The Hardest Mage Tower Challenge is....

[PraisCthulhu]

The hardest one I've done is Frost Mage, but I've not done a ton of them (Havoc, Elemental, Enhancement, Windwalker, Discipline, Frost/Fire/Arcane Mage). I've done a bunch of pulls on the Resto Shaman one but haven't beaten it.

[FlemmMinis]

The hardest one for me personally are either destruction warlock (beaten) or arcane mage. I really can't seem to get the arcane one down.

[PraisCthulhu]

The hardest one for me personally are either destruction warlock (beaten) or arcane mage. I really can't seem to get the arcane one down.

I found the Arcane one to be pretty easy, I go it in less than 10 pulls (compared to ~50 for Frost). Not as easy as Fire, but still pretty easy. What parts are you having issues with and what ilvl are you?

[FlemmMinis]

I found the Arcane one to be pretty easy, I go it in less than 10 pulls (compared to ~50 for Frost). Not as easy as Fire, but still pretty easy. What parts are you having issues with and what ilvl are you?

945. To be fair, I really suck at kiting. Still don't know how I did frost.

Come to think, my main problem is my habit of blinking out of the arena.

[Sosuke Aizen]

...in my humble opinion.... Protection Paladin. I got Kruul on every other tank, but I just can't seem to DPS things down fast enough before I end up with like 3 Infernals and everything goes to shit. I think I'm just doing something wrong because I'm like 20 ilevels higher than when I did it on my DK, DH and Druid.

So even if you haven't tried them all, what is the hardest one so far for you?

I think the MW one was pretty difficult. BM hunter and WW Monk was the easiest for me.

[Jester Joe]

Every fucking dps have an interrupt, it's not more of a tank job than a dps job in any way shape or form.

Prot paladin is arguably the best interrupter in the game, with reasonable RNG.

Doing dmg is something but again, a dps job, no one really gives a shit how much dmg a tank does except people who are jealous when they think tank dmg is too high for their fragile taste. Positioning is, again, something everybody does, what a tank does that no other job does is positioning the mobs, which we can't even do with the most important mob of the challenge who just doesn't even move, completely stupid.

Several tanks pull more damage when you're executing your active mitigation the best, yet again, look at Prot paladin.
I also would think you've never done mythic+ if you think the tank damage doesn't matter at all.

1. No pulling/pacing; everything comes with a timer like the worse dungeon in the game: violet hold, that place is shit, the tank challenge is designed like that so it makes it shit as well.

Hate Violet hold too, but mechanics based on timers is nothing new. it's how almost every raid works.
Kruul's challenge is based around health, you kill the one guy to start the 2nd phase. There is no timer to it.

2. No relevant dmg mitigation; you either dance around it like a dps does or simply have your health pool inevitably shrinked by something 90% out of your control.

Maybe if you outgear it ridiculously, otherwise you do need to keep up some form of mitigation, as the adds he summons increases your damage taken/does damage to you too. So if you don't roll something as he casts, you can take a massive chunk of damage.

3. No cooldown management; you can take them out of your bar, it's pretty much useless as this plays like a dps challenge.

That's why all guides have a set up how to use your big CDs during Kruul? You most certainly need them, Argent Defender alone is a life saver. Even past that, tank cooldowns have become less "Use when you can" and more of a "I'm in over my head at the moment" button.

4. No LoS; there's a ton of rocks and shit around the place but we can't even use them for gameplay purposes.

LoS isn't really the most interesting thing anyway.
And you can use the rocks as somewhere to get knocked into and not fall off the platform.

5. No mob positioning since the main mob cannot be moved, completely retarded.

Mob positioning is exactly what phase 2 is all about.

6. No one actually cares about Kruul, once you get there the challenge is pretty much over, the annoying part is the cock sucker caster rooted in place.

Yet again, maybe if you massively overgear it. Otherwise, no, Kruul is just as much of a pain as phase 1.

