Delves

A delve is a short instanced dungeon you can run alone, with an NPC companion, in about 10 minutes. You pick a tier — the difficulty — and the tier decides what it pays.

They matter because they are the only content in the game that gears you properly without needing four other people or a schedule. If group content is not available to you this week, this is the lane that keeps your character moving.

There are two kinds of run, and the difference is large:

• A regular delve pays a chance at loot — around 50% — and counts toward your vault.
• A Bountiful delve costs a key and pays guaranteed loot

at a higher item level.

Keys are limited per week, so Bountiful runs are the finite part and regular runs are the repeatable part.

Two lines worth finding in that table. The vault column is well ahead of the loot column, so a delve run is worth doing even when nothing drops; and Bountiful runs only start paying extra from T4, so a key spent below that is a key wasted.

Note also where the numbers stop climbing. Regular loot peaks at T8 — T9 through T11 drop exactly the same item level, and exist for the challenge and for what is attached to them rather than for the gear.

Running delves advances a season-long progression track, up to rank 10. This is the part new players miss, and it is where most of the system's real value is — the ranks unlock things the delves themselves do not.

If you intend to run delves at all this season, push this track early. Several of these ranks pay back every week that follows, so a rank earned in week two is worth many times the same rank earned in week ten.

Delves scale hard with tier, and you are doing it without a group to carry a weak link. These are the item levels at which each tier stops being a fight and starts being a run:

Delves feed the Great Vault's world row, which fills from delve completions and other outdoor content together.

Here is the honest caveat, and it is ours rather than the game's: ResetReady does not track this row. The game does not report a weekly delve count we can read, so we show you the two rows we can stand behind rather than guessing at a third. Your delve progress is real and it counts — you just have to look at it in-game rather than here. The vault page explains what that means for planning.

The planner ranks delves the same way it ranks everything else — item level per hour — and they score well, which surprises people who think of solo content as a consolation prize. A 10-minute run with guaranteed loot competes directly with a dungeon key that takes three times as long and might drop nothing.

Key-limited runs are treated as the finite resource they are: the planner will point you at the highest tier you can actually finish rather than the highest that exists, because a key spent on a failed run is gone.