Delves are an interesting component of the new endgame of WoW in The War Within. Already, Delves are something of a standout because they represent a new ideal for gearing and accessibility, but are also being crushed under the weight of difficulty discourse and the WoW player tendency to prioritize optimal play over measured approaches and fun.

So what’s the deal with Delves?

Well, the basic idea as presented by Blizzard is that they are short, satisfying, 15-minute shots of gameplay for 1-5 players. You zone in, pop through a basic scenario (each Delve has a few different story options that rotate at random), beat a boss, and then open a treasure room and loot it. There are 11 “tiers” of difficulty (plus two special tiers that belong to the one-boss delve of Zekvir’s Lair), of which the first 8 reward scaling levels of gear, both at the end in the treasure room and in the Great Vault on reset day. A Tier 8 delve, the highest reward tier, provides 603 item level loot at the end (provided you do a Bountiful Delve and have a Bountiful Coffer Key, the delves that are Bountiful also randomly rotate daily while the keys are a timegated reward for a variety of outdoor content) and then load a slot in your Vault with 616 item level gear at specific breakpoints. This, for comparison, is equivalent to mid-late Normal raid gear and mid-late Heroic raid gear respectively.

All of this is fine so far, right? You get raid-level loot for Delves, but with a limiter in place, and while you can gear to Heroic raid level over time, the pace is a deliberately slow trickle. That poses a followup question, then – how is difficulty in the Delves and is it tuned in a way that makes sense?

So far, the answer is a resounding no.

Blizzard is right, in my estimation, to make raid-level gear more broadly available, and I think it plays a great role for a majority of the playerbase to have such options available and accessible. My actual hottest take about World of Warcraft is that every player, regardless of gameplay mode or difficulty, should eventually be able to have a full Mythic-level set of gear because gear alone does not dictate how well someone plays or what they are capable of. In that light, Delves are great – but the difficulty question lurks in wait.

If you can get raid-level gear from a solo activity, how in the hell do you balance that, exactly? It’s tough. As a player, you might expect that Delves would bring a bit of difficulty in order to make that gear progression feel earned, since WoW’s core guiding light in gameplay is that higher item level loot is a primary motivator to push yourself to play harder content and refine your skill at the game. At the same time, though, everyone is expected to be doing Delves, evidenced by the fact that a lot of high-value crafting reagents drop nearly-exclusively in them (Profaned Tinderboxes, Vials of Kaheti Oils, etc). The nature of something that, in Blizzard’s own marketing, can be done in 15 minutes also means that the difficulty maybe can’t be as pronounced as a raid boss or higher-key Mythic Plus dungeon, because how do you balance that for high vertical scaling difficulty but also incredibly variable group sizes and solo capabilities per class and spec?

Blizzard’s initial, wordless answer is Delves that are, in many ways, intensely challenging, more than it seems they should be.

Over the course of week 1 of Season 1 of TWW, the players I talk to and engage with had a variety of experiences with Tier 8 Delves, both solo and in group. The scaling changed multiple times through hotfixes after the first couple of days, but even early on, how soloable Delves were depended a lot on your spec – if you had high DPS and constantly-available self-healing, it was fine, but anything less was not. Item level did make an impact, but that too was easy to blunt if your spec was good – I breezed in as Windwalker Monk at a 585 item level and did Tier 8s solo easily, while even Retribution Paladins I knew struggled with the same at similar item levels. The scaling was fundamentally broken, however – the incoming damage on tanks scaled proportionally out of whack with the health and defensive increase of a tank such that being a tank made them harder while healers could make some headway but had to constantly be self-healing (and patching up Brann).

The issue for me has been this – it’s hard to even comment on intended difficulty because Blizzard doesn’t even seem to know what they want Delves to be. The early tuning was hard solo but easier for groups (substantially so), but then the first tuning hotfix just made them harder across the board, including solo. Subsequent hotfixes have made them stabilize a bit, but they are still very much in flux as of this writing. In fact, as of the first round of Delve hotfixes, the seasonal boss Zekvir is currently mathematically impossible to kill solo based on a few different analyses, and nearly every aspect of Delve tuning has been modified, from enemy cast times to Brann’s tuning. Why does it matter what Blizzard intends, though? It’s simple – if Blizzard straight-up communicated the intended ideal difficulty, I think we’d have less reason to contemplate how they are tuned.

WoW players are creatures of habit, and the chief habit among them is optimal play. If something yields optimal results, there is a certain assumption that everyone should do it and should be able to do it. Even with an item level recommendation in place at 600+ for Tier 8 Delves, a lot of players are trying to use Tier 8 Delves earlier to get to that level, since the loot rewards are valuable and a faster, better way to get them in the initial week of the season with no Mythic Plus or Mythic Raid. Without commentary on intended difficulty, players are left to assume, and since Blizzard has marketed Delves in this sort of casual-friendly, in and out style, there’s a reasonable assumption to be made that the intended difficulty is lower, which is then offset by Blizzard tuning things up and making them a lot harder. Of course, this discourse is also confused when Blizzard makes changes that cause things to become impossible, like with Zekvir.

So what challenges are present in balancing Delves? They’re honestly things that Blizzard has perpetually had problems with in scaling, flexible-group content.

