Improving Delve Rewards and Endgame Scaling

ZHP Mentioned! To this day, I still don't understand what the problem with it was. Skill expression is cool in every game. Even half these changes would make the mechanic so much better, namely the reward scaling and difficulty scaling. It should be really hard but just as rewarding. It doesnt have to reach pre-nerf t17s or 8mod all 17mod 16.5s to appease the delve enjoyers.

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Alphearan#7162 wrote:

It doesnt have to reach pre-nerf t17s or 8mod all 17mod 16.5s to appease the delve enjoyers.

pre-nerf t17 and 10 mod t17/16.5 don't even hold a candle to the difficulty of deep delve, in terms of build requirement.

Somewhere in the range of depth 20,000 or so, a random white cave weta has the same ehp as uber searing exarch (including the 70% less damage taken buff uber bosses get), and its basic melee attack hits for somewhere around half of the damage of uber exarch's incineration blast, but as physical damage. Tack on to that that by the time you hit even as shallow as depth 1000 or so, every biome has at least 6 regular map mods, so on top of the massive amount of extra damage that comes from that, you also have to tick off all the regular boxes of reflect protection, survival in no leach, survival in no regen, survival in reduced recovery, and able to survive a literal swarm of uber boss equivalent monsters before even thinking about blue yellow or gold ones.

And then remember that the depth cap is 65,565.

I'm not saying nerf it or anything, I think the difficulty scaling is actually fine. I'm just saying it already is harder than everything you've mentioned, and I think thats great.

Please don't draw their attention to delve. I actually enjoy delving, and they'll only ruin it with poe2-style bullshit, like they just did with breach.

Aside from some of the long overdue QoL changes we've gotten since then, the game's been primarily going downhill since 3.17; and if you don't count the huge upgrade to the way endgame works that came with 3.17, it's been downhill since 3.14.

+1 need delve buff

From Q&A fossils are delve exclusive now, which help.
However there still a lot of stuff to improve in delve

From current Q&A with Zizaran

Octavian is open to change the delve rooms

https://www.twitch.tv/captainlance9/clip/HungryRoundPlumageBuddhaBar-AeDj18cpIjbssg27

Prayge delve brothers

Reading this a bit late but seeing the amount of ideas you have for Delve is great. I feel like Delve was nerfed specifically because deep delvers were making insane amounts of currency compared to other players but now with maps getting HEAVILY buffed (mainly since 3.26) and out-of-map mechanics (Delve, Sanctum, ToTA removed completely, etc.) being nerfed over the years it feels bad that we are pretty much "forced" to map in order to farm enough currency to improve our characters.
With Delve being the only mechanic that scales beyond the basic 83 monster level limit it forces you to invest heavily into your build and that isn't rewarding enough since even at depth 1500 where you get the maximum amount of rewards you still don't make a substantial amount of currency.
I feel like from a non-delver perspective it did look overpowered even though it was pretty balanced compared to the amount of investment into your character and skill you needed to have in order to farm it efficiently.
I hope that GGG will make delve better soon so it will feel actually worth to do.
I also don't see any reason for the removal of ZHP builds. They required a lot of knowledge of specific mods and nodes in order to push further and I think the current meta of making an immortal build that can stand in the middle of a node tanking everything at any depth is infinitely worse than ZHP builds.
Delve also requires a fossil update in my opinion. fractured fossils aren't really cared for anymore since they pretty much work the same way as split beasts do. I don't really know if their previous state was better or not since it made it possible to do overpowered things like mirror fractured beyond maps or synthesis bases but their current functionality is straight up horrible, no reason to have 2 different mechanics that do the same thing.
Bloodstained fossils have no uses now when they used to be the most expensive (and most interesting) fossils in the few leagues after Delve, I don't think anyone cares for throwing 1 chaos on an item and then having a corrupt implicit on it. Kind of lame considering it's a fossil from a special node and not a base fossil.

I really hope that GGG will see this post and add some of the things you mentioned. Delve really needs a rework.

Actually good post, its very true that Delve should get some buffs in terms of loot, for example this league theres easily 4 other farms that will provide you with better loot, yes fossils are quite expensive, but its still hard to compete with other strats that print currency much easier.
Im having fun at depth 600 right now with few expensive fossil nodes here and there, but i feel like delve is only good if you get to depth 600+ at early league so when you get to 2-3 weeks into league you are at the 1k+ depth so you can squeeze out as many expensive fossils as its possible since at that point you will have multiple competing farms, currently i can make easily much more profit on essences or scarab farm than running delve 600, and i still have 700 more depth to go until i hit the bigger profits which kinda does sound meh to me