Over the past few weeks, I have obsessively slammed into Delves with a large chunk of my total WoW playtime. I’ve been cycling alts through tier 8 Bountifuls to gear up, cleared Tier ? Zekvir, progressed the difficulty curve up to a deathless solo Tier 11, and then finally two nights ago, put about 90 minutes of attempts into Tier ?? Zekvir solo, finally getting him down and getting the void customization for the Delver’s Dirigible, with my Brann at level 47 and my seasonal journey just over halfway done.

So, what has changed from the last time I discussed Delving?

Well…the balance changes have calmed down and I think the difficulty curve overall has landed in a spot of relative comfort. Tier 8s feel easier than they did during the first week of the season, even on alts with less gear and non-tank specs (Discipline Priest fucking rips them open really easily haha). The tuning generally is in a better place across the board – solo is punishing but feels doable, grouping generally takes the bite out of higher tiers to a level that they are incredibly straightforward, and the higher tier difficulties for “fun” are tuned around where I’d expect – incredibly punishing at this point in the season with lower average item level available, but still quite doable if you play smart and push hard.

With more time and more characters into the system, I can make some more informed commentary about a couple of the major points of progress tracking for the system – Brann and the Delver’s Journey – and then we’ll talk about the fun I had slamming face into double-question mark Zekvir until I won.

Brann

So…Brann is kind of interesting as you progress the season.

Early on, I noted that he feels damn near worthless as a companion – no tank role, both his main low level abilities in DPS and healer require movement which makes the Kobold delves feel like shit, and his overall contribution is relatively low. That changes, quite a bit even, as you level him.

Once Brann is in the high 30s, you start to feel his impact. As a healer, he gains the Emergency Kit to save you from imminent deaths, the Titan Relic heal that is actually substantial and much easier to be in, and those things coupled with increased damage from him when not healing help a lot. Likewise with him as DPS, the traps are less the focus, because he has a big burst window that actually does good damage and he will very often just execute low health enemies, killing them outright. On my undergeared alt tanks in Tier 8 Bountifuls, Brann executes like 1 in 4 pulls on average and it makes a huge difference in how easy the delves feel. Leveling Brann does make a difference, and given enough levels, he’ll start to really pull his own weight very well.

While I still wish he had a tank spec, I also know that the companion is swapping per season and so I suspect that we’ll see a new companion in Season 2 with a new ability set and potentially different roles. I feel like one of the support roles is always going to be needed – either tank or healing – and that the companion will always have a DPS spec too, so it’ll be interesting to see if we end up with a tank/DPS companion next season and see how that changes delving, especially solo.

The Seasonal Journey

In The War Within, Blizzard has embraced using more game-design terms within the game instead of dressing them up, and the biggest example of that is the Delvers Journey. In each Delve you complete, you’ll gain some amount of Delvers Journey, an experience-point like system that offers rewards at certain breakpoints – most of which are cosmetic, but some of the later ones bestow player power or possible player power – the ability to buy Bountiful Delve Coffer keys and item level 580 gear that you can use on any character on your account.

Delver’s Journey is kinda neat as a concept, but it also has a lot of flaws. For one thing, the UI in-game doesn’t tell you how many points of Journey you need to progress the major milestones, but does tell you how many points you earn for activities in Delves, so you can track what you’ve earned (if you’re eagle-eyed) but cannot actually see in a useful form how much progress you’ve made. I didn’t even know what the point values were until today when Wowhead helpfully published the information from the game files! This is such a silly and weird way to represent progress and feels like an unforced error on Blizzard’s part, especially as we enter a Delve bonus week where people will likely be more eagle-eyed about it!

There’s also an issue of how it is earned, which is exclusively from Bountiful Delves. This is fine on its own, but then it also has a scaler for difficulty tier (also fine) and then goes off the rails by having a rare-drop quest for the season and random encounters with Zekvir which offer additional bonus Journey. You can get close to doubling the run’s Journey value by having Zekvir spawn into your Delve and by ensuring you kill all of his empowered packs (which is fine until around Tier 10, where the higher-level unique enemies become incredibly hard such that there are some pulls that can feel literally impossible, and I ran into a bunch of them doing Tier 11 delves for funsies), so if you do Tier 8s and beeline to objectives, you can (and probably will) forfeit a good amount of your Journey progress potential. That is decidedly not great!

