World of Warcraft: The War Wtihin: Do Delves Live Up To The Hype?

One of the most prominent new features in World of Warcraft’slatest expansion, The War Within, was the addition of Delves. They were described as challenging content for players who played mainly solo or in small groups out in the world instead of instanced content. Not only would it give them something interesting to do, but it also was intended to give that group of players a way to attain higher gear levels. After all, the main point of playing WoW has always been getting the best gear.

One of the issues with Delves initially was that Blizzard had a hard time balancing them, so they kept making buff and nerf passes, which caused considerable swings in the difficulty. As I mentioned in my The War Within Review, these hotfixes even caused an issue with being able to quickly complete one tier 8 to not being able to complete the next one immediately after. At this point, everything has settled into a decent stasis, which works regardless of whether you prefer to do them as a group or individually. It still feels like a group of three is the optimal setup; there isn’t a huge difference between a solo player and a full group clearing through, which is good.

The difficulty discrepancy between playing solo as a tank, healer, or DPS hasn’t settled out yet. Depending on the specific delves, some classes or specs have an advantage over others. I’m not sure there’s a good solution to this problem without the delves essentially having slightly different versions for each spec, and that’d be a ton of work. Even doing that per role would be a significant lift, and even then, some classes would still have an advantage—as they did in the Mage Tower. Plus, once you start having different versions for different roles, that’d become a big problem for groups trying to complete delves. The best way to go is to balance them around being done solo and not balance around groups so much. Essentially, the primary focus on delves should be the solo experience, and if people want to do them