Think about the spread of abilities in the game and how many ways different classes and specs have to respond to certain threats. If you need to interrupt a spell, you might have a 15-second interrupt, a 24-second, or be a Shadow Priest with a 45 second interrupt (disgusting). If Blizzard wants a castable ability to be an interrupt check in content that can be soloed, it has to, at a baseline, be solvable by any spec – and that includes the variety of interrupt timers as well as Holy and Discipline Priests who have no interrupt! You can make it so that crowd control on the target might also stop the cast, but then you have to account for that as well as the fact that many melee specs have the fastest interrupt availability and also have CC, meaning that it’s now easier for those specs but remains more challenging to the others.

The Mage Tower circumvented this by being tailored to each class and spec, such that each spec, even when sharing the same challenge with other specs, had some unique tweaks that allowed it to be on a roughly equal footing. However, Horrific Visions, Torghast, and now Delves have all suffered the same problem – there’s only so many mechanics in WoW that you can reasonably expect the average player to do and those mechanics mean a design that fundamentally favors melee specs and disadvantages casters and especially healers. Interrupts are most common, but there’s also forced downtime (moving out of the stupid Sporbits), which is tough for melee but still harder on a soloing caster, and defensive checks (where melee specs are often again more sturdy and still have defensive abilities to press to mitigate). Exacerbating this, Brann can be two of the three roles in the holy trinity of MMO design…but he can’t be a tank, which means the player is always the tank unless you have ways to shed or redirect threat to Brann (Fade, Misdirect, Tricks of the Trade). Brann brings some interrupt capability and some interesting utility, but the problem is that you can’t directly control him or give any sort of priority to how he should use things like his interrupt – so he helps, but he can also get in the way.

Speaking of Brann helping, a secondary issue is that he’s kind of…not helpful? As a DPS he’s okay, but as a healer he’s pretty awful, with his primary heal requiring you to run and grab potions, which is fine enough but sucks for casters, requires weird positioning for melee, and burns scenario-specific resources like Air Purifier fuel and candle wax. He gains heals later on that are helpful, but you have to level him pretty highly to get there, which feels kinda bad early in the season when you’re trying to push and need to do tier 8 Delves to level him up! A lot could be fixed if Brann was a bit smarter, a bit more direct in both healing and DPS (dragging to potions or over traps feels bad!), and if he had a tank option available to allow casters some distance and room to breathe.

So the difficulty of higher-tier delves is almost exclusively limited to mechanics that just punch your face in. Instead of adding more mechanics or changing mechanics over time, the higher delve tiers simply blast you with damage far beyond anything else in the game (except maybe high key Mythic Plus or Mythic raid) and the mobs become giant damage sponges, which is more difficult to a point but also kind of a dull way to scale difficulty that doesn’t address the underlying issues of imbalance between solo roles.

All of these combine to create the potent blend of issues that currently face Delves – unclear and constantly-shifting difficulty without a clear statement of intent from Blizzard, difficulty with scaling in the solo scenarios that disadvantages certain specs due to a lack of specific scaling and targeted tuning, poorly thought-out retuning that has made the seasonal journey basically impossible without further fixes, and a community expectation that doing Tier 8s is optimal and thus should be possible for everyone, when it quite clearly isn’t and a big part of that is down to tuning (but also player perception drives that too, when Blizzard does recommend having 600 ilvl for them but most people do not at this point). It’s basically a big mess, which is a shame because I think Delves are actually quite fun and I’ve enjoyed having them as a thing I can do solo to progress my character in the first week of the season.

Long-term, I think Blizzard has work to do in order to iron out the kinks with these forms of flexible, small-group content. For the solo experience, they need to design a baseline version that can be done spec-agnostic, and then work to add meaningful modes of difficulty expansion. Timing interrupts to be possible (or allowing more stops through CC so that someone with a slow interrupt or no interrupt can still do work), scaling incoming damage and mob health more specifically around specs or at least roles, and then tuning group ability timers such that there can be a mechanical challenge and not just numeric challenge would be a start. Making Brann more potent and more directable, like a minion bar so you can control his use of abilities a bit or at least give him commands like Assist, would be nice, as would letting him be a tank. Lastly, I think the scaling of difficulty to rewards is a bit off – expecting players to need item level 600 average to tackle content that rewards 603 gear and a 616 vault slot is…fine to a point, but it also means that this soloable, non-raid method of gearing still heavily favors raiders who push their item level higher over the world content players who are a bigger chunk of the audience. Even if it’s intended to be a seasonal “journey,” I think there’s still room within that structure to either detune the challenge slightly or up the rewards – most likely the former. If I’m already 600 average item level (and I actually am as I write this!), then a 603 piece is not a hugely compelling reward, and while the Vault slot generally is, that also heavily favors the raid and dungeon crowd who can complete Tier 8s early enough in the season to supplement their gearing through Delve rewards, while the majority of the WoW audience is going to be on a long tail journey that won’t likely gear them all the way.

And, to a point, I guess that’s fine. However, I do think that making something that is intended to bring the gear progression curve outside of dungeons and raids should be, at a minimum, at least more accessible to that audience than it currently is, and I think that is where the real opportunity to improve lies.