[Dristereau]

Of what I've done so far;

Guardian Druid (without Thrash Legendaries) - Please note I hate Guardian playstyle this expansion, and still don't understand it fully (aka, I'm bad). Anyways, it was the flying bear show for a very long time. Vengeance DH made this look like a joke in comparison. I'm yet to do Warr/Pala/Monk Tank so I'm expecting worse.

Affliction Warlock - Took a few attempts but got done. Another one where a certain legendary makes it a joke if you have it.

Expecting Outlaw Rogue/Fire Mage to be painful. I remember doing Agatha on my DK when they first came out and having some mighty rage with that at times.

[Deleted]

...in my humble opinion.... Protection Paladin. I got Kruul on every other tank, but I just can't seem to DPS things down fast enough before I end up with like 3 Infernals and everything goes to shit. I think I'm just doing something wrong because I'm like 20 ilevels higher than when I did it on my DK, DH and Druid.

So even if you haven't tried them all, what is the hardest one so far for you?

I had good luck with basically ignoring the infernals and just moving in a circular pattern around the map, which makes sure you're not in the forward cone attack that the infernals do.

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It's certainly not unholy DK vs Agatha. I just one shot it at 925. Can't seem to get holy paladins last phase down though.

[Gestopft]

Expecting Outlaw Rogue/Fire Mage to be painful. I remember doing Agatha on my DK when they first came out and having some mighty rage with that at times.

Outlaw is harder than Fire tbh. Marked for Death is the most helpful thing you can do.

- - - Updated - - -

The hardest one for me personally are either destruction warlock (beaten) or arcane mage. I really can't seem to get the arcane one down.

Destro for me was mostly about getting my interrupts down, but it was rough going. I was literally calling out loud which spell I was going to use for the next Fel Burst.

[FlemmMinis]

Destro for me was mostly about getting my interrupts down, but it was rough going. I was literally calling out loud which spell I was going to use for the next Fel Burst.

Same here. Without saying my fear rotation out loud I wouldn't have beaten it.

[Marrilaife]

Same here. Without saying my fear rotation out loud I wouldn't have beaten it.

I did the destro one and what helped a lot was to make 3 macros: cast the doomguard interrupt at focus, mortal coil at focus (ofc put tauren guy at focus) and use unending resolve + dark pact at the same moment (as a back up soak if none of the interrupts were up). I tried without these and got frustrated with misclicking or using them too slow or interrupting wrong target because I was dpsing eggs. Don't have prydaz on my lock and mostly affli leggos so had to do with sephuz and norgannon's but I found out I nearly never managed to stand still for 6 seconds to get benefit out of the boots, so that was a waste.

[Corroc]

I would say prot warrior. No matter how much gear you have you need to be aware of your health alot more than other tanks. If you slip even once you might be in trouble. out of all the dps challenges i had most problems with elemental shaman. Yeah you could burst shit down really fast with artifact power but you cant do shit when you are moving.

All the healing challenges are pretty easy when you do couple things:

• DPS in the first phase, this gets ridicolously easy with gear no matter what class you play. Even holy priests can do stupid burst to priority targets.

• Rotate your cooldowns on the third phase. It has absolutely nothing to do with gear, you just need to find correct cooldown rotation for that phase.

• Last phase really isn't dps fight. I have seen many youtube videos emphasize doing dmg to the boss while healing. But I have completed that with all the healers with just healing. Hardest part of that is of course not healing too much.

[Marrilaife]

I would say prot warrior. No matter how much gear you have you need to be aware of your health alot more than other tanks. If you slip even once you might be in trouble.

I've done all the tanks and I'd say prot warrior doesn't seem to be the worst at current gear levels. Most common cause of death is getting knocked off and warrior can remedy it with charge and leap. Also it helped to pick stormbolt instead of shockwave to backup interrupt without having to be really close (with shockwave I got either stacks refreshed or the guy in the puddle not getting stunned and drain velen). I think paladin / dk have a disadvantage of no in-built anti-knock-off, and monk has the disadvantage of very little self healing (warrior can get resets on victory rush by killing adds, and can spell reflect the debuff in last phase for self healing). If you have low gear, I think paladin is worse than warrior due to low mobillity and getting extra infernals (you won't do crazy dps without correct leggos like pants).

out of all the dps challenges i had most problems with elemental shaman. Yeah you could burst shit down really fast with artifact power but you cant do shit when you are moving.

