A Slower Meta for Delve's Leaderboard

TLDR: Solo Delve depth leaderboard will be won by builds that don’t bother with move-speed or clear-speed but on strong single target, CC, and high defenses of which they may even sacrifice their clear/move-speed. No idea how party play will work out maybe one CC/support and a glass cannon. Also Kinetic blast and Specters expected top tier.

Feel free to steal anything from this post.

The announcement of delve league has without a doubt had many people theory crafting builds which will work best with the shown mechanics. The current meta are builds that do massive amounts of damage resulting in most enemies getting one-shot and moving at insane speeds from pack to pack. Many of these builds sacrifice defenses in order to kill things faster, a kill it before it can hurt you method. Builds such as kinetic blast or Arc are examples of this play style. There are of course other slower more defensive builds that are no less strong although less popular. The average player will for the most part go down into the mine and “delve” at a fixed region where they can zoom from checkpoint to checkpoint and rip through mobs like butter. These type of clear-speed characters will likely dominate the delve depth leaderboards for the initial few days of the league. However I propose that the final victors will be slower builds. I believe this to be the case as most clear speed builds die quickly when they cannot kill enemies quickly/ off-screen. Delve will infinitely scale and monsters will become difficult to kill. The league takes place in a closed off mineshaft hurting some builds while helping others (cough cough KB). The lantern-minecart does not move all that fast unless you drag it allowing slower builds to comfortably push through the deepest depths.

Path of Exile is one of my all-time favorite games and I’d not be writing what amounts to a short essay for it if it was not. However one of the biggest areas that the game fails badly enough that many don’t bother with hardcore is the spikey nature of damage. All it takes to kill a character and send them back to standard is a few unlucky hits and you drop from 5k to 0. The bouncing health globe is an ever present feature of PoE at this point. The spikey nature of deaths in PoE is even present in maps that are level appropriate to the character running them. Delve promises to scale infinitely what once hit for 1k will start to hit for 1.2k then 2k and so on. In order to achieve high placements upon the leaderboard characters will have to delve into what is promised to be more dangerous than even the highest level of maps. Monsters will have enough life that they can survive long enough for the unlucky hit to now be regular face-melting punches. The increasing in monster stats will make Specters really nice for extended delves though. Running ahead and agroing more monsters will be the last thing you want to do in the lowest of levels. I could write another essay about how monsters in path of exile just do too much damage and it will only be worse if you’re pushing the depth leaderboard.

The delve league takes place in a mine, mines have walls, and tunnels. The whole league for the most part essentially takes place in a closed off place (Kinetic blast is excited). Because of this monsters will be up close and you will not have much space to move around account of the walls and face eating darkness. This type of geography will only compound upon the issue of monsters having more life and doing more damage. The method of kill things before they reach you or you reach them will no longer function. What I predict to occur will be kill things before more things show up and you’re overwhelmed.

The leaderboard will hopefully not be a timed event and as such people will have all league to slowly make their way down into the depths. With even normal monsters being scary pushing the crawler ahead will only agro more things killing your character. As such your character will no longer need movement speed as it is in your best interest to slowly chip away at packs and avoid agroing lots of monsters. The lack of a need to focus on your characters movement speed outside of a skill for dodging opens up the option to use items that would normally be considered useless. I have little doubt that items like Koam’s Roots will be best in slot for many delving builds. You will also no longer need as much attack or cast speed if you focus on fewer stronger hits but that would be build dependent.

For these reasons I predict that due to the nature of infinitely scaling monsters and the geographical layout of the league that slower builds focused on defense and single target will get to the deepest depths. I can only hope that the rewards for going so deep make up for the reduction in speed.

TLDR2: You were better off just reading the first TLDR and skipping the wall of text.

top of the leaderboards will be characters who have aurabots with them

Well that is pretty much every leaderboard at this point as the benefit an Aura bot provides is so large that your build could be compleat trash and still do well in high tier maps. However at the current state of the game the SSF Leaderboard is the only one that matters for solo play and where I see the most interesting builds coming from.

Only respect people playing the SSF leaderboard. Everything else is cheese.

Lets be real here. Anyone that wants a slower meta hasn't played a slower meta.

There was nothing wrong with how slow the game played back in 2011-release, but there was barely any content and the game plays vastly different than it does now. End-game content was enjoyable in a party, pretty crappy solo.

I rather suspect it will be "summons/totems" meta, cause even tanky characters can be almost insta-killed in current maps, if they let enemies attacking them all the time. If enemies get tougher, things will get only worse.
And aurabot problems... I can only hope that there will be different "ladders" for solo and party. And of course, in party, aurabot will be a "must".