hovering over the treasure icons on your map to get the HandyNotes tips can help, as some are tricky to find and might only be possible in certain storylines for some delves, e.g. if you’ve got to web up really high.

Re. Brann as a healer: if you have a bad impression of his healing from the first few days, give it a go again. After ‘fixes/breaks/whatever’ and when he’s been levelled a bit, his healing is pretty strong. Each of the 3 potions will now heal a huge chunk of my HP, whereas last week it wasn’t even noticeable.

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The 125% buff made him super useful. I didn’t realise until yesterday, when I gave it a go as a dps on my DH and started struggling a bit. He was actually erasing the damage I was taking, it felt amazing.

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Can you explain what you mean by this? What happens to loot when you die?

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My tip is to just do them with friends. It makes them much easier and faster.

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It gets lower on death. Nothing too major. Then when you run out of lives you just lose out on the bountiful rewards - if you were in a bountiful delve.

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Do you mean the ilvl gets lower?

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The gear itself until you run out of lives is fine. I think it’s more related to undercoins or the like

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It’s still not clear what you mean. I’ll look up an official guide or something.

“Rewards get lower” doesn’t explain anything.

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There’s more to delves than gear. You have a limit of 5 deaths(lower past tier 8). The rewards from the delves get lower if you die, however gear isn’t affected. That is, until you use up all your lives. Also you can’t unlock new tiers if you run out of lives

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For bountiful delves you have 5 lives. When you die 5 times the dungeon isn’t bountiful anymore and you won’t get the chest.

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As Mistjo said, if lose all your lives you won’t get the bountiful chest (assuming you’re in a bountiful delve), but you will still get the two other chests. I believe (though I haven’t tried it yet) that if you’ve been lucky enough to find one of the ‘Delver’s Bounty’ maps that guarantee bountiful loot for a particular tier, you can use it and still get the bountiful loot. I’ve got a couple, but I was planning to use them if I run out keys of some point.

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You get a 610 hero track item from the maps. I would suggest to just use a map when you have one. You get an extra chest, so you aren’t missing out on the normal bountiful chest.

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Ah OK, thanks, I’ll try that. I didn’t realise you could more than one bountiful chest at the end. They look to be tier specific though. I’ve got one that says “Tier 8, blah, blah…tier 8 at the end of the next tier 8 or higher delve you complete.” And one that says Tier 6. So I assume I’ll get an extra bit of veteran gear for one and champion gear for the other.

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I would add the tip to check your toys, some toys can be very useful in Delves.

Enluu recently started a thread asking forumers what were their most useful toys, I was surprised and grateful for the tips people gave. Linked the thread for info.

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For those who are nervous of pushing higher delves, if you run out of lives you don’t get kicked out. You can keep going for as many tries as you want. This is useful if you want to get improved Great Vault rewards.

On the subject of great vault rewards, I expect I’m not the only one to have them for the first time. For Delves they work thus:

The ilvl of the vault reward is determined by the LOWEST tier run for that vault slot. The slots are:

2 x Delves / world events
2 x Delves / world events
4 x Delves / world events

Say you run 5 Delves. 2 x T7, 1 x T6, 1 x T5 and 1 x T4. You will get the following vault rewards:

T7 reward
T5 reward
World event reward

Assuming you’ve run 3 x World events.

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Thank you so much for the mention! I really liked everyone’s answers!

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+1 tip: In the day the dread pit has the egg version, only the burning eggs are Kobolds.

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You forgot to add “except every other patch”