Why do Delves not drop loot?

Well I guess I mean casual in the sense that it's not a main focus for me in the league and I'm not investing a lot of currency or optimising my build around it, it's more of a side project. I think most decent builds should be able to safely delve to 400 or lower, although I'm cycloning this league which is an extra safe and easy skill to shallow delve with so I had a pretty smooth ride.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

From opening one small currency chest in a Heist contract you'll be making more money than you do from 15 minute of delving.

Yeah, that's been my experience. I have 1600 hours played, but I usually only stick around each league for 200 hours or so. I never really experienced the full game and all the content, so this league I've been going out and learning the various league mechanics that I missed out on. I was doing Heists first and receiving pretty good and consistent returns-- then I tried Delves and immediately felt like it was bad. Very bad.

For instance OK, with Heists you have to start off leveling all the Heist NPCs. Even then you can find nice loot and fairly consistently. With Delves though, the "leveling" process is having to mindlessly run through significantly lower level content for at least an hour or so. I'm not sure how long it actually took me to reach Depth 150 but it was at least an hour I'd say. So with Heists you start seeing returns right away, but with Delves you have to muck about for an hour or two before you'll even see *anything* worthwhile.

And just to reiterate, I have been exploring the dark areas using Flares and Dynamite. I haven't broken through a ton of walls but probably a couple dozen and I seriously didn't find anything worth more than 2chaos.

And I don't really feel like Delves are good XP either? I'm a Vortex build, I constantly have phase run up, so I run through packs very quickly in Delves and kill 99% of the mobs. Feels like significantly lower XP than doing Tier16 maps. With a Tier16 map you'll have screens full of enemies that die very quickly, with Delves you have a long corridor and they just don't die at the same pace. The only thing I'd say Delves have in their favor for leveling is that it seems to be very hard to die in them.

Playing SSF, I Delve a lot to farm fossils to craft gear.

This league though it feels as though they've really dropped the spawn rate of fossils behind fractured walls.

I'm lucky if I get more than 5 fossils behind fractured walls for 50k sulphite this league. If it wasn't for the need to farm it for resonators I wouldn't bother despite the buff to special fossil nodes being more common at around depth 270.


The vast majority of my fossils I use now come from other league mechanics like Blight and Harvest. And they marketed this league n saying that the main source of special currencies was supposed to be their league mechanic .... that's just a plain lie when it comes to fossils.

Delves have some pretty unique Spectres to use if you count those as loot. Otherwise I still love how it feels to pick stuff up and tell Niko about it.

P.S. The option to also just Delve to level 100 without leaving "Normal" difficulty is also still an option too so there's that as a feature.

Ok, after further testing its time to ask slightly different question:

Why do delves even drop loot at all?

I made a short video about delve some time ago. It still works and should inform you on what to look for

https://youtu.be/10nAAMGKHX0

The more I read on these forums the more demoralized I am. Clearly I'm playing the whole game incorrectly from A to Z, Delve not being the first. I like Delve, if it's necessary to run around in the dark dying in the dark I might as well stick to Maps.