WoW: The War Within's new mini dungeons are annihilating solo players while groups sleepwalk through them for 'free' loot

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Difficulty discourse has landed in the WoW community.

Anduin, traumatised from his many struggles in World of Warcraft: The War Within, stares bleakly at an offered hand, as if it's holding a knife that isn't there.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
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September 13: Blizzard has issued a hotfix that generally makes Delves easier for solo players and more challenging for groups. It also made some of the most egregious enemy attacks less potent. But, oops, some enemies are doing millions of damage!

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. I'm no game designer but that makes no sense to me. You'd think enemy health would scale up with each new player you add.

The weird scaling and the disparity between different classes and roles have made the WoW subreddit resemble the Elden Ring one earlier this year when players were furious about Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty. Some posts beg Blizzard not to nerf the difficulty while others say "it's almost ridiculous to consider them solo content."

(Image credit: Blizzard)

"Right now, duo delves are free gear, and solo is nearly impossible for some classes."

Reddit user Kyuuki_Kitsune

"Right now, duo delves are free gear, and solo is nearly impossible for some classes," Reddit user Kyuuki_Kitsune said.

Most people say the problem isn't actually a skill issue, but a balancing issue. Enemies deal absurd amounts of damage and have too many attacks for one person to handle. "I think the problem is where the difficulty lies," Reddit user Lpunit wrote. "Every time I have died, it's because of unavoidable, very highly tuned damage."

While I wasn't a huge fan of Delves in their current iteration, I could see the potential for them to be a way for solo players to gear up characters in what are essentially little Diablo dungeons embedded into WoW. They're theoretically of a piece with all the ways WoW's becoming a more singleplayer-friendly MMO. The first raid, for example, will have a 'Story Mode' version so solo players can see the end of the campaign—a feature people have wanted for years.

But Delves currently lack an identity, and it shows in the mixed responses from players. I can understand wanting a challenge, but in a game all about gaining power on a seasonal schedule, it's no fun to feel forced into a certain playstyle just to keep up, especially when Blizzard pitched them as solo-friendly dungeons. As they are now, Delves are just better than dungeons for loot, and that doesn't make a lot of sense for an activity that wasn't supposed to be a full-on replacement.

Blizzard has already tweaked the difficulty of enemies while you're leveling, so I'm sure it can find a way to fix Delves up too. Ideally they should be preferable for solo players and optional for groups. That way there's a good loop of things to do for people who frequently play both ways. But Blizzard will need to fix them quickly before Delves blemish the first season of an expansion that has set up a promising future for the 20-year-old MMO.

Tyler Colp

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.