Delve Scaling: Why Two-Player Delves Were Easier Than Solo

Key Takeaways

• Early in The War Within's Season 1 (September 2024), content creator Sloot tested Delve scaling and found two-player Delves had enemies with less health and lower damage than solo runs.
• Sloot used the Nerubian Threadmancer's Web Bolt as a fixed damage yardstick across group sizes.
• His numbers showed a solo player taking the heaviest Web Bolt hit, while a tank-and-DPS duo took far less.
• One standout outlier, the Crazed Abomination in The Underkeep, gained close to ten times its health at five players, a separate scaling bug.
• Past the duo quirk, four players scaled to roughly 1.5 times solo values and five players to roughly twice solo.
• Blizzard adjusted Delve group scaling in a September 12, 2024 hotfix, raising grouped enemy health, cutting grouped ability damage, and fixing the boss-scaling bug.

When Delves arrived as The War Within's flagship solo feature in 2024, the assumption was simple: bring a friend and the content gets harder to balance your extra firepower. Early Season 1 testing showed the opposite in one specific case. Veteran raider and content creator Sloot ran the numbers and found that a two-player Delve could be easier than going alone. The figures below are his recorded test values from that window, not Blizzard-published constants, so treat them as a snapshot of how scaling behaved before the hotfixes rather than fixed rules. The War Within is now the previous expansion, so this is a look back at an early-Season-1 quirk.

What Sloot's Testing Showed

Common sense says adding players to an instance should make enemies tougher to offset the group's higher output. Sloot's recorded runs in early Season 1 did not follow that rule for two-player groups, where enemies often hit softer and died faster than they did for a solo player.

Damage Taken Across Group Compositions

To keep the comparison honest, Sloot leaned on a single ability, the Nerubian Threadmancer's Web Bolt, and recorded the hit it landed across different party makeups. The pattern that jumped out: several two-player setups took less damage than a lone player.

Read down the column and the oddity is clear: a solo tank ate a 2.5M Web Bolt, but pairing that tank with a single DPS dropped the same hit to 1M in Sloot's runs.

Enemy Health From Solo to Trio

Health followed an equally strange curve. Using a standard Nerubian Threadmancer as the reference, Sloot logged how its health pool shifted with party size, and the two-player value came in below the solo value before rising again at three.

A two-player group facing a weaker enemy than a soloer, then a slight rebound at three, is exactly the kind of non-linear curve that pointed to a scaling problem rather than intended tuning.

The Outliers and Larger Groups

The trend did not hold everywhere, and the exceptions were as telling as the rule. The Crazed Abomination in The Underkeep ran the other direction, carrying close to ten times its solo health when faced by a five-person team. That made a coordinated group still the better way to down it despite the longer fight, and it lined up with a known bug where some bosses scaled incorrectly with more players.

Once Sloot pushed past the duo case, the math settled into something more predictable:

• Four players: roughly 1.5 times solo health and damage.
• Five players: roughly twice solo values.

In other words, the two-player dip was the anomaly, and the larger groups scaled up in a way that matched expectations far better.

How Blizzard Responded

This was not intended behavior, and Blizzard treated it as a bug rather than a quirk to leave in. In a September 12, 2024 hotfix, the team increased the health scaling of grouped Delve enemies, reduced the damage scaling of many grouped enemy abilities, and fixed the bug that made bosses scale incorrectly with more players. The stated goal was to bring group difficulty in line with solo difficulty after group runs showed unexpectedly low clear times and unexpectedly high lethality. Further tuning followed over the next days as the team chased the right balance.

Delves remain a core part of the modern game, so if you are climbing the higher tiers today rather than studying the old numbers, you can see our Delve boosting options for the current season.

FAQ

Who is Sloot?

Sloot is a veteran World of Warcraft content creator and longtime top-end raider who streams endgame PvE, including Delves. He is associated with the Liquid scene, and his Delve scaling tests were widely cited across the community in early Season 1.

Were two-player Delves really easier than solo?

In early War Within Season 1, yes, for many enemies. Sloot's testing showed two-player Delves with lower enemy health and damage than solo runs, a genuine scaling quirk that Blizzard later corrected.

What is Web Bolt and why did Sloot use it?

Web Bolt is a single-target Nature damage ability cast by the Nerubian Threadmancer, a common Delve enemy. Because it was consistent and easy to reproduce, Sloot used the size of its hit as a fixed yardstick to compare damage across different group sizes.

Why did the Crazed Abomination behave differently?

The Crazed Abomination in The Underkeep gained close to ten times its health at five players, the opposite of the duo trend. That lined up with a separate bug where some bosses scaled incorrectly with more players, which Blizzard called out and fixed in the September 12, 2024 hotfix.

How many Delve tiers were there in Season 1?

The War Within Season 1 ran eleven Delve tiers. Tier 8 was the reward cap, the point where Delves stopped giving better gear, which is why Tier 8 gets cited as the meaningful top tier even though the difficulty ladder went higher.

Do these numbers still apply today?

No. They were a snapshot from early Season 1, before the September 12, 2024 hotfix and the follow-up tuning. The War Within is now the previous expansion, and Delve scaling has been adjusted since, so the figures are historical reference rather than current behavior.

Last reviewed 2026-06-26 against The War Within Patch 11.0.2 (Delves, early Season 1). Maintained by WowCarry's WoW team.