As a bonus, I like the idea of Journey, and I want to progress it to the point where I can gear alts quickly with Undercoin and buy cheap coffer keys to kit out characters before Season 2, but it is frustrating in no small measure because of difficulty tracking it and inconsistencies with how it is rewarded. Speaking of inconsistencies…

The Role of Alts in Delves

Delve progress is account-wide. Your Brann has one level for all characters so no repeat leveling is needed and your Delvers Journey is a Warband progress, with everyone working towards the same bar. What this means in practice, then, is that it is the one place in which Blizzard has effectively challenged their own ethos – that having alts should not be rewarding. You get more Journey for opening a Bountiful cache, but keys are a real limit on one character that is easily subverted on multiple characters. The word is that Brann experience and Journey only apply to the first 28 Bountifuls you do per week, which is a limit that sounds silly, but is the absolute maximum a single character could do (1 Bountiful per zone per day, 4 zones, 7 days a week, multiply that out and you get 28), but getting max progress on Journey from that would require one character to have 28 Coffer Keys, which is…essentially unrealistic, especially early in the season. Maybe once you have enough Journey to buy keys, but at that point, it kinda doesn’t matter since you’re no longer farming Journey anyways!

Functionally, the easiest way to push your Delve progress is to do Bountifuls on as many level 80s as possible. That gives you more base Journey, more Brann XP, more chances at hidden cache maps, more possible Zekvir encounters – and a substantially easier push to that 28 delve weekly limit for progress. At the point you have seven level 80 characters, you just need to do your free weekly four Bountifuls on each of them to get maximum progress – which is still a lot of gameplay, but far more reasonably attainable than pushing one character to be able to eventually run and open 28 Bountiful Coffers a week! Thus, there is actually an incentive here to play on alts that can, in some ways, help your main, as Brann leveling up means more easily being able to tackle the challenges of higher-tier Delves. It’s not a huge difference overall unless you are struggling, but it does make a difference which still counts.

My Experiences with Delves and Both Zekvir Difficulties

So far I’ve done Delves at Tier 8 on Windwalker and Brewmaster Monk, Discipline and Shadow Priest, Protection Warrior, Vengeance Demon Hunter, and Protection Paladin. For the DPS specs, I run Brann as a healer and for the tank specs I run Brann as DPS, and I ran at least one Tier 8 per character in the low to mid 580 range of item level, eventually gearing all of the alts I ran to at least 594 item level against the recommended 600+.

All of them were fairly straightforward once the balancing settled down. Brann as DPS is a bigger boon in my opinion because the execute is incredibly strong compared to what he can do as a healer, but if you’re bringing the pain, you likely won’t need him healing much either. My easiest Delving experiences have been on Windwalker Monk (high damage, lots of cleave, short recovery on burst windows) and Discipline Priest (easy healing access that doesn’t take away from damage-dealing coupled with getting healer-level tuning for the Delve as a baseline). Tanks in general have an easy experience because reduced damage intake coupled with self-healing access means that you rarely face huge threats. However, since tanks have been hit with self-sustain nerfs for TWW, you do have to play smart – tanking isn’t automatically a win by any stretch – but it is easier in a general sense.

I’ve only dared to venture north of Tier 8 on my raiding-main Monk, where I was able to do 9 and 10 in DPS spec as Windwalker without changing my approach. Tier 11, however, required going tank for now because the increased number of Zekvir empowered packs and the addition of named lieutenants made them substantially harder to survive as a DPS. It was fun – having to strategically pull, use range to create safety, and think intelligently about how to approach the delve as a whole was great. The challenge in these higher-tier delves is great fun if you like skill checks and I would highly recommend trying them if you are lacking other goals to chase after. Doing a Tier 11 without dying feels equally about luck and skill, but it was a good achievement and the title of Immortal Spelunker is very fun!

My Priest has even managed to swat away two different Zekvir invasions, during one of which he looted the Fate Weaver unique off-hand that creates a matching main-hand weapon with a proc effect. Very nice stuff and the weapon was a big upgrade!

Lastly, the actual Zekvir’s Lair Delve on both difficulties. I did both as Windwalker Monk, ? difficulty at 602 ilvl and ?? at 613, with Brann at 37 for ? and 46 for ??, set to healer role for both difficulties.

On single-question difficulty, Zekvir is not a terribly hard fight once you have sufficient item and Brann level. His major mechanics are the poison DoT, which is magic needing a dispel (or an interrupt on the cast), two frontals (one an insta-gib and the other a pull that basically will kill you), a fear circle centered on the boss (move immediately)and the add cocoon (DPS it fast and it doesn’t matter). The checks on single-question mode are pretty light, meaning played half competently, you’ll blitz it with relative ease which is fun, but it is a longer fight and takes some effort. It also counts as a Tier 8 delve for the Great Vault, which is nice because it is shorter than doing an actual Tier 8.

