Delves: Strategies, tactics and tips

I’m about ready to quit this game in frustration. No point in playing a game nearing borderline impossible due to bad RNG and forced crappy game design with every poorly designed faction team.

There’s no sense of strategy left; any smart play you do gets completely undone if the AI grabs a match and gets a skull off the top of the board that you can’t see over and over and over again.

I like a challenge, but this isn’t even a challenge if I can’t fight back.

This game has seriously forgotten how to put “fun” in its game.

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Yup. Just be happy with 2100-2200 renown folks. Please don’t throw countless gems/gold away for an extra few hundred it’s not worth it. That’s exactly what the devs want. Put the gold into LT’s instead.

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You are too pessimistic

For me all of this look

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That’s kinda look like my last try at 200 faction, all was going good, still full team while enemy was down to 3 and wounded too, then from the speaker came out the same voice of “mana surge” saying “hope you had fun until now”, then, 1 of my troops skulled to death each turn, game over lol.

So did 180 and fk it, happy with it (plan was to use all free delve until sunday to try 200 fac before going on with event).

Not that i waste anymore time watching streams (after last time waiting 20 mins to see how Quin was for nothing, 20 mins of chit chat about how many hairs should be of which color and stuff like that…) but would be nice see a stream where devs play HIGH lvl delve (not lvl 10 one like i seen once for about 15 secs).

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I would love to see @Sirrian play one battle with pure faction team at level 500 instead of talking about new chat icons for 35 minutes

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The weird thing is, looking at the overall Delve design it feels like it was done by someone who had at best a fleeting grasp on game mechanics.

  • Delve troops get a (mostly irrelevant) Delve stat bonus as one of their traits.
  • Delve troops have “fantastic synergies” to make them extremely powerful as full team.
  • Delve progress is linear, you can’t return to a (much) easier level.
  • You only get the faction pet to boost the faction team in the level 400 Delve range.

So, yes, this looks like the designer thought all high level Delves would be cleared almost exclusively by pure faction teams. Under that assumption there’s no need to ever return to a lower Delve level (e.g. 250) once you’ve cleared level 500, because you’ve already collected all faction points available.

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In everyone’s experience, what is the least difficult faction team to succeed with? I’ve been trying to push with Crypt Keepers at level 300 and its frustrating to wait for the RNG.

I beat level 300 in both Primal Rift and Crypt Keepers, so it’s doable. Hall of Guardians also seems pretty manageable, but I didn’t bother leveling that one (yet?).

Primal Rift.
I find it to be the most playable faction team - board control (color & skull convert), summon, entangle…only one I’ve beaten level 500 with, other faction teams make me more or less frustrated every time I try them at 500 or, in case of the new faction, past 350.

Delves are certainly the lowest priority for me, which is a shame because the idea has so much promise. It is simply too frustrating to have a random wraith DT your top troop or Cedric get a last second cast to screw up your order or have a mushroom transform a troop, and suddenly your run is over.

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I wouldn’t even suggest that high of a level.
How about just level 300 with a hoard quality of 100 with a pure Dark Pits Faction team.
(See I’m even giving him only 3 battles that need to be completed.)

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I couldn’t even beat lvl 200 Dark Pits with faction team.

Primal is the only one I’ve beat that way, therefore I think its the easiest lol. Crypt Keepers has been close a couple times but I am fairly disgusted with the tactics required …

Personally, I believe the situation regarding delves is one of those “it looked good on paper” designs, but in reality turned out much to be much different when implemented.

A combination of design choices and dev statements really highlight the issue.

Building upon what you have already said,

The fact that delve renoun rewards are miniscule suggests the original intent that delves would be fully cleared regularly by players. Also, needing delve level 400 for the faction pet is a strong indicator of this.

Two streams ago, Sirran said that he thought the problem was that there wasn’t enough shards entering the game fast enough (implying to obtain treasure cards to level up delves).

On the most recent stream, when asked by Tacet if loot drops on higher level delves could incentivize players to run them, Sirrian answered with a hard “no”.

This agrees with @Fourdottwoone 's assertion that delve progress is supposed to be linear with a “never look back” mindset. I believe that the intention was that hoards were supposed to be leveled up concurrently with delves to facilitate this outcome. Hence, level 500 delves are balanced around running with a level 500 faction team. Players are not supposed to be running level 100 teams against level 500 delves.

And we are supposed to be doing this from scratch with every new faction, every month.

The problem is that the math currently used to level hoards is unworkable. Not counting the issue with treasure card rarity in general, it takes far, far too much xp in relation to the payout of the treasure cards needed to level up a hoard. If the expectation is to level up a hoard to 500 every month, then it shouldn’t be difficult to level up a hoard until at least 400 at a minimum.

The issue can be resolved rather easily:

– Simply increase the XP value of all treasure cards by adding a zero to the end of their current XP values. Coin Purse goes from 5 → 50 XP, Sacred Treasure goes from 500 → 5000 XP.

– Do the same with existing treasure hoards by players (multiply by 10x) and recalculate hoard level.

The gold cost alone per card at leveling up a delve at 300+ will still provide a sufficient gold sink for the game. Even go so far as to incentivize players to level hoards to 500, if the devs want.

Frankly, if it wasn’t so impossible to level up hoards post 100, these complaint threads probably wouldn’t exist at all. The fact that most end-gamers who can get hoards to 100 and beyond easily enough continue to choose to invest in LTs over hoards speaks volumes.

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Too expensive, hoard level is a square factor in the gold cost formula, players would need something like 2 million excess gold each week. That’s quite possible on its own, it would mean an end to guild tasks for all high level guilds though. Buuuuut…

*Putting on Thinking Cap*

What if delving at level 500 granted hoard XP? Something like 500 XP (the equivalent of a Sacred Treasure), awarded on beating the boss room (so you have to work for it), subject to the Treasure Room Multiplier (so taking the risky long route has some tangible benefits)?

That way players could slowly work on making their faction teams viable. And it would provide an incentive to run completed delves again, even if it’s just to brag with your total hoard level. Sure, this would theoretically allow players to save several billion gold donation costs, those wouldn’t ever have happened anyway though.

*Taking off Thinking Cap*

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Neat idea. Re-running level 500 with a non-faction team would eventually let you earn enough stat boosts that a faction team might be viable (for players who aren’t TheIdleOne—that guy’s crazy). It would also give players a three-way choice for what to do with their three daily Delves: (1) farm for shards, (2) advance a faction at less than 500, and (3) “farm” a level 500 faction for the extra star boosts. This means less shards flowing into the economy.

I suspect they’ll wait to see how many gems people spend on potions…

Isn’t potions just a side effect of buying event shop tiers?

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Potions are not intended to be the means of making high-level Delves easier. So said Sirrian during the dev Q&A.

But they will make every lvl500 with pure faction team possible and much much easier than now.