GamesMMOWorld of WarcraftWoW: The War Within’s new mini dungeons are annihilating solo players while groups sleepwalk through them for ‘free’ lootWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesMMOWorld of WarcraftWoW: The War Within’s new mini dungeons are annihilating solo players while groups sleepwalk through them for ‘free’ lootWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
Recent updatesSeptember 13:Blizzard has issueda hotfixthat generally makes Delves easier for solo players and more challenging for groups. It also made some of the most egregious enemy attacksless potent. But,oops, some enemies are doing millions of damage!
Recent updatesSeptember 13:Blizzard has issueda hotfixthat generally makes Delves easier for solo players and more challenging for groups. It also made some of the most egregious enemy attacksless potent. But,oops, some enemies are doing millions of damage!
Recent updates
September 13:Blizzard has issueda hotfixthat generally makes Delves easier for solo players and more challenging for groups. It also made some of the most egregious enemy attacksless potent. But,oops, some enemies are doing millions of damage!
Delvesare World of Warcraft’s new mini dungeons that can be done solo, and they reward some of the best loot in The War Within’sfirst season. But players have found that they’re exponentially harder alone than with a group, which has squashed the hope that they would be a new solo alternative to normal endgame activities like raids and Mythic+ dungeons.
The problem is how Delves scale enemy difficulty for solo players versus groups. Many players say they’re an obstacle course of environmental hazards and brutal enemies when you’re alone, but a breeze in a group of five. Even the NPC ally who joins you in solo runs, Brann Bronzebeard, struggles to heal through normal enemy attacks, let alone boss attacks, in the high-level Delves. And on top of that, solo players have to use up one of their limited respawns every time they die because Bronzebeard, unlike other players, can’t resurrect you.
Several playerssay that grouping up with even one person alleviates most of these problems and renders some Delves surprisingly trivial for how good the loot rewards are. WoW raider Slootdid the mathand found that for some reason solo players have to fight enemies with strictly more health than two players do. I’m no game designer but that makes no sense to me. You’d think enemy health would scale up with each new player you add.
The weird scaling and the disparity between different classes and roles have made the WoW subreddit resemble the Elden Ring one earlier this year when players werefuriousabout Shadow of the Erdtree’s difficulty. Some posts beg Blizzard not tonerf the difficultywhileotherssay “it’s almost ridiculous to consider them solo content.”
(Image credit: Blizzard)
“Right now, duo delves are free gear, and solo is nearly impossible for some classes.“Reddit user Kyuuki_Kitsune
“Right now, duo delves are free gear, and solo is nearly impossible for some classes.”
“Right now, duo delves are free gear, and solo is nearly impossible for some classes,” Reddit userKyuuki_Kitsunesaid.
Most people say the problem isn’t actually a skill issue, but a balancing issue. Enemies deal absurd amounts of damage and have too many attacks for one person to handle. “I think the problem is where the difficulty lies,” Reddit userLpunitwrote. “Every time I have died, it’s because of unavoidable, very highly tuned damage.”
While I wasn’t a huge fan of Delves in their current iteration, I could see the potential for them to be a way for solo players to gear up characters in what are essentially little Diablo dungeons embedded into WoW. They’re theoretically of a piece with all the ways WoW’s becoming a more singleplayer-friendly MMO. The first raid, for example, will have a’Story Mode' versionso solo players can see the end of the campaign—a feature people have wanted for years.
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But Delves currently lack an identity, and it shows in the mixed responses from players. I can understand wanting a challenge, but in a game all about gaining power on a seasonal schedule, it’s no fun to feel forced into a certain playstyle just to keep up, especially when Blizzard pitched them as solo-friendly dungeons. As they are now, Delves are just better than dungeons for loot, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense for an activity that wasn’t supposed to be a full-on replacement.Blizzard has alreadytweaked the difficultyof enemies while you’re leveling, so I’m sure it can find a way to fix Delves up too. Ideally they should be preferable for solo players and optional for groups. That way there’s a good loop of things to do for people who frequently play both ways. But Blizzard will need to fix them quickly before Delves blemish the first season of an expansion that has set up apromising futurefor the 20-year-old MMO.
PRODUCTSWorld of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft: The War Within
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