Delve Feedback - from a longtime player

Delve has it's upsides. Along with Temples, GGG seems to understand the end game has room for more variety, and that is great for them to recognize the value of the end game. Delve's also can give a mid leveling break that you might just need - it can encourage making more characters, perhaps.

But Delve isn't perfect.

The idea that the darkness can kill you sets up a nice foreboding tone... a certain feel of danager... That has upsides...

Until you consider the negatives of actually dieing to nothing but air. Not the monsters, just the lack of light. The lack of remembering how many flares you have, or when the "oh shat" moment occurs, not exiting the game gracefully...

That's where I think the downside of the mechanics lie. Death should be a tale worth telling. I want to tell the tale of the man eaten by the dragon. Not, "Steve ran out of flares and forgot how to exit the game."

Let the darkness cause a damage debuff if you want. Let the darkness empower the monsters if you want. But I never liked absolutes. I don't like how monsters can't be harmed in darkness. And I'd rather the darkness damage taken not be that high, since that's not why darkness is normally scary. Normally it's not the darkness, but about what lies in the darkness. If there is something that could kill you and you can't see it... now that's the shat that is actually scary... cause I want to see the snake, spider, dragon, whatever... the thing in the darkness...

On another topic, on the slighlty feels odd area, fire/lightning spell that light up a room aren't light against the darkness. See how that maybe doesn't quite work?


So, yeah, great concepts exist in the extension of the game with even more content, especially the end game where 99% of play happens. Delves break up mapping, and mapping breaks up delves. You guys get it.

But delves may need even more content, and the darkness, maybe, you didn't get quite right?


I would not make the monsters completely immune in the darkness. But I would give them a 75% damage taken reduction. I wouldn't kill people in the darkness alone, but I'd give the monsters a 75% damage added as chaos damage buff in the darkness. Lastly, to keep players from ignoring the darkness, and because trust me it would work, I'd give players a 75% movement speed reduction at max stacks of darkness. These could be buffs/debuffs that ramp up with stacks.

If players start moving slower, monsters start hitting harder, and everything becomes tankier, then the darkness would start to scare the shat out of people real quick. Those "lights out" disrupter moments also become more intense. And when the stuff is scary, you really want to be able to see it.

I don't like darkness hurting people directly, but that's my 2 cents. Even worse when the darkness alone can take you over the 1 hit point threshold.

What's your take? Do you like Delve? (I do.) What parts of it do you think could be better, and what parts do you think are perfect as is?

I think sulphite should be more abundant to allow a better ratio of mining past depth 300 and red maps. Ideally 10-12 maps should cap your max sulphite reserve and allow you 20-30 minutes at ANY DEPTH. Again, GGG is stopping us with sulphite instead of stopping us with difficulty. I feel that needs to be reversed. And if you're worried about too many rewards or rewards being too good for that much access...

I think they need to remove all "special" type rewards from the mines and restrict them to maps. This includes shaper & elder gear, essences, beyond, abyss, harbinger (including all harbinger currencies), breaches, etc. Basically the mines are the mines and that's that. You get regular gear drops and currency drops along with the fossils and resonators plus mine specific drops. That's what makes the mines special and separating the rewards while boosting sulphite results in people still wanting to map while having plenty of incentive (and sulphite) to mine as well.

I think they need to improve the ability to run around in the mines without the crawler by providing us a direct way back to either a node, the crawler's current location, or the mining camp from anywhere in the mine. (Yes, I realize this means people could "escape" from danger but who cares? They lose the sulphite and fail the encounter which is enough punishment IMO.)

I think the dynamite upgrades should be removed except for quantity. I mean, is anyone actually using dynamite to kill mobs?

I think bosses need to be far more accessible and common. I'm done looking since I'm done with the league but I've searched down past 300 and all over the place at multiple depths and I haven't seen a single one. Random yes, small sample size (me) yes, but I'm not the only one. They are entirely too rare. Again, challenge us with the encounter, not the fucking RNG bullshit. So mundane for such smart people.

