My Thoughts Exactly.
Problem with delves is, that they are either easy or frustrating. It was good idea, but poorly implemented.
I know more are on the way, whenever they get around to it, but super happy for the break. I have 3 left to PF (Werewoods, Sunken and Pit), which is where I wanted to be around this time so I can focus on them alone. I’m not in a rush since the next stat point isn’t achievable yet.
I get all my weekends back now, yay!
I like delves and arena. Anything that takes more skill than just rolling my face on the keyboard or breaking out my cc
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Don’t get me wrong, I liked the puzzles. I think most of us do, that’s why we started playing in the first place.
The thing is, they spent all this time and effort making a game mode that is one-and-done. Once you get to 500 deathless and do a PF run for every Faction, that’s it. There is no replay value. (Unless you’re dedicated and want all hoards to 500)
When Factions first released, I never paid any attention to it at all because I was trying to work on catching up (I took a couple years break). I was working on Classes, traitstones and figuring out the best way to grind gold.
But then they changed the Faction pet to count towards the attached Kingdom. This made the Factions invaluable since there’s 3 or 4 kingdoms with only one non-cosmetic pet. So then I had to spend a lot more gems and time than I wanted to on Faction release weekends. I actually missed a few because the PF battles were taking longer than expected and it rolled over to weekly reset.
Thanks for the vent, I’ll leave it at that 
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As the OP, I just thought I’d add some thoughts on the way I see the Delve/Faction situation. (Of course, mine is just one possible view.)
The poll was a bit of fun, that I hope the devs see – and understand the point it’s making.
When were Delves ever Fun?
When Factions/Delves launched, the idea was that you’d chip away at them each day, slowly getting up towards level 500. This was fun, and just part of what you did in the game each day. There were a number of troops that scaled sufficiently to make this challenging but possible (eg: High King Irongut). Stopping your Hoard at level 100 (for maximum Hoard Renown) was perfectly sufficient…
…Except for Pure Faction attempts. Pure Faction teams were just so much weaker than normal Delve teams, that it frankly seemed impossible to ever reach 2500 Renown. Even now, you need a Hoard level of 155 or 200, and far too much luck. Pure Faction contradicted the basic design of Delves – and obviously so from the very first moment.
If you search the forums from the months after Delves first launched, you’ll see dozens of suggestions how to make Pure Faction attempts possible. Many of them are very sensible. If you keep looking, past the introduction of Potions to Faction Events, you’ll see even more workable solutions to the Pure Faction problem. So the devs were given heaps of excellent ideas (which I now suspect they never saw).
I should point out that there were also lots of very, very stupid (or simply unworkable) ideas posted. Who is doing the posting is a lot more important than how many people agree with something…
Anyway, the “fix” that the devs deployed was Potions in Events. While this did make other events more interesting, for Faction Events it fixed a problem that didn’t exist without fixing the problem that did exist!
What I mean is, Potions allow you to complete a Faction in a single event (if you have the time, Gems and patience). They do not, in any way, specifically address the problem of Pure Faction attempts. Put it another way: L500 Delves were never too difficult; L500 Pure Faction Delves were basically impossible. After Potions, L500 Delves are much too easy, but L500 Pure Faction Delves are still too difficult – too much about luck and not skill.
The other major problem introduced by Potions is that it completely removed Factions from our daily activities in the game. Rather than gradually increasing in level, getting that great sense of making progress every day, and learning how to counter the abilities of each troop and each room… We now play the entire Faction in a marathon effort across 3 days (or 1 day!), and never think about it again. It’s just pointless content, with no sense of achievement – just the sense of relief that I started this thread with.
I should probably be thankful that we no longer have to do Delves every day. Imagine a weekend when you had to do Guild Wars, a World Event, a Faction Event, Adventure Board, Dungeon, Campaign Tasks AND daily Delves on the same weekend! What a ludicrous workload! Certainly not fun.
Solutions and Problems
So, what do I think should be done?
First, we need to be very clear on what the precise problems are. And I think the original model for Factions (as interpreted by players at the time) should be restored, in some sense. (Notwithstanding the last paragraph of the previous section, as workload is technically a completely different problem.)
To me, it seems that the problems with the current Faction system are:
- Daily Delves are largely pointless.
- Without Potions, L500 Pure Faction is extremely difficult, and too dependent on luck.
- We only get a single chance to “easily” achieve L500 Pure Faction (at launch – ie: in the past).
- We only get a limited time (3 days at launch; or 1 day on a Tuesday) to realistically achieve 2500 Renown with the help of Potions.
So, how do we solve these problems? (And not solve other problems – that don’t exist – instead … again.)
Without knowing the true intentions of the devs, nor the internals of their systems, I can’t really tell what can and can’t work. So all I can really do is lay out the problems as I see them, and guess as to what might work.
The other problem is that the best solutions might be too complex to understand, and the game has often shown itself unable to explain complex systems to players within the game (where everyone has a chance to see it).
Anyway, here’s some tentative suggestions (note that doing all of these at once may not be a good idea):
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Cycle through all the Factions again on one weekend per month. (Only addresses problem 3.)
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Extend the effect of Potions to Daily Delves, but ONLY when using a Pure Faction team. One approach would be to buy a temporary pet, that gives you a bonus for a whole week. (Addresses problems 1, 2 and 4.)
