How to complete Delves in The War Within for raid-level gear, your very own dirigible, and other rewards

Delves are a new instance activity coming to World of Warcraft when the The War Within launches later this year. Delves can be completed solo or in groups up to five players (with cross-faction grouping enabled), and players are always accompanied by an NPC companion with customizable abilities to support them. This new activity is intended to be another progression option for players, with gear rewards equivalent to raids and Mythic dungeons, as well as another narrative bridge for storytelling in The War Within.

I had a chance to run a Delve during The War Within alpha test so a lot could change between now, the beta, and launch. But right now here’s everything you need to know about running Delves.

How to start Delves in The War Within

There are 12 total Delves across Khaz Algar’s four new zones, and the main campaign quest will direct you to the first one: the Isle of Dorn campaign will run you through the basics of how to complete the activity. After that you’re free to go run them at your whim. During the alpha test, Delves weren’t marked the main map but they did appear on the mini-map with the same cave-mouth icon from Dragonflight indicating where you could travel underground to Zaralek Cavern — but Delves will likely have clearer markings at launch.

When you find a Delve, you’ll find your NPC Companion near the entrance, which looks like a foggy barrier. In Season 1 of The War Within, the NPC companion is Brann Bronzebeard, but in later seasons we’ll work with new NPCs who will probably be part of the Dragonscale Expedition. Interacting with your NPC companion lets you set their role (in the alpha it was either healer or damage), check their abilities, and manage their utility and combat trinkets.

After you set your NPC loadout, you can interact with the Delve entrance to get started. Delves will have 11 escalating difficulty tiers, Your experience and rewards scale to the tier you choose and higher difficulties will also add different modifiers for an extra layer of challenge.

After you choose your difficulty tier, you’ll be able to seamlessly walk through the foggy barrier and start the Delve.

How to complete Delves in The War Within

Delves aren’t timed so you can complete them at your own pace, but they should take about 10 – 15 minutes to finish end-to-end. Different Delves may be available at different times: the devs intend to put them on a rotation, but the details are still being finalized. If you want to chain-run Delves, there won’t be a limit on how many you can run each day, though you’ll earn fewer rewards after your first daily completion.

Each Delve will have a different scenario featuring different enemies and other NPCs, requiring you to help your companion NPC complete a set of objectives that include:

• Freeing trapped Earthen miners
• Survive an enemy ambush or killing a certain amount of enemies
• Puzzles and platforming
• Completing a final encounter

Throughout the Delve, you can acquire extra abilities by opening webbed treasure chests or killing random elites. These abilities only last for a minute but they do stack! Your NPC companion gains experience by completing Delves and can level up to access new abilities — plus they have some unique behavior. There are material gathering nodes through Delves and your companion will interact, collect, and bring you the materials. If you AFK, the NPC will find a place to lean against and go to sleep, waiting for you to return.

Right before the final encounter is a checkpoint stone that you can use to save your progress as well as a vendor station if you need to repair gear or sell items. The final encounter may be a boss battle (which is what I did in the alpha) or another activity, but once you complete it, you’ll enter the treasure room.

Rewards from Delves in The War Within

Once you complete a Delve, you’ll end up in a treasure room with a Bountiful Treasure Chest. Interacting with the chest nets you rewards based on the tier difficulty you chose at the beginning of the Delve but at minimum you’ll earn gear, gold, crafting materials, transmog pieces, and Resonance Crystals, a new currency coming in The War Within that’s used to purchase items from Renown vendors. Completing Delves will also count towards progress with The Great Vault for more gear.

But be careful! During a Q&A session with The War Within devs, they revealed some of these chest could be mimics!

There will also be a Delves hub run by the Dragonscale Expedition in Dornogal where you can adjust your NPC companion’s loadout and interact with Sir Finley Mrrglton, who appears to be the Delves vendor.

The endgame gear you can earn at the highest Delves difficulty will be comparable to gear from Mythic 15 dungeons and Heroic raids. One of the other endgame rewards is a customizable mount, the Delver’s Dirigible. You can also find additional Resplendent Chests throughout Delves for more rewards. You’ll need a certain key to open them which can be earned by doing Delves, other PVE activities, or weekly quests.

We don’t have a lot of information about the rewards from these chests right now and there will surely be more twists to Delves as alpha and beta testing progresses — we’ll update this article as we learn more!