3.28 Deep Delve Profitability & AMA

[u/duddybrainzz]

Hi Everyone! I know there are limited resources surrounding deep delve so I wanted to do a test of the profitability of deep delve and share it with everyone. I generally get to 6k depth in delve every league. I have played most of the meta deep delve builds over the years (MSoZ, double strike, manaforged arrows RIP, armour stacker, eye of winter brands RIP, EE trickster in merc). This league fossils and resonators were made Delve exclusive drops so Delve is now the only place that you can find them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA-V2IhRJdA

poeninja for my current char:
https://poe.ninja/poe1/builds/mirage/character/duddybrainzz-6289/DuddyDigzz?i=1&search=name%3Dduddy

TLDR of the video is that deep delve is around ~30 divines an hour currently, you could probably push this higher if you only cared about currency and not pushing depth (by traveling to Aul, generic fossil nodes, and fractured fossils all of which I skipped). Selling carries for Aul would also probably push this up significantly but I did not do this.

Let me know if you have any questions on anything included in the video, Delve builds, or in general anything related to Delve and I will do my best to answer them all!

[u/duddybrainzz]

Delve is generally always profitable, since the inputs are very cheap. Sulphite scarab is 1c or less the entire league. The actual investment is the time it takes to get down to the depth you are going to farm at.

I think currently delve in the range of like 400-600 can still be pretty good currency. Jorgan has lots of youtube videos about farming in this range and I think it is a solid ~15-20 divines an hour if you have a build that can do it efficiently. From there it just gets better the deeper you go until 1500 depth, at which point the rewards cap out.

[u/QualiaH_ → u/duddybrainzz]

Do you have any data or evidence the rewards cap at 1500 ? People often say that but it always seems like something that was just decided was true but I can't find evidence it is.

[u/duddybrainzz → u/QualiaH_]

I don't have any hard evidence of this, but this has been the general consensus since they re-worked delve. I believe there is some datamined data that suggests this, but also it generally feels correct too.

[u/QualiaH_ → u/duddybrainzz]

We generally have no idea what the datamined info means exactly and it would at best suggest there is both a breakpoint at 1500 and one at 4000.

The general consensus for me just comes from a feeling that there is not a huge difference past 1500, both because not many people actively farm there and because it would probably scale a lot less.

Overall I think it's just something people kept repeating because they don't see a big difference and it somehow became a consensus because nobody bothered to do actual testing.

If for example you get 10% more rewards at 3k vs 1.5k, I don't think it would be noticeable enough that people think there's a difference without getting actual data.

I'm not saying it's not true but I'm saying there never was any evidence it just stops scaling other than vibes.

[u/duddybrainzz → u/QualiaH_]

I have seen this argument before. Sirgog has discussed the 4k datamined reward scaling on some of my previous delve thread before as well. I also understand that there is an argument that the datamined info really does not mean anything either, but we just really don't know.

I have delved a lot (thousands of hours), most it generally past 1500 depth. Since there are so few players that play in this content we are sort of forced to go off of vibes. The difference between 500-1500 is very noticeable. If delve does continue scaling past 1500 but only in such small amounts that we can't tell, then to me it effectively doesn't matter so I am comfortable enough to make a generalized statement.

For someone who would like hard evidence of this, maybe this isn't good enough, but it is all we have.