The companion in the depths of World of Warcraft has been changed. This is now causing some frustration, as the grind has become longer.
In World of Warcraft: The War Within, the depths (“Delves”) are a new feature that you can dive into intensively starting today, as the higher difficulty levels are now accessible and allow for the acquisition of really powerful loot. The constant companion by your side is Brann Bronzebeard, who also wants to be levelled up happily. The problem: He levels up very slowly now and only in very specific depths. Many are really not fond of this.
What has changed about Brann? Just a few days ago, Blizzard reacted to the fact that some players had exploited a bug. They had levelled their Brann Bronzebeard extremely high, some even to level 60. As a result, he was extremely powerful and could handle the depths almost single-handedly without real help from the respective character.
Blizzard reacted quickly: Brann was first restricted so that he could not gain experience past level 15 until the start of the season. Subsequently, Brann was reset to level 15 on all accounts.
Now the season has started, and Brann can again gain experience points, but with a significant restriction: Brann can only gain experience points in “bountiful” depths. These can only be visited and completed once per day and character – and provide hefty loot only if you use restored chest keys.
Excessive grinding to level up Brann quickly is therefore quite difficult, if not impossible.
This is how the community reacts: They seem to be quite divided on this change. While some can understand the change so that Brann is not completely overpowered within a few hours, there are also many sarcastic and clearly disapproving voices. From the comments in the official WoW forum, for instance:
- “This should have been known months in advance. Why are we only getting this information now?” – Rynnox
- “With all due respect… why?
The only real difference between bountiful and normal depths is the chest at the end.
Just let him gain XP from every depth and that’s a clear win.” – Voidarcane - “Sniff… It brings tears to my eyes to see that solo players wanted a progress system only to then run into the same time-gating wall that mythic and PvP players experience and then shout ‘WTF’. You’ve done it.” – Primalmatter
Even in the World of Warcraft subreddit, the topic is being discussed vigorously, even if the reactions there are quite similar.
- “An outstandingly terrible decision, lmao. This is just insane.” – DanielMoore0515
- “This is a terrible design decision. It only encourages having a large army of alternate characters and running the bountiful depths on all of them every day.” – mistuh_fier
However, some also note that Brann and the depths are supposed to be a progress system that stretches over an entire season. If Brann were to reach the maximum level in the first few days, the progress would be completely finished right away.
Many suspect that Blizzard will make some changes to Brann in the coming weeks, such as increasing the XP bonus for the first visited depth each week – but that’s only speculation so far. If you are still unsure which class is currently really good, check out our tier list for WoW: The War Within.
