The Grudge Pit is a terrible delve and a missed opportunity.

Obligatory: I love delves. I have played WoW on and off since beta (!) but the only expansion I maintained my sub for the entire time was The War Within. And that was because of delves.

(1) I am not against the idea of outdoor delves. Atal’aman, for example, is in an interesting and otherwise underutilized location. But The Grudge Pit feels lazy as holy heck. The location, and arena itself, is not visually interesting or appealing.

It seems like Blizzard was like: “we don’t have enough delves—find something in the open world that we can reuse.” And then because the location was so tiny they basically felt the need to stuff it way too full with mobs and have too many stages.

Maybe Blizz needs to expand the delve team.

(2) It is also a missed opportunity. An arena delve could be so cool and different! Maybe just have 1 variant for the delve but actually make it like a gladiator arena match. Have 15 or so mini-bosses. Each run, the delve would randomly choose something like 3 or 4 of those. And each stage would match you up with one mini boss. There would then be a few “final bosses,” and the delve would randomly choose one of those as the final stage.

Some people would like it, some wouldn’t, but it would be cool and different. The current Grudge Pit feels lazy, uninspired, and boring.

But, you respond, “designing so many mini-bosses is too much work!” I’m not saying they need to have completely unique mechanics. WoW has been out for over 20 years, just steal mechanics from other mini-bosses. Maybe from old dungeons? Maybe from Brawlers Guild? Heck, they could literally reuse some old mini-bosses as a nostalgic callback.