Delve Week

I mentioned a few weeks ago that delves weren't off to the best start with me, or I with them. After I wrote that post, I did a few more delves on low tiers on levelling alts, for whom they really were the advertised fun 15-minute romps, but otherwise I mostly stayed away unless the husband needed help with a tier eight on his mage. Some things you just don't get to say no to.

More generally speaking though, I continued to feel vaguely annoyed by delves and didn't want to bother with them. For some people they may be the greatest new feature ever, but I figured Blizz couldn't pay me enough to put up with them. Except... maybe they could.

Which is to say that this past week was "delve week". Not only were rewards from delves increased for seven days (as if they needed to be any more rewarding than they already were!), there were also not one but two weekly quests available for max-level characters in Dornogal to complete multiple delves. I know I didn't have to do those, but I really like ticking off my weeklies... fine, Blizzard, I'll play your game.

With four characters at level 80 by this point, I was potentially looking at twenty delves or more, so I knew I needed help. I searched for advice and found this video by SignsOfKelani particularly helpful. The "use your utility" section was what stood out to me the most. Careful pulling? Using crowd control? That sounds like heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade and I used to like those! Maybe I just needed to let go of this notion that because Blizzard promoted delves as this quick and easy activity, that's what they were actually meant to be. I mean, I guess they could be if you were sufficiently overgeared or doing them at a low enough tier, but if you were actually trying to use them to gear up, they were something else. Maybe it was just a matter of accepting and embracing that.

I decided to make my holy priest my dedicated solo character for this purpose and started with a round of Fungal Folly, since I'd heard that the exploding spores in there actually do damage to the enemies as well, something I hadn't originally realised. Soon my go-to strategy became to simply aggro everything on a given platform, including all the spores, and then run screaming in hopes of making it out before they exploded. It worked surprisingly well and was - dare I say it - strangely fun.

In Kriegval's Rest, I progressed one tiny step at a time, using mind control to make the mobs beat each other up from a distance so I had fewer of them left to finish off at the end. I actually used abilities like Mind Soothe and Psychic Scream, which I hadn't really found a use for in forever. Without exploding spores to help with the dps, killing things took a really long time (I sadly had to find out that many of the mind-controlled mobs' abilities gave the error "target not a player" when I tried to turn them against each other), but I did get there in the end.

I had absolutely hated my last experience in an underwater delve, so that was next on my list of fears to face down. I made sure to grab some underwater breathing potions this time to get rid of the constant pressure of drowning and that immediately helped a lot. In the middle of a pull featuring more mind-control, Zekvir breached the delve and I had barely time to go "oh no" before he swatted me. Weirdly enough the fight didn't reset though, probably because I went into Spirit of Redemption form and had the talent that brings me back to life for free once every ten minutes. When I got up again, blinking in confusion, Brann was still fighting so I joined in, and with a lot of frantic kiting and spam-healing, I managed to stay alive long enough for Brann's dps to push him back. Now that was satisfying.

People have very different attitudes to challenge in MMOs, or video games in general for that matter. Some don't really want to be pushed at all, desiring only relaxation from their gaming experience. Others want challenge and thrills as often as possible. I'm more in the "taking it easy" department myself nowadays, but there are definitely times when a game pushes me that I will push back. I'll always remember that time I spent something like half an hour fighting a beholder boss in Neverwinter just because he was standing between me and completion of a quest. This situation with delves has felt similar in that at first I was just put off, but somehow this week's event was the push needed to nudge me back into action and it actually felt satisfying to go back into delves and be successful.

It's also been a good opportunity to do more duoing with the husband. I mostly talked about the solo challenge so far, but we also did more delves together. The main lesson we took away from this is that one person just has to be on a sturdy character that has the cooldowns to stand still and take some hits. When we tried the Underkeep as an evoker/mage duo it was just a disaster because we were both too squishy. Sure, sometimes you can kite, but sometimes you can't, and then you're stuck. In this instance we'd got the variant of that delve that requires you to defeat a row of ambushes within a small circular area, and there just wasn't enough room to make kiting work, and neither of us could survive getting hit more than a couple of times. After losing all our lives, we went out and redid it twice as evoker/death knight and mage/warrior instead and both of those were a breeze. In fact, that was the first time we did complete a tier eight delve in the advertised fifteen minutes, because with the right combination of classes it was just a whole different game.

Warrior and mage taking a break at the campfire after surviving an ambush in the Underkeep

I guess the point of all this rambling is that you only get to make a first impression once, but sometimes a second look does change things. I'm glad I gave delves another try because approaching them with a different mindset made a huge difference to my enjoyment. That said, I'm not planning to suddenly start running them by the dozen like I did last week. They are still time-consuming, and (in my opinion!) overly rewarding to the point that they can feel like a chore that you must do because the rewards are too good to pass up. 

This past weekend my guildies and I also stepped into Mythic Zero dungeons for the first time since the expansion launch, which was definitely the right choice based on the challenge level we encountered (which is to say we cleared them in decent time, but we did wipe and generally die more than a few times, showing that we weren't really ready for M+ yet), but most of us got no gear rewards out of the exercise since all the item drops were about ten item levels lower than what people already had.