Feedback from Endless Delve

I wanted to provide some Feedback from the various events, as well as from Heist League itself. I'll make a separate thread for each topic, if/when I get to each of them.

I'm starting with Endless Delve, because I absolutely loved this event.

I heard it said that the general belief inside GGG was that Endless Delve would have been better as a 1-day event, and I've heard some streamers express that same opinion.

Personally, I could go for a an entire league of Endless Delve. I realize it's not for everyone, but I also know I'm not alone. I've heard others say the same thing in Twitch Chat.

If Endless Delve returns (which I really, really hope it does), I think it would be really awesome if some special nodes were designed for it. For example, there could be nodes that contain Navali for trading Div Cards and buying prophecies.

The special environment of Endless Delve also taught us some lessons:

1) Lab, especially Uber Lab trials, sucks. I say this as someone who actually enjoys the trials themselves. I know many people hate doing them. Having access to Ascending without needing to find Trials and do Lab felt great. I think it actually goes a little bit too far, where there should be *something* gating ascension other than just levels, but I'd rather have it like Endless Delve than like the current form. The gating of your final Ascension behind RNG is ridiculous. It often takes until level 90 or later to find your final Lab trial, at which point Lab itself is a joke.

2) Gem access could do with some tweaking. Having access to every gem as every class right from the start felt great. Also having them all cost 1 Wisdom was great. It made it much less burdensome to buy extra gems and play around with them. However, the lack of ability to buy *leveled* gems was quite restricting. If you found some item that made you want to switch skills, or worse, if your build just wasn't working, being forced to go back to level 1 gems was horrible. Aside from Endless Delve, Marauder is in desperate need of a gem availability tweak. Most of the skills available to Marauder in early game really suck. Plus, it is the only class with a specifically Fire-based Ascendancy, but it only gets access to like 10% of the Fire gems. Please fix that.

3) Sulphite is no fun. At least in its current form. It's far too restrictive. If we compare Delve to Heist, you could map for an hour, and then do literally a DAY or more of Heisting. Mapping for an hour won't get you even an hour of Delve, unless you've got Niko missions saved up (which can't be maintained), or you're buying Sulphite scarabs. But if we assume you're buying stuff (and thus in Trade League), then the Heisting ratio is infinite, because you *never have to map at all*. Let's break this down into three components: the Cap, Earning sulphite, and Sulphite Cost. Make the sulphite cap absurdly high, and make it that way right from the beginning. I'm talking like 1,000,000. When it comes to Earning sulphite, I don't think it should be tied to Master Missions. Remove Niko as a Master (which opens up room for a new Master without diluting the pool). You could just go ahead and remove Sulphite as well, which fixes this whole issue. If you don't remove sulphite, make it something which drops from monsters and boxes, and make it drop is larger quantities. When it comes to cost, the rate at which the cost increases with depth needs to be tweaked, at least in comparison to the amount earned. There are times where it feels like you barely get any delving at all from multiple maps worth of Sulphite, and other times when one map gets you quite a bit of delving. Smooth it out. (or just remove it entirely!)

4) The Crafting Bench turned out to be less important than I thought. The Crafting Bench makes the game easier, but, in and environment like Delve (which drops lots and lots of items, especially armour), it wasn't actually that big a deal. The lack of access to Veiled mods from Syndicate did basically remove some options from the table (like general Ailment immunity for most classes).

5) The leveling uniques were OP, unbalanced, and completely necessary. If you ever return to these items for another event, I suggest you take a pass at these items and bring them back into balance (if they ever were in balance). Certain items were much more powerful than others, and I saw multiple characters over level 90 still using at least 1 of these items. They also help alleviate early game socket pressure. Which I personally think is a good thing.

6) Sometimes less is more. I think Endless Delve demonstrated that there is clearly room for removing some things from the game, and that removing the right things would likely be an improvement. And removing some things would certainly provide room for new things that could be better. One example is Pantheons. The Pantheon system is very dated, and doesn't add much to the game. Fewer than half the Minor pantheons are commonly used, and Divine Vessels are super rare, so many players never bother upgrading their Pantheons at all. Pantheons mostly provide a way for players to patch their build against stupid or OP mechanics, like Reflect or Burning Ground. (Aside: Personally, I think Reflect should just be removed in the game. It's just a "Gothcha!" mechanic, and does not add depth or nuance to the game. Super extra true for Reflect Auras (Izaro's Lieutenant and the Racecourse boss). The *only* instance of the reflect in the game that I don't hate is the Atziri mirror clone. It's clearly signaled, and it's a special boss. But that can go too, and I'd still think it was an overall improvement. )

I too really enjoyed the event. I could see it as a standalone within Standard as it's own 'league.' It never needs to be updated with new content for the most part, so it could just exist on its own. It was a really enjoyable way to play a character without dedicating to wanting to play one for a whole league but to try some skill and ascend quickly to see if you like the build.

I know a lot of people are over the story, I personally enjoy it the first few times of the league. But this league I started Heist SSF (3 chars), rerolled trade with a buddy (1), then the events started, mayhem (2 chars), then we got to delve, and after the 6 times through the story it was a refreshing change, all the more realized when Flashback started and I ran my 7th and 8th chars through the story. Way more than I ever had done so in the past or will likely do in the near future. But it got me to realize how many more chars/skills I may try if they weren't locked behind the 10 acts.

The uniques were quite strong, the shield was insane I wore that till the event ended and took it to 400. Honestly the thing I really enjoyed about them was having 6 white sockets on my weapon swap to allow leveling gems without fuss. That was just a really nice QoL result of having them, a statless tabula option wouldn't even be a bad thing for those items. (Not saying give us all a tabula)

No crafting bench really wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be, I feel like that added challenge has helped me when having it back to not rely on it as much.

1 day would not have been enough to really experience the event where the mine finally stops you. That challenge was really funstrating (fun/frustrating) and I'm sad to see it go.

I wish I could have easier access to Sulfite too, it's not funstrating just frustrating that I cannot go delve simply because I'm out of the reagent. If we have to trade contracts or maps to get sulfite I'd happily do it but, especially if you SSF, there is no way to just spend a day mindlessly mining.

Side note: Of all the events, this was the only one I was able to get my roommate to play too. He normally plays CoD between leagues but delve peaked his interest. Dunno if that has any merit, but I thought it was worth mentioning.