Delves - a Game Changer

It remains to be seen if Blizzard makes good on its promise to make Delves an "evergreen" feature, which will carry on to future expansions.

For over a decade, they've sought to create some kind of more low-key version of dungeons. In Mists of Pandaria, they had Scenarios. In Legion, they had some solo content like the Withered Army Training. In Shadowlands, we had Torghast (something that players in the Beta and early in the expansion were ecstatic about and somehow it later became one of the many things people moaned about).

But they've also always kind of struggled with what they should reward for such things - for so long, the philosophy was that you couldn't allow players doing something on their own to get something as good as what you could get in organize play.

Raiding, of course, has long been the centerpiece of the WoW experience. And as I understand it, you'll still never be able to get better gear than you can find in Mythic Raids (unless Mythic + dungeons hit that level?)

But, remarkably, Delves will apparently allow you to get Hero-level (as in, Heroic raid-level) gear from them - something you can do solo.

Now, I've taken some characters into tier 7 and one tier 8 delve (which award Champion, or normal-raid-level gear) and while it certainly keeps you on your toes, it's doable - I even took my Mage in there.

As someone who doesn't really do organized raiding anymore (my guild kind of fell apart and I reserve my weekly gaming sessions for D&D) it's really exciting that there's something I ought to be able to do and get some serious gear out of.

Of course, what I wonder is what this will mean for things like LFR. Gear-wise, at this rate I'm going to be at least on-par with gear from the new raid before the last LFR wing is open. I'm still planning on running it to see the raid in all its glory, but I can imagine a world in which I run through it on my main once (well, probably the first couple wings a few times) and then wildly outgear it thanks to Delves.

The limiting factor, of course, here is the keys - you can only get so many keys for the Reinforced Chests each week, and there are also only so many bountiful delves per week (though I think the keys are the tighter limitation). But, also, with Delves and other world content now on the Great Vault, it's going to potentially mean gearing up that much faster.

I've only done a little Delving with a friend - I wonder to what extent when you get to big groups (potentially with a healer and a tank) that it starts to just feel like a dungeon. I'm also curious to see how many delves it takes to progress the seasonal storyline - with already a fair number of alts at the level cap (see the name of the blog) I was able to get past the first little node on the progress bar. But then, I have to remind myself it's literally the first week of the new season.