wow Delve Changes in the War Within Beta: July 9th

[Staff 1,488]

We have more changes coming to the new Delves feature in the War Within, as Blizzard detail the many adjustments made in this week's Beta build. We have XP reward buffs, tuning for Bountiful Delves, improvements for Brann's abilities, as well as changes for some specific Delves and more! 

Delves (Source)

Hello everyone! We’d like to share some updates for you on Delves.

Tuning and Experience

Across the board we’ve increased the XP rewards from delves during level up as they felt a bit too low.

We’ve also done a general tuning pass across all tiers and will continue to monitor difficulty for all specs and classes. From your feedback and from our testing we saw that delves became particularly punishing throughout level up, and that many specs felt like they had to be several item levels higher than the recommended item level to survive.

We’re continuing to review the tuning for classes that are struggling in delves. We’ve seen your feedback on which classes are having a hard time. We also have our own data that shows performance in each delve by class and spec. We’ll be using your feedback and our data points to help improve the experience for players that are struggling. Keep it coming and we’ll keep you updated!

Bountiful Delves

We are in the middle of reviewing how we want bountiful delves to work at max level. Here’s what we’ll be rolling out:

• Bountiful Delves will be consumed upon completion.
• Bountiful Delves base chests are upgraded in quality.
• Locked chests are still there, but will go away if you lose all of your lives.

Our goal with Bountiful Delves being consumed is to encourage players to see more delves and their variants. We’re modifying how many keys players can get per week while also increasing the base rewards from Bountiful Delves so they’re still worth running even without any keys.

We’re still working on balancing these numbers so please give us feedback as these new systems come online!

Brann Bronzebeard

We’re continuing to do work to tweak Brann and improve the experience with him and understanding what he’s doing from the moment to moment gameplay. These will be rolled out throughout upcoming patches.

• Moved several of Brann’s “big” abilities to be unlocked at earlier levels.
• Modified the number of abilities Brann has to be more readable
• Brann’s “ultimate” abilities will now go on a rotation with each other to ensure he consistently uses them throughout combat. This means Brann’s use of his bigger abilities will be more focused and spread out to avoid a situation where it feels like Brann isn’t doing anything.
• Dwarven Medicine will now heal player pets.
• We’re aware of an issue of curios and Brann’s levels being reset and are looking into the root cause of this.

General

• Player class cooldowns will now reset after wiping to a boss encounter.

Tak-Rethan Abyss and The Sinkhole

• The Aquatic Hex will no longer apply slowfall.

The Dread Pit

• The Skardyn Lure for one of the variants will now pull skardyn even if they’re in combat. Other parts of this mechanic have also been tweaked.
• Removed the nerubian web spreaders from the skardyn variant.

Skittering Breach

• Moved the web spreaders to be within the cave system of the delve to give our other mechanics some breathing room.