For me outlaw was 10x worse than ele shaman even though it's the same boss. Ele I used prydaz / pants, stood away and pew pew. Outlaw I wiped numerous times due to slow puddles from imps dropping in melee then screwing my ability to dodge rolling rocks. That, and the "she's at 10% and summons EVERYTHING" and the imps are so spread I don't hit them all with blade flurry while chain lightning had no such problem. And I even went with Outlaw when command center buffs were up while on shaman I went when the other building wasn't up. I'm starting to think I'm the worst rogue ever, took me multiple tries with command center, 930+ gear, valeera's pants, lightsblood elixir, sylvan elixir, falcosaurs omelette, drums, flask and prolonged pot. And yeah I did save mark of death for imps to get resets. While on ele and feral this boss felt significantly easier, with less consumables used. I wonder why.

I haven't tried any healing one yet because I've heard it can take up to 20 min to complete an attempt, is that still true? I'd hate in that case to wipe at 19 mins in...

[Deleted]

Done all 36. Hardest ones were Prot Paladin (without legendary pants), Resto Shaman, Outlaw and Fury. What makes these challenges stand out is the fact that they were all non-trivial even at ilvl 920+. On top of that, none of these 4 challenges was my first time doing that challenge type, so they were difficult even after knowing the mechanics. Guardian Druid would probably be on this list without legendaries, but I did it with Ekowrath, which trivialized it.

I did most of the challenges at around ilvl 910-920 (practically all Argus gear and 1-2 first legendaries I happened to get) with 52-60 traits, which was already enough to outgear most of the challenges. Most of the time I was left thinking: "I wonder what would've been the hard part of this challenge, if I wasn't able to just brute force parts of it?", whereas the 4 challenges mentioned left me with the opposite thought: "how the hell would I have been able to do this, if I didn't have all this gear helping me?".

I know now that you can cheese Agatha with various non-typical consumables that you're only able to use in outdoor zones, but I didn't use any of those, so I'll still rank Fury and Outlaw hard based on how I did them. It's very subjective no matter what, because the difficulty depends greatly on things like legendaries, ilvl, secondary stats, trinkets, experience with the spec, experience with the challenge (the hard challenges are doubly hard, if you never killed the same boss on an easier spec to learn the mechanics), etc.

out of all the dps challenges i had most problems with elemental shaman. Yeah you could burst shit down really fast with artifact power but you cant do shit when you are moving.

There's fairly little movement in the encounter, and you have quite a few instant casts. With all the adds in the fight, you constantly get instant Lava Burst procs. Also, you get lots of mobility from Gust of Wind and Ghost Wolf.

I think the Elemental Shaman challenge was one of the most enjoyable ones, but it's below average in terms of difficulty. It's the only challenge I've done twice, and the second time I did it was with by far the shittiest gear I ever used to complete any of the challenges.

Elemental Shaman has such great spec mechanics to match the encounter mechanics of the challenge. You can save up max Maelstrom for a big Earth Shock burst for when Agatha gets the absorb shield. You can control the adds with Thunderstorm, Earthbind Totem and Lighting Surge Totem. You can do massive AoE clean-up every minute with the artifact ability. At times you can keep adds alive for instant Lava Bursts and extra Maelstrom generation with Chain Lightning to boost your single-target DPS. Agatha in general is my favourite Mage Tower challenge, and Elemental has the most interesting toolkit to deal with the challenge.

Here's a screenshot of my 2nd Shaman after I completed it on the next day after dinging 110. ilvl 880 (although with at least 2 910+ relics on weapon, so in a way it's artificially low compared to "real" ilvl 880 evenly spread across all gear), no legendaries, no set bonuses, no enchants, and no consumables. It took me around 10-20 tries. If anyone is triggered by the Arcanocrystal on a fresh 110, I'd like to point out that it's ilvl 860 straight from Withered Jim, who happened to be up when I dinged 110.

