Difficulty discourse has landed in the WoW community.
Delves are World of Warcraft’s new mini dungeons that can be done solo, and they reward some of the best loot in The War Within’s first season. But players have found that they’re exponentially harder alone than with a group, which has squashed the hope that they would be a new solo alternative to normal endgame activities like raids and Mythic+ dungeons.
The problem is how Delves scale enemy difficulty for solo players versus groups. Many players say they’re an obstacle course of environmental hazards and brutal enemies when you’re alone, but a breeze in a group of five. Even the NPC ally who joins you in solo runs, Brann Bronzebeard, struggles to heal through normal enemy attacks, let alone boss attacks, in the high-level Delves. And on top of that, solo players have to use up one of their limited respawns every time they die because Bronzebeard, unlike other players, can’t resurrect you.
Several players say that grouping up with even one person alleviates most of these problems and renders some Delves surprisingly trivial for how good the loot rewards are. WoW raider Sloot did the math and found that for some reason solo players have to fight enemies with strictly more health than two players do.