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Give us the option to use all three Daily Delve Sigils on a single Pure Faction team attempt, with boosted Skills. The exact level of the boost could be like buying Tier VII potions, an increase in Hoard level, or dependent on how many Potions you bought in the last Faction Event (ie: like suggestion 2). (Addresses all 4 problems, if implemented well.)
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Provide shortcuts during Faction Events. For example, if your external Delve is at level 500 (via Daily Sigils), every time we complete an Event Delve without losing any troops, give us the option to skip 4 levels: L20 up to L100 up to L150, to L200, L250, L300, L350, L400, L450, L500. The cost is that we forfeit points and rewards, but we don’t have to spend 8-12 hours on the Event! I would make the cost of each skip just 3 Sigils, factoring in the Valravens we would have gotten. (Addresses problem 1, but very much 3 and 4.)
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Give us a way to transfer purchases from one event to the next, or to Daily Delves. The issue is, if I spend 2500 Gems on a weekend faction event and DON’T manage to reach 2500 Renown, I don’t want to have to spend another 2500 Gems the next time this Faction’s Event comes around – I’m more likely to quit the game in frustration (I nearly did. Twice.). I don’t know how to make this work well. (Addresses problems 3 and 4, and combines well with suggestion 2.)
In summary: to make reaching 2500 Renown fun, we need more opportunities to do so, at our own pace, yet with appropriate boosts that apply only to Pure Faction teams.
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! Either you really care about this game, or you managed to preserve the skill of reading despite the Internet.
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To quickly address a couple of other things people have said above:
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Only the highest level achieved with Pure Faction (or a lossless run) affects your Renown. During a Faction Event, most people do Pure Faction at L100 (for the pet) and L500 only.
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Increasing your Hoard above level 100 does not increase your Renown further. You get the full 500 Renown from your Hoard for getting it to level 100.
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If more Kingdoms are released, they will probably also get Delves. But the time frame is hopefully very long. (IMO, there’s enough new troops just from the weekly events and monthly Mythics and Legendaries.)
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All-Seeing Eye is different because the devs were still learning how to design Delves. It’s not a major issue. Just different.
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Treasure Rooms came in with later Delves, and Tier I rooms were mostly dropped. Be thankful, as they give fewer resources.
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Many tweaks to what constitutes a “Pure Faction” team have been suggested. All have been ignored. I don’t know why.
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I personally do NOT want more troops added to Delves. I think it’s a system that is fundamentally robust – except for Pure Faction L500. Let’s fix that, then let them be.
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I’m not thankful, I didn’t want every Delve to be a copy/paste experience, and that’s all it ever was.
Does Tier 1 rooms even really matter for less resources? most people ended up skipping rooms as is
Different from regular Gems of War gameplay was what I was hoping/expecting and what we got was a standardized experience. zzz.
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I don’t know, Delves are interesting to me, especially pure runs. I think the issue with them is that many of them are just way too hard (on purpose as a bottleneck / time sink) for the average player who doesn’t have infinite gold to level hoards or infinite time to spend on weekends or Tuesdays.
Now that Factions are “done,” we see the natural loosening of the bottleneck by the devs talking about adding additional troops to Factions. I suspect we may see other methods of loosening, such as weekend events for old Factions, in the future.
The renown system and being forced to use a set of troops is really cool and different imo. I’m excited to see what they do if a third world happens, but I hope they give it a while and implement some QoL content first.
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I like delves. I enjoy the challenge, for the most part. And I’ve aggressively completed a lot of them; I probably have something like two-thirds of them at 2500 renown and I actively work on the one that I haven’t completed to that level. And other than Wild Court – which a healthy chunk of my guild (and I) did with potions on release weekend because we didn’t have the related trophy at the time – every delve I’ve got to 2500 I’ve done potionless.
To me, the biggest problem with Pure Faction runs is that many/most of the delves don’t have synergystic teams. You’ve got a couple that are complete RNGeezus festivals and beating it is largely a matter of waiting for random chance to smile on you. You’ve got a few that have one overpowered troop that can win things on its own. You’ve even got a few where there’s some strategy to things and creative application of that strategy is enough to carry you through.
But most of the Pure Faction runs don’t have any of that. You’re basically left to slug it out with the AI in a situation where you’re significantly out-statted. On top of that, you often have to fight 4 or 5 battles to clear the delve, making it all the more likely that things will go pear-shaped when combined with the statistical disadvantage. Which leaves the Player to either invest a ton of resources in their Hoard – something that not everybody can (or will) do and can be rather time-consuming to accumulate Chaos Shards and Treasure Troops – or for that same Player to beg for potions “to make it possible”.
If you could “strategy” your way through more delves, I think it would be better. If the developers took the time to create teams that work reasonably well together, I think it would be better. If you could use the Soulforge to meld all those low-rarity Treasure Troops into higher-rarity troops – even if the “trade rate” were something like 5:1 – I think it would be better for the sanity of Players trying to build their hoards. If Faction Portal draws worked the same way as Guild Chests by no longer dropping troops ascended to Mythic x4, I think that would be better as well.
Could the addition of extra troops to a faction help out? Sure, so long as it’s done right. Add a Common-rarity troop to each delve that addresses a blind spot for that faction team and maybe you can “strategy” your way through more delves. On the other hand, add a Mythic-rarity troop to each delve and you’re almost certainly encouraging more of an approach where you have to try and out-slug the enemy, which isn’t really all that different from things now.
Plus we could use some more Common-rarity troops, what with how seldom they’re released anymore. And because so many of the Mythic-rarity troops released really aren’t all that wonderful.
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There’s some good ideas in there.