Everything You Need To Know About Delves in The War Within
It's always an amazing day when a new World of Warcraft expansion releases. Typically, an expansion launch would come with 3 to 5 zones, 8ish dungeons, and 1 or 2 raids. The War Within includes its new zones, dungeons, and raid, of course, but it also includes a brand new feature, known as delves.
Delves have been hyped up by Blizzard since their announcement at The War Within's deep dive. Anyone who has played a recent WoW expansion has had some noteworthy concerns. Is it just another island expeditions? Or Torghast? Is it a bland copy and pasted thing like all the "enemies spawn out of portals so fill up a bar until a boss comes out of one" like the open world content of Dragonflight?
The answer, thankfully, is no to all of those questions. Delves are their own thing, and they're pretty cool.
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What do you need to know about delves?
Delves are essentially single-player dungeons with one boss which is at the very end and small random tasks that need to be completed on the way to the end of the delve. There is a gimmick that is attached to the delve which is a mechanic you are introduced to at the beginning and have to manage throughout the delve. For example, having a candle on your head that emits light so you can see that you must manage the brightness of and prevent from going out.
Delves are short (about 10 to 15 minutes) and simple and your role does not matter. You can go in as a tank, healer, or DPS and complete the delve. There is also no player requirement; meaning you can enter solo or with up to four other players.
Delves are designed to be replayable and offer a variety of different difficulty and reward tiers to allow them to be relevant from early leveling all the way to end game progression.
How to find delves?
The War Within brought with it an overhaul to a lot of icons and some new ones. With delves being a new feature, they needed their own map icon so you could track and find them easily. The delve icon is a unique cave entrance symbol. It features a stone arch with light shining through the arch.
The icon can be seen at the bottom left of the above screenshot. When you arrive a delve entrance, you will see a swirling gate similar to raids and dungeons but gold in color. Running into this gate will bring up the menu to select what tier of delve you want to run. After selecting your tier and starting the delve, you just run through the gate. The process is very seamless with essentially zero loading screen.
Where are delves located?
There are 13 total delves currently available in The War Within. The 13th delve is a special more secretive delve that is designed like a pseudo-mage tower like experience. It's not specific to each spec type like the mage tower was, but it is designed to truly test players in a solo environment that requires mastering your class.
Isle of Dorn | The Ringing Deeps | Azj-Kahet | Hallowfall |
|---|---|---|---|
Earthcrawl Mines | The Waterworks | The Spiral Weave | Skittering Breach |
Kriegval's Rest | The Dread Pit | Tak-Rethan Abyss | Nightfall Sanctum |
Fungal Folly | Deepwalker Hold | Zekvir's Lair (13th secret delve) | The Sinkhole |
Mycomancer Cavern |
What are delve companions and how do they work?
In each season of The War Within, you'll be accompanied by an AI companion when you enter a delve. In season 1, this companion is Brann Bronzebeard, legendary explorer. Brann has his own progression with unique items that grant him different abilities and can gain experience to level up as you do more delves. Brann can also be either a healer or a dps, depending on what your group needs more to survive/complete the delve. He also has his own unique talent tree. For a more detailed breakdown of how Brann works, check out the Brann guide on Icy Veins.
What kind of gear can you get from delves?
Unlike previous attempts at alternative content Blizzard has made, delves are not just a gimmick or random one-off form of content. Delves are supposed to function as a new eng game pillar. They are supposed to be somewhat on the same level as mythic plus, raids, and pvp.
You can't get mythic track gear from delves, but you can get heroic track gear. The quality of gear you get from a delve is determined by the tier of delve you are running, with higher tiers rewarding higher item level loot. Once per week, you can get a piece of heroic gear and doing delves will contribute to its own section of The Great Vault.
Dying in a delve is bad, and should be avoided at all cost beyond the obvious reasoning. Every time you revive in a delve, your odds of getting loot at the end of the delve go down.
More deaths/revives = Less likely to get loot at the end.
So try not to die.
This is everything you need to know to get started with delves in The War Within. For a more comprehensive breakdown, visit the delve guide on Icy Veins or this guide on Wowhead.
BEN FITZSIMMONS