The Delve system should be applied to all dungeon and raid content

[Biomega]

I mean, why not add the option for people to do solo stuff, so that they can get gear on the level of mythics? As long as you make it comparable in difficulty.

Because that's one of two things: either 1. not feasible to actually create; or 2. way too expensive to create.

Keep in mind how much more difficult solo is to balance across 3 roles and almost 40 specs. There's a reason they restricted mythic raids to a fixed 20 people rather than the flex options from normal/heroic: it's a nightmare to balance unless you have very specific, very fixed parameters. There is just no way to do this for solo play and not have 100 people working on it all the time which shoots your production budget to the moon.

One-size-fits-all doesn't work at a high difficulty level because of the radical differences between the various setups. For normal-ish difficulty it's fine to make something that works for a dps, a healer, or a tank because it's kind of whatever, but if you want to actually make something comparable in difficulty to mythic-level content, there is just no way to have the same thing work anywhere close to the same for a dps, a healer, and a tank. It's just a structural impossibility. You'd have to change and fine-tune every little thing, and that becomes an absolute nightmare. They did something close to that for Mage Tower, and we still wound up with a limited number of scenarios that only fit kind-of-maybe for certain specs/classes with considerable difficulty differences.

People can still chase achivements and fame doing raids/mythics etc. if they want a challenge.

And just to be clear, if the high-difficulty content like mythic raiding etc. was without power progression and was cosmetic/prestige only, it would collapse. Challenge Modes had pitiful numbers while they were cosmetic-only - the second they added something trivial like dungeon currency to the rewards, those numbers immediately shot up. That's the whole reason they redesigned CM as M+ with an actual reward track: people need that, or they won't do it.

[Karlz0rz]

It might be hard to balance, but not impossible.
I'm sure they could do it if they wanted to.
Granted, WoW has always been fairly centered around the social aspect.

But I personally wouldn't mind the option at least.


Well yes, you can't remove rewards from raids/mythic+, so keep that in there.
Just make sure you also have cosmetic/other rewards seperate from the solo content, so that there's still a reason to do them outside of strictly solo play.
Again, I would just like the option. I am not saying it should be the norm :P.

[Twdft]

It might be hard to balance, but not impossible.
I'm sure they could do it if they wanted to.

Not really. For example legion tank mage tower was a lot easier on my druid than on my prot pala due to a single ability: bear can simply charge back to the boss, on my pala I had to take great care not to get yeeted off the platform.

[CaptainV]

That would be a complete disaster.

Remember that like 5 or less people carry the entire LFR group.

if you bring it down to 10 players then individual responsibility is going to go up and your hoping you get the 2-3 carries in your 10m and not be in one of the 10m groups with just 9 useless leechers.

I mean if it encourages idiots to quit LFR I dont see that as a loss, delves are being designed for solo progression anyway.

Raids have a niche and alwys have, normal and heroic is literally 10-30 man and mythic is 20 man, so 25 man raid finder is dumb anyway.

Individual responsibility was always there, people just hate having it.

[agentsi]

Then why did you even mention it, especially the part where you basically said that the anecdotal sample size is to be taken more seriously, since of "random ass reason A".
Don't feel offended just because people elaborated on it even more to point out the bias.

It's one of those things folks like you probably don't like. An opinion from someone you apparently disagree with. On thrall, delves are meme'd in general chat. My guild dislikes them, and people I run into dislike them. But you're right, I shouldn't have said anything because you didn't agree with me, so my opinion is automatically invalid. Cool.

[schmonz]

Because that's one of two things: either 1. not feasible to actually create; or 2. way too expensive to create.

Surely not more expensive than a mythic raiding difficulty with very tightly balanced boss fights.

I actually love delves. Well done, Blizzard. And please, do not nerf them to oblivion as you did with every other casual gamer instanced gameplay.

[Biomega]

Surely not more expensive than a mythic raiding difficulty with very tightly balanced boss fights.

Uh, yeah? Way, way, WAY more expensive.

There's a reason they restrict mythic raiding to exactly 20 people: it'd be a nightmare to balance for all possible sizes. Which is basically what you'd have to do for solo content: balance for all sorts of roles, classes, specs. It VASTLY increases the amount of work involved on every level from design to tech to testing. The game has almost 40 distinct specs now.

Just look at Mage Tower. It was a massive undertaking to have different versions for everyone and they STILL had to consolidate a lot AND a lot of it remained unbalanced where certain classes/specs had a massively easier time than others. This is a ridiculous amount of work.

[Kisuke411]

no
variety of content is far better than trying to fit all in one formula
also doing it solo would be definitely easier than coordinating big group so rewards would have to be weaker, which would lead to people like you whining for welfare rewards again

and no, it would not lead to way more dungeon content, it would lead to same amount of content just bastardised into something people who like dungeons and raids would probably not like, bcs its virtualy impossible to do instance that could work as delve AND dungeon AND/OR raid

wow is mmorpg, its great there is solo content, its great its going to be rewarding, but multiplayer content should ALWAYS be there and be the most rewarding, if you want full solo play go play full singleplayer game

All of the best "single" player games I own allow me to group with 3-5+ of my friends and be able to play the full content of the game up to the hardest difficulty at any time with full access to the best loot/progression path. Try again.

This roughshod concept of not applying scalability to content because of archaic oldskool-playur delusions like multiplayer only content is exactly what is poisoning the MMO market, not saving it.

[schmonz]

Uh, yeah? Way, way, WAY more expensive.

I am all ready for your detailed calculations based on your year long experience as game producer.

Or what do you actually base your ideas on?

And hey, mythic raids are played by a few thousands. Delves by millions. So its worth the effort.

[Biomega]

Or what do you actually base your ideas on?

...the rest of my post, where I explain my reasoning?

My man, you gotta read all the way to the end.