WoW devs confirm major details about The War Within’s Delves

World of Warcraft: The War Within is set to release later this year, and the next expansion has entered its Alpha phase. As part of that, more details are beginning to emerge, including on one of the upcoming centerpiece activities: Delves.

Delves are going to play a major role in The War Within, both as an endgame activity and as part of the narrative. This new instanced content essentially boils down to relatively short adventures set across the new zones being introduced in the expansion.

In a recent interview with Wowhead, Production Director Michael Bybee and Senior Game Designer Sean McCann shared some interesting updates on exactly how Delves will work.

The first major piece of information is that Delves will feature 11 increasingly difficult tiers, with everything beyond Tier 8 described by McCann as largely for bragging rights.

“Fun fact: we did the math to figure out what would be good. We found 11. We were like, is 11 weird? We should do 10, and someone was like, no, we’ve got to take it to 11. So we said, OK, it’s 11. The plan is that around Tier 8, we will say, ‘It’s just for bragging rights now.’ This is a similar idea to Mythic+.”

The other huge revelation is the addition of a 13th Delve, beyond the 12 confirmed by the developer to date. This will present the greatest challenge to players, along with exciting potential rewards.

“There’s the 13th Delve – we’re still going to figure out how to unlock that, but that’s basically the highest, highest challenge that we’re going to have. It mainly just entails a one-room boss fight. That’s the, ‘I’ve beaten the hardest difficulty of something in Delves,’ reward-wise. The plan is that Tiers 9, 10, and 11 will give the same rewards as Tier 8.”

The War Within does not have a confirmed release date, but it will likely arrive in the final quarter of 2024 to allow Cataclysm Classic some room to breathe.