As for double-question difficulty…it’s a lot more involved. On Windwalker Monk, I had to make some adjustments to build and playstyle. Firstly, Brann pretty much always needs to be a healer as a DPS player on this challenge (and likely as a tank too) – the auto-attacks alone are 2 million against a health pool of 5 million, which means that you can quickly die if you’re not getting some form of healing in. Brann’s relics also matter a great deal here – I had to swap to the Porcelain Arrowhead for increased crit damage and Amorphous Relic for the buffs it provides. As for my Monk’s talents, I had to swap to a raid build to get more focused single target DPS and to ensure I had Diffuse Magic to provide an extra layer of defense against the incoming damage.

In this mode, Zekvir is a two phase fight. From 100% health to 60%, the fight is similar to single-question, with the only major addition being a self-heal Zekvir casts which absolutely must be interrupted. As a change in strategy, I had to only interrupt the heal, and then wait when the DoT went out, as Brann could dispel it sometimes, but not every time, and if he didn’t dispel it by the first tick, I had to use Tiger’s Lust on it, which breaks movement impairing effects and removes the DoT as a result. At 60%, Zekvir enters an Old God empowered form and channels the power, which gives you a free 5% to wail on him mechanic-free before he finishes the empowerment and does a small knockback to start the second phase. In this form, you get a similar set of mechanics but empowered – the self-heal is much bigger if allowed to cast, the fear circle shoots out line AoEs you need to dodge, the web grab frontal now shoots into a void portal and bounces out between a series of portals which means you cannot stand between any of them, and he gains one new major ability – a channel where he covers the ground in AoEs sequentially, so you just dodge the first couple and then move into their space once they go off.

The challenge of the second phase solo is managing the mechanics with accuracy, as you have to be very mindful of things that didn’t matter in the first phase – you can’t just run out of the fear, you have to run in a direction not marked with a line AoE, you can’t just dodge the web frontal, you have to find a safe spot that is not in a straight line between two portals which often means forcing downtime to just move out and let the webs bounce around, and the biggest challenge of phase 2 is that Brann will almost certainly die at some point, so you need to have a plan to deal with mechanics without his dispel, heals, or saving throws for up to a full minute while he revives. It becomes a bigger amount of juggling, and the temptation as you enter the home stretch is to deal with mechanics less fully – to let the cocoon hatch and then CC the add, for example – but what I found worked for me, given that there didn’t seem to be an enrage, was just calmly executing the mechanics and staying the course doing everything fully – properly interrupting, moving small and direct around the boss to dodge frontals, stepping out for the web frontal, and ensuring I broke off the boss to DPS the cocoon when it was up. When I did that and had a locked in pull, I won – and it felt really good.

So, looking at it overall from the perspective of someone who has done every solo skill challenge in the game, does double-question Zekvir hold up to the prior bar?

Well…no.

It’s a very fun fight and very engaging, don’t get me wrong. It has a small but stringent list of mechanics that must be done properly to win and the overall tuning felt pretty good at 613 item level, but at the same time, the challenge it offers is uneven (a similar problem to soloing Horrific Visions back in BfA or doing Torghast solo in Shadowlands) and the overall challenge isn’t as strong as the Mage Tower in Legion, which required being really locked in on each spec, especially whatever spec you pushed first through a given challenge. Mage Tower was better tuned to individual specs, while Horrific Visions felt like a bigger win solo because the path to get to a 5 mask run was explicitly grindy and took a bit to work towards. Double-question Zekvir is just kind of waiting once you can do a Tier 10 Delve, and while he’s tough, it was mostly just grinding out some learning pulls before getting really deep into the fight.

One thing about the balance that stands out sharply to me is the unevenness of the mechanical complexity. The reason my Monk was relatively breezy was that Tiger’s Lust removes the DoT. and healers can magic-dispel it, but for other specs solo, it would unquestionably be harder. Monk’s new class tree for talents also has some specifically helpful defensive options that mean you aren’t getting tagged by auto-attacks nearly as often, and you can usually have an instant-cast Vivify when you are tapped by one, which makes Brann’s potions less necessary (still quite needed, but you don’t have to play around them as aggressively). I shudder to think of what it would be like on a caster’s interrupt, especially if you then also don’t have a way to dispel magic or remove movement-impairing effects, and I think that’s the problem – the challenge from spec to spec is not directly comparable. Sure, people could fuss over Mage Tower difficulty in a sense, but it was always highly subjective – which specs you did first to learn the fights versus later, level of familiarity with each spec, etc – but for Zekvir, as with Horrific Visions, some are just objectively easier, which feels kinda bad.

But, outside of the high-level discussion for the game as a whole, I enjoyed the challenge and it was fun to cross off.

Just Keep Delving

As the season winds on, I find myself impressed with Delves and overall rather satisfied they exist to fill out the gameplay options this expansion. Flexible group and size content is great and I love when WoW puts challenging aspirational content in for me to slam my face into. Overall, I’m pretty happy with them and I hope that we see a similar challenge with maybe-better tuning in Season 2!