I do not have any specific issues with the darkness, the mobs (even the OP ones), or the basic concept of using sulphite to run the crawler to go from node to node. I love the visuals and the environmentals. I think the concept could be a real winner. I also think GGG will never let it be that great because they are stuck in their ways and won't try anything remotely "outside the box" with their end game.

Those are my thoughts anyway. Too late for any of that now but it was fun to dream. :)

Well i do agreed on this, the boss encounter is just to rare. I am at lvl 92 and almost delve 300 but only encounter the boss once. This is like bestiary league again where we cannot find any boss. I cannot even power through to get 24 archievement point.

I fucking hate sulphite.

no one cares what you like or dislike.

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Xtorma wrote:

no one cares what you like or dislike.

I do.

I THINK the darkness invulnerability was an attempt to prevent high depth delve cheesing. Attempt, that failed (~solely because there are flares in the game, allowing said cheesing).

And I THINK there is no easy way to fix that, because flares have legitimate uses also.

At this point, I feel like some "sulphite regenerates over time" is warranted, however, that ain't happening. So... yeah. We got what we wanted, almost

Darkness invulnerability should go away honestly.
Or to keep it fair there must be invulnerability for players in the light.
See hows its broken?

So yeah.

@OP
I very much like Delve, it is definitely one of the best challenge league mechanics introduced by GGG. It is a lot more complex than Breach, which was very popular but it is not so convoluted as Beastiery and it is far less disruptive to game flow than Incursions.

I do not like OP's suggestions to replace darkness damage for more lethal monsters or character movement hinder. Darkness damage should be not possible to mitigate or at least minimize the option to prevent cheesing--you can alraedy get builds or party setups that nearly immobilize and incapacitate monsters to a point where they can not damage players. We should deal with darkness, not bypass it. OP's suggestion would also greatly penalized ranged or less tanky characters that rely on keeping distance from enemies. It would lead to a very limited selection of delving builds that would have a strong combination of damage, survival and enemy hinder capabilities all at once.

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Phaeded wrote:

I think sulphite should be more abundant to allow a better ratio of mining past depth 300 and red maps. Ideally 10-12 maps should cap your max sulphite reserve and allow you 20-30 minutes at ANY DEPTH.

Why do you need to delve past level 300? One thing is to do challenges to reach certain depths but it is nowhere said you should delve at those depths or go even lower. There are some thresholds where biomes or boss spawn but they start at around lvl80 and cap out at around 220 as far as I have read about them. Determine appropriate depth where to delve compared to where you are in maps and how long do you want to delve and map to gather sulphite to find a sweet spot.

It is unrealistic to expect to be able to delve eat extreme depths and spend equal amount of time gathering sulphite in maps. It can work but it will have to be in depths closer to surface.

I'm currently just hitting red tier maps (Atlas completion bonus around 100) and delving at depth 170 is the perfect sweet spot for me. I have 10k sulphite, which takes me quite a few maps to fill in (with maps of tier 8 to 10 giving me from 350 to 500 sulphite per pick) but it than allows me to spend similar amount of time delving vertically.

Another way to determine appropriate depth where to delve is to check Vaal outposts to see what map tiers are dropping there. If map drops are at your current level of maps your character clears, you are in a right spot. If dropped maps are lower tier than you currently run, you should move deeper.

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Baron01 wrote:

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Phaeded wrote:

I think sulphite should be more abundant to allow a better ratio of mining past depth 300 and red maps. Ideally 10-12 maps should cap your max sulphite reserve and allow you 20-30 minutes at ANY DEPTH.

Why do you need to delve past level 300?

For the challenge.

Edit: To be more specific, so that Delve can live up to its marketing hype:

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The deeper you delve, the harder the game gets. In Delve, you'll find encounters that are much harder than end-game Maps. Your progress is only limited by the power of your character build.

I hate sulphite, I hate cavestalkers (Damage is retardedly high with that stupid screech AND the fact that it can go through walls) and I have the fact that to progress further in delves you need sustained leach (Which is non-existent for summoner builds)

Its a good concept but there's room for change.