Delving missions with a LM?

[Forodir]

Has anyone any experience running those Delving missions solo with a LM? Is LM a viable class to do them at higher levels?

I'm interested in the potential difficulty increase since the normal landscape playing is pretty boring and doesn't bring much challenge, but not sure if the mechanics of those new delving missions allow LM's to run them successfully?

[Mithithil]

The answers are

Yes

and

Not Really.

My experience above T7 and i have capped mits, three pieces of raid gear and full raid jewellry plus a shade over 1M morale is that mob damage is simply overpowering some of the time, or they are painfully slow to kill requiring a lot of CC, Water Lore and Inner Flame plus letting your cooldowns recover. Mobs that don't do big hits (>100K) attack very fast instead. Example at T8

Deal with 6 shrew nests. Each shrew has around 2M morale and hits fast for around 50K and has high mitigations. Tedious but perfectly possible with sensible use of the bear and tar.
Then deal with 12 crebain which come in groups of three. Again, signature, around 2M morale, 50-100K damage but high aggro range naking kiting very risky and while not as far as I can tell formally linked mobs most of the time hit one get them all.
Cracked Earth is your freind here for the root pull, then CC one and waste another as fast as you can, with bear as aggro pull if need be.
Expect a stun poison (I've seen it proc x 3 at once) and/or a fear dot. Pottable etc but pots demand cooldown while your wound cure is colling down. The stun effect is faster than that form Pale Folk in Carn Dum
A good half an hour with the reward best not described but assume profanity involved

Anothert one involves a chain to The Drowned Prince who is an Elite with many million morale doing >450K Shadow (tactical) damage per attack. You can Frost Lore that all you like but you are basically two hits and gone. It can be mezzed.

I can do patient, was one of those LMs who soloed ColdBear back in SoA days, and that took a couple of hours of focus, but that seemed worth it.

Cue different player who will tell you they are faceroll noddy but not how or why:-)

[Forodir]

OK, thanks for the feedback. Based on the number of feedback this doesn't seem to be the most common activity for LM's.

I've been longing to have some more challenging content for solo play but reading this and other delvings feedback, it may not trigger me to spend extra money on it. I've stopped buying new content until they fix key problems in game performance and stop abusing the LM in each update.

[Gorikon]

I did some delvings with my LM up to T8. Equipment was boots from raid, two jewellery pieces from T2 raid, the rest a mix of Adventure gear, instance drops, and landscape drops.

Some lessons learned:
- be picky what Mission you play. There are very hard ones (e.g. the Tharbad ones with Darkwaters) and very easy ones (e.g. Scurloc Farm, kill 14 wights). The latter one probably can be solo'ed up to T9, because the wights can be killed one by one. Every Mission that has only has groups of 2 standard mobs can easily be solo'ed. Mezz one mob, damage the other, Bear taunt it, kill it. Rinse and repeat.
- Stun poison can be countered with Stun Immunity. When you are afflicted, put up SI, ignore it.
- Purple eye fear effect should be ignored. (Only does damage on removal.)
- Disease effects are nasty. They lower max morale by 30% and work multiplicative.

[Alcor]

Here is the irony.

These delving missions are supposed to be an avenue for non-raiders to get raid-comparable gear, yet it seems that to do the higher tiers, you need the raid gear which these are an avenue to obtain.

It is clear that for my interest and play style I must remain content with decent enough gear for landscape and epic quest line.

[Rannhund]

I do regularly solo T10 delving missions with my LM ( red line ). With stun and pet aggro you can manage most of them. The problem is that often the time spent on a T10 is not always rewarded with good stuff... spending 15-20 min on a T10 delving and receiving 10 stuck of wood is not really enthousiastic... and surely not worth the time you spent in it. ( except the 50 scrolls )

[Elmagor]

IMHO delving missions d7-d10, from best to worst:

Hunter
LM
Mini
Beorning
RK

Hunter just damage mobs for distance, negating half of their debuffs. Yes, it's hard to fight with 2-3 mobs at once, but you still can kil at least one of them
LM have more heal when hunter, a lot of CC and AoE, so he can keep most dangerous mobs in CC and deal with others with AoE, holding alive with heals.

Other classes have lack of heal/CC, or lack of single target dps

[cbfan14]

I have the same experience in that it can take some time soloing high tier delvings with LM. There's a couple RNG factors that determine whether the delving will be a walk in a park or a painful slog, like what mission you're doing and what the current delving mechanic is. Not to mention that the rewards are often not worth the time invested.

[Mithithil]

Couple of updates

Drowned Prince one in Tharbad, utterly tedious but can be done, but woe betide you if you put a dot on the boss. Really not worth the bother, box ticked and move along

LM + RK also with maxed mits and decent gear. Most T10 gets done, just fast enough for it to be more or less fun, but slow enough to be dull after a while when nothing of value drops afterwards.

The only value in doing T10 is more wrots

[sknauf]

It makes no sense on how low the ROI is for Delvings. the # of Writs you get is so low it is an insult to everyone's time.

It's 7500 writs to upgrade the cloak. 12500 writs to fully upgrade the necklace. And these items bind to CHARACTER because of the class essence
At minimum, T10 delving is 10 minutes, and you get 50 writs.
You as the Devs, are expecting ppl to play mindless missions for 1500 minutes for an fully upgraded cloak per character, and 2500 minutes per necklace.

MINDLESS MISSIONS for 66.66 hours minimum PER CHARACTER.

At minimum T10 should be 100 Writs. I should not have to complete T10 missions 250 times to complete a necklace.

[cbfan14]

It makes no sense on how low the ROI is for Delvings. the # of Writs you get is so low it is an insult to everyone's time.

It's 7500 writs to upgrade the cloak. 12500 writs to fully upgrade the necklace. And these items bind to CHARACTER because of the class essence
At minimum, T10 delving is 10 minutes, and you get 50 writs.
You as the Devs, are expecting ppl to play mindless missions for 1500 minutes for an fully upgraded cloak per character, and 2500 minutes per necklace.

MINDLESS MISSIONS for 66.66 hours minimum PER CHARACTER.

At minimum T10 should be 100 Writs. I should not have to complete T10 missions 250 times to complete a necklace.

Don't forget the big kicker; the cloak and necklace will become irrelevant with the next lvl cap because the essence stops working once you lvl past 149.

[Mithithil]

Don't forget the big kicker; the cloak and necklace will become irrelevant with the next lvl cap because the essence stops working once you lvl past 149.

As the last level bump was ten levels in Gundabad I'm presuming the next one may be a five level one