Delves are the latest open world progression content coming in The War Within — but are they fun?

Delves are one of the major features in The World Within, offering players a new type of evergreen content to play throughout the expansion. These mini-dungeons are scattered around the open world, and they’re full of puzzles, combat, and other challenges for players exploring Khaz Algar. They can be done solo or in small groups, with increasing difficulty (and increasing rewards), and the mechanics in a Delve may change play through to play through to keep things interesting. If you enjoyed Torghast or the Legion Mage Tower, Delves may be for you. But if you didn’t enjoy Torghast or the Mage Tower, you don’t have to push yourself — like dungeons, Delves can be run at multiple difficulty levels (up to Delve Level 11), so you can give yourself a challenge or enjoy them casually.

But the fact that we’re meant to run these throughout the expansion is important: like dungeons, raids, and PVP, Delves are designed to last until the next expansion rolls around. They increase in difficulty, offer rewards on par with other content, and even unlock slots in the Great Vault.

So the question is: are Delves actually fun? And will they still be fun after we’ve been running them all expansion?

Adventuring with Brann Bronzebeard

Even if you decide to tackle Delves solo, you won’t be alone: you’ll venture into each Delve with your buddy Brann Bronzebeard. Each season, there will be a different companion to join us on Delves, and as you complete Delves, these companions will earn XP and level up. Brann can heal or DPS (you tell him which you’d prefer) and starts with a single basic ability.

At early levels Brann’s contribution to your success could best be described as “bless his heart.”

As a healer, Brann throws snack packs in your direction and you have to run through them, and as a DPS he starts out fairly weak. Brann frequently stands on top of NPCs or objects you have to interact with, and in later levels he has a large devilsaur that randomly shows up and similarly gets in the way. Like many of the NPCs we’ve played with, he can be sometimes more annoying than effective.

But Brann has 11 levels with new abilities, and his last ability is somewhat like the Paragon levels we’ve seen in Diablo, and can increase its attribute up to a cap of 50 ranks. You can level Brann up to unlock all of his abilities at Delve level 3 reasonably easily — though it will probably require finishing each Delve once, and doing most of them at level 3. (Though you can repeat them at lower levels and still get XP for Brann.)

And because your progress with Brann is Warband-wide, you can spread your efforts across multiple characters. You can power up Brann and then hit up Delves on alts to level and gear other characters a bit more easily. The fact that you don’t need to repeat the leveling grind is definitely a point in their favor for replayability: you’ll play Delves because you want to, not because you need to level Brann up again to play a new alt.

Blizzard is still working on balancing Brann, and recently increased both his power level and his XP gains, so he’ll hopefully be a reliable companion by the time The War Within goes live in August.

What it’s like to play Delves

You can play Delves in groups of one to five players, and you can do lower difficulties (levels 1 – 3) while you level up. But higher levels will be more challenging: mobs will have more health and damage, and affixes that alter how the Delve plays, much like Mythic dungeons. To do Delves above level 4 (which opens with The War Within Season 1) you’ll need to be level 80, and you’ll need to gear up to tackle higher difficulty levels.

Blizzard is still trying to find the right balance for these instances, and my first time through many Delves I found damage to be very spiky, and some bosses felt unreasonably difficult compared to the rest of the instance. Some classes will likely have a harder time with Delves than others. But same beta patch that tweaked Brann’s power also did a balance pass on the health and damage of enemy NPCs, so we can expect a smoother difficulty curve moving forward.

You won’t be able to steamroll through these: you’ll need to pay close attention to succeed. In my second pass through these Delves, I made more of an effort to read the tooltips for specific mechanics. Initially, I felt hurried to keep up with mechanics, but quite a few of them decay with movement, so rushing was actually making it more difficult. Taking a slower and more strategic path through the instance, and trying to optimize my path to objectives worked better. Pay attention to what the NPCs are saying, because it will provide clues as to what to do — and since these mechanics can change, it’s important to pay attention so you know what’s happening.  Some instances will have multiple viable paths through them, with more objective elements than are required to meet the completion requirement scattered through out.

If you’re struggling, take a minute to read everything. And if you know the mechanics but still keep dying, a Determination-like buff will help you power through — though at higher levels deaths may affect the quality or quantity of rewards, you’ll always get something at the end.

The changing nature of Delves, with differing objectives and paths, should help keep them interesting all season. Though, much like Mythic+ Affixes and Torghast mechanics, you’ll probably get used to the patterns as you get more experience.

Who are Delves for?

Delves are intended to be a type of world content that offers solo players content that requires low time commitment but also offers challenges and progression. Delves have achievements for treasure hunting, leveling companions, and completing different challenges — just like dungeons and raids. They also let players who may not have time to do raids or Mythic+ an opportunity to do equally challenging content and get higher level gear than you can find in the open world — plus they unlock Great Vault slots for even more gear.

This is content can do in small bites, and for those with a harried schedule, you can solo them and go AFK in a “safe” corner if you’re called away. You don’t have to worry about a timer or leaving twenty raiders waiting for you to get back.

For the most part I found this to be true, which could make this good content for parents with young children, people looking for a quick activity to do during their lunch break, or people who play at irregular hours and have trouble getting groups. They may also be a good option for leveling alts after you’ve played the main campaign and leveled Brann.

But are Delves fun?

I enjoyed playing Delves, and they fill a niche for solo players that Blizzard hasn’t always done a good job catering to — but I’m just one player. As someone who often plays solo due to playing at odd times on an Oceanic realm, when it’s early for my US-based friends and late for my NZ friends, this is content I could see myself playing. I found the difficulty curve more manageable than Torghast at release, and I’m encouraged that Blizzard has already made changes based on feedback. Comparably, Torghast was significantly harder when it first launched than it had been in beta, which put a lot of people off in early days.

Solo or small group players will may enjoy the ever-changing challenges, and findingthe optimal path through the instances. I’m sure that there will be guides release saying which objectives to skip on the way through to have the best chance for success, but there’s definitely a fun factor to stumble through and figuring out yourself. At one point I stopped and fished for a while in one of the Delves.

But playing in the beta didn’t offer the opportunity to grind through an expansion’s worth of Delve content, or do maximum-difficulty Delves. I feel like Delves will have quite a bit of replayability without getting boring, particularly if Blizzard adds new Delves in future patches.

Whether Delves will have the staying power of raids and Mythic dungeons remains to be seen, but for a player like myself I will most likely do more Delves than 5-player dungeons in Season 1.