If you log in with a few hours a week and a half-finished gear set, the question is brutally practical: do you grind Delve tier 11 or queue Mythic+? The honest answer in The War Within Season 2 is "both, but in a specific order" - and which one wins depends entirely on which item slots you still need to fill. Here is the actual math on item levels, vault slots, and time spent, with no hand-waving.

What tier 11 Delves actually drop right now

A Bountiful tier 11 Delve, with a Restored Coffer Key spent on the end chest, drops gear around the Champion track - roughly 658 item level at the bottom of the track and a ceiling near 671 once fully upgraded. The chest at the end is the prize; the rest of the run is Gilded Stash and bonus loot you mostly vendor or scrap.

The real Delve payoff is the Great Vault. Clear eight Delves at tier 8 or higher in a week and your weekly chest offers up to three Delve slots. At tier 11 those vault options land at the higher end of the Champion track - competitive with a mid-key Mythic+ reward but earned with far less stress. No group, no leaver griefing you, and a single run is roughly 8 to 14 minutes with Brann doing half the pulling.

The catch: the gear ceiling

Champion-track gear caps out well below the top. Once your slots are sitting around 670 ilvl, tier 11 Delves stop being an upgrade for those slots - they only feed your vault and your Coffer Key economy. That is the wall every Delve-focused player hits in week three or four. Delves alone will not get you raid-ready or high-key ready.

What Mythic+ gives you that Delves cannot

Mythic+ end-of-dungeon chests and vault slots scale into the Hero track and, at the top end, the Myth track. A +7 or higher key already pushes your weekly vault into Hero-track territory (678+), and clearing higher keys raises that ceiling further. Crests matter too: M+ rains down Runed and Gilded Crests far faster than Delves do, and crests are the real bottleneck on upgrading anything past the Champion track.

So the gear ceilings are not close. A consistent +8 to +10 player out-gears a pure Delver within two or three resets, full stop. The cost is variance: a bad group, a depleted key, or one disconnect can turn a 25-minute dungeon into a wipe-fest with nothing to show for it.

The honest decision framework

Forget "which is better" in the abstract. Map it to where your character actually is:

  • Under ~655 ilvl, fresh or returning: Delves win clearly. Champion-track drops are pure upgrades on almost every slot, and you get them solo without needing to perform in a group. Knock out your eight Bountiful tier 8-11 runs for the vault every week.
  • Around 660-670, plateauing: This is the crossover. Delves now only help via the vault. Start running M+ for the Hero-track ceiling and, more importantly, the crest flood. Keep doing Delves only for the weekly vault slots and Coffer Keys.
  • 670+ and pushing: Mythic+ is the answer, period. Delves cannot touch Hero or Myth track on your end-of-run loot. Treat Delves purely as a low-effort third vault category.

The combined weekly play

The optimal time-for-gear route is not picking one - it is filling all three vault columns. Run your Delves for the Delve column (cheap, solo, ~90 minutes total for the week's eight), run M+ for the dungeon column and crests, and raid if you do that. Three full vault columns every Tuesday is the single biggest gear-per-week lever in the game, and Delves are the easiest column to guarantee.

Where buying time is a sensible trade - and where it is not

If your blocker is a single brutal slot - a stubborn trinket or weapon that has refused to drop for five vaults - a targeted Mythic+ carry to bank higher key vault picks can save you a fortnight of soul-crushing RNG, and that is a defensible time-for-money call when your real-life hours are the scarce resource. The same logic applies if you want a specific Mythic+ rating for a guild slot before a raid tier locks in. If that is your situation, our M+ boost services exist for exactly that targeted, slot-or-rating problem.

But be honest with yourself about Delves: they are so cheap to do solo that paying anyone to run tier 11 Delves rarely makes sense. The whole point of Delves is that they are the accessible path - eight runs a week is a couple of relaxed evenings, and the gear is Champion track regardless of who presses the buttons. If your goal is just the weekly Delve vault slots, play it out yourself. Save the spend for the M+ ceiling, the crest grind, or that one cursed trinket that the vault keeps refusing to offer.

Bottom line

Tier 11 Delves are the better time-for-gear deal while you are under roughly 665 ilvl and gearing solo. Mythic+ is the better deal the moment you plateau, because it is the only path to Hero and Myth track loot and the crests that fuel every upgrade above Champion. The smartest players this season do not choose - they run Delves for a guaranteed, low-effort vault floor and lean on Mythic+ for the ceiling. Pick based on your current ilvl and how many real hours you actually have, not on which one the forums are louder about this week.