One of the new features introduced to World of Warcraft with this expansion are delves. These are basically smaller puzzle dungeons that can be completed solo or in a group. The best thing about them? They drop loot that was normally only available to heroic level raiders. I love it.
Casual friendly feature
Delves are just one of the casual friendly features added to World of Warcraft in the War Within. The fact that you can complete these delves alone while also getting rewarded with the same gear that people who go through the effort to assemble raid teams of 20 or so people is pretty wild. Basically unheard of in a game like World of Warcraft if you turn back the clock a few years. Gear like that was only available to the top tier players who put the most hours in the game.
I also find it great that you get the choice of going into delves with a group or solo. The content will basically scale to fit the amount of players in the instance. Or, at least it's supposed to. The higher tier delves were released just this week and there's still some balancing issues. I am easily soloing the higher tier delves with my Death Knight while squishier glass cannon classes are struggling big time.
A puzzle adventure
I don't know how many delves there are but there's at least 10 different ones. Each delve also has three different variants to it, meaning you don't get the same experience each and every time you run a specific delve. Some are straight forward adventures where you need to fight your way to the end boss while some have puzzle elements to them which you need to solve. This can be both fun and annoying.
There's a few delve variants where you need to carry around a candle so the dark doesn't consume you. With every step the candle fades and you can pick up a new candle here and there. These are fine as you can plan your route ahead of time. Some other delve variants has you been underwater and having to pick up breath bubbles before your breath runs and so you don't die. I keep forgetting so I keep dying. It's not bad dungeon design, I'm just not paying attention but it's still annoying.
Bountiful rewards
So far I've been exhausting my bountiful delves with every daily reset. These are delves that will drop an extra gear chest at the end if you have a key for it. I'm slowly running out of keys but due to decent luck I've managed to gear myself up to be quite beefy. I have raid level gear in almost all of my slots so I'm very happy about that.
Let's hope that helps when I'm going to tank a raid for the first time in a few days...
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.