The Queue: Making friends with fish

Nothing has ever gone wrong by making friends with a strange fish. Nothing at all.

It would be very Warcraft to send us collecting shards of a shattered city, to put it back together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. But…

…yeah, it would definitely be more than 40. How are we going to find Atiesh in all of this?

There are some transmog looks you can buy with the tokens, but frankly it’s nothing to write home about. And I say that as a real transmog fan.

Yes, and it’s a bit weird. In Diablo 4 the Butcher can show up in dungeons and Nightmare dungeons, neither places where there are many consequences for death other than that it slows you down — Nightmare dungeons have a death counter, but it’s pretty generous, another player can Rez you without consequence, and unless you’re playing well out of your league you won’t hit it. You don’t get the Butcher spawns in situations where deaths really matter, like the Pit or Gauntlet, which are both timed, or on bosses on the ladder, which are difficult enough on their own. And also, the Butcher is a mob you can reasonably kill, excepting a very bad situation. (Sure, the game added a more powerful Butcher recently, but it’s still killable.)

But death has consequences in Delves, as you only have a certain number of deaths available. And Zekvir has 164 million health; he’s a boss, not an average mob, or even a difficult mob. Random spawning him on top of everything else in a high tier Delve (he’s confirmed to potentially spawn in tier 4+) would almost certainly just wipe you. (I’m not sure if it despawns after a death; The Butcher does despawn if it kills you.) A hotfix yesterday also added a “new enemy variant,” Zekvir’s Heralds, which are also beastly mobs that spawn in tier 8 Delves. They have 30 million health, can’t be CC’d, ignore line of sight, and their attacks have unlimited range. Yikes. I mean, it has to be a bug, but still yikes.

Delves are supposed to be tough solo content, but the balancing right now is weird. Until some hotfixes yesterday, in a two player group mobs had less health and did less damage than they did for a solo player. In general, scaling on Delves is wonky and they’re tuned more difficult for solo players; yesterday’s hotfixes seem to have tuned up difficulty for larger groups and reduced the damage to solo players. But Zekvir and Zekvir’s Heralds still have tons of health and hit like trucks. Either of them showing up just mean you’re done with the Delve. Doesn’t feel great.

It’s a simplified version of the final boss encounter for solo players or small groups (1 to 10 players) so you can check out the story and watch the final cinematic in context.

If you want to see the whole raid (and don’t have an organized group), you’ll have to do LFR, but LFR wings are coming out at a very good pace so you won’t have to wait long. (LFR wing 1 is live now, wing 2 is available next week, and wing 3 the week after.) But why would you want to do that? It’s full of spiders. You’ll never get all of those cobwebs out of your armor.