Delves are a new seasonal outdoor content feature in WoW: The War Within

The War Within is the next expansion for the World of Warcraft and one of the core features is called a new type of instanced content called Delves. Similar to Scenarios and Island Expeditions, Delves are designed to expand endgame options for players focused on open world activities. Delves are a new type of Seasonal content content, and include competitive rewards for players who prefer world content over dungeons and raids, with gear, pets, and mounts to earn. Completing Delves will also count towards the new outdoor content track of the Great Vault, so you can collect gear from the vault even if you don’t raid, run Mythic+, or PVP — making it a great option for players who prefer to run solo or in small groups.

What are Delves?

Delves will be role-agnostic instances for one to five players, with the challenges and rewards scaling to match the number of players. At the end of the Delve will be a Treasure Trove that you can unlock by completing the Delve — perhaps by solving of puzzles and/or defeating enemies — so there’s no stealthily sneaking straight to the treasure at the end. Delves should take 10-15 minutes to complete, so they’re quick to run without getting bogged down — though that doesn’t mean it won’t be challenging. There are 11 tiers of difficulty for each Delve, and you should expect those top tiers to be tough.

In The War Within beta, Delves have a death counter that will keep you from corpse hopping your way through: while you can complete a Delve even if you’ve gone over the death counter, you won’t receive bonus loot, like collectibles. We have seen Blizzard make big changes to beta content, however, so if this death counter is too much of a hurdle it may be removed.

Our old friends from the Dragon Isles the Dragonscale Expedition will be leading the exploration of the 13 Delves on Khaz Algar coming at launch, and each Season an NPC companion will be joining the players to assist. For Season 1 you’ll be escorted by Brann Bronzebeard, who will hopefully not pull half of the Delve accidentally along the way. The NPC companion will also be customizable with the ability for them to focus on healing or damage or a mix based on your needs.

Where can I find Delves?

Delves are scattered across Khaz Altar, but we already know where most of them are located. The known Delves are:

• Isle of Dorn
  • Earthcrawl Mines
  • Kriegval’s Rest
  • Fungal Folly
• The Ringing Deeps
  • The Waterworks
  • The Dread Pit
• Hallowfall
  • Skittering Breach
  • Nightfall Sanctum
  • The Sinkhole
  • Mycomancer Cavern
• Azj-Kahet
  • The Spiral Weave
  • Tak-Rethan Abyss
  • Underkeep
  • Mystery 13th Delve, as yet unannounced

We don’t know much about the mysterious thirteenth Delve, but it may require a secret to unlock, or it could be capstone after completing all previous 12.

Rewards for doing Delves

Sure, you could do Delves for fun, but the rewards are also pretty compelling. Delves will drop gear that’s competitive with dungeons and raids of similar difficulty, with loot that’s equivalent to Mythic+5 gear or Heroic raids at the highest difficulty levels. It seems like Delves will be a solid way to level up in the expansion.

But there’s also gold, crafting materials, transmog, and the Delver’s Dirigible, a customizable mount.

The addition of Delves to World of Warcraft should provide another fun activity for players who want to earn rewards for their players without stepping into instanced content (or who want to gear up some alts). As an “evergreen” feature it shows a commitment to expanding open world content for players that will also provide meaningful progression (and of course, some nice rewards that will likely not be obtainable elsewhere). We’re hoping for a lot of new appearances to really take advantage of the new Warbands feature. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Delves so keep an eye on Blizzard Watch for updates.

Originally published November 3, 2023. Updated July 7, 2024.