In comparison, I had twice as many wipes on the Outlaw challenge, even though I did it at around ilvl 930 with the cleave ring legendary (the other legendary was just a stat-stick for Outlaw), enchants on my gear, and normal consumables (flask, rune, food, potions, drums). Often it felt like I was at the mercy of RNG, because it's easy to cleave the adds down when they spawn close to each other, but it's complete RNG where they spawn. On top of the add RNG there was the Roll the Bones RNG. Maybe I should've used Slice and Dice for more consistency, but MfD is nice as you can constantly reset the CD on adds.

[Corroc]

I've done all the tanks and I'd say prot warrior doesn't seem to be the worst at current gear levels. Most common cause of death is getting knocked off and warrior can remedy it with charge and leap. Also it helped to pick stormbolt instead of shockwave to backup interrupt without having to be really close (with shockwave I got either stacks refreshed or the guy in the puddle not getting stunned and drain velen). I think paladin / dk have a disadvantage of no in-built anti-knock-off, and monk has the disadvantage of very little self healing (warrior can get resets on victory rush by killing adds, and can spell reflect the debuff in last phase for self healing). If you have low gear, I think paladin is worse than warrior due to low mobillity and getting extra infernals (you won't do crazy dps without correct leggos like pants).

Stormbolt should be mandatory pick for the fight, you can actually use it to interrupt every single heal cast. Second phase wasn't really problem with warrior with the spell reflect but the first phase caused alot of issues since warriors dont have any kind of mitigation for the mind rend and the only warrior heal you have is based on your max health.
DK was easier because you could build up shield with death strike for the phases were you were taking more dmg.
Paladin was actually alot easier than I thought it would be. You are getting constant interrupts on the inquisitor so the whole fight is basically add and debuff control.
You can use Niuzao as monk and it will pretty much tank inquisitor so you are not even taking dmg. You can than take like 10 stacks of the debuff in the burst. Though sometimes it would bug and insta kill niuzao for some reason.

[Polarthief]

As someone who has done all 36 challenges:
- Outlaw Rogue: It felt like RNG on if I got Grand Melee (attack speed+leech) or not. Not getting it ever = pretty much loss towards the end.
- Affliction Warlock (without Sacrolash or bugging it): I got lucky and had the ring but I can't imagine doing it without that or bugging it with an Infernal without overgearing it.
- Shadow Priest: I did the Surrender to Madness strat and man was it fun but very difficult unless you know what you're doing.
- Prot Warrior: This was super annoying. Having the shoulders made this way easier though but I didn't have them my first round of attempts.
- Brewmaster Monk: I managed to get the belt after my first round of attempts for a bit of healing but I'd still argue this challenge to be really difficult.
- Feral Druid: This was the only challenge I stupidly overgeared because Druid is my main. Did try it undergeared and it felt impossible.
- Prot Paladin: I'd argue 3rd hardest (4th if Druid has no Ekowraith or Luffa) tank to do. Warrior and Monk were definitely harder (DK and DH were total jokes though).
- Subtlety Rogue: Phase 2 wasn't too bad but phase 1 just felt like RNG based on if he was close enough to Shadowstep to or not.

[Marrilaife]

Stormbolt should be mandatory pick for the fight, you can actually use it to interrupt every single heal cast.

Yeah, sometimes I followed spreadsheet from wowhead guide only to realize later other talent made more sense. Maybe shockwave was recommended when you couldn't burst adds fast enough at low gear levels. Same thing with destro lock, no idea why the spreadsheet has burning rush, even though the small print below talks about advantages of dark pact and demon skin (in the end I went with dark pact). Burning rush is pretty useless on this fight, you never run for prolonged periods of time, mostly side step ground abilities. Yeah I know my bad for following a guide blindly, however when it comes to specs / classes I don't play on a daily basis I'm rarely 100% sure what talents to pick until I see "this could be useful" or "this didn't work". Somehow warrior ended up as my least played tank mostly due to the fact of no persistent / spammable aoe for dungeons. So had lowest gear on it from all the tank classes.

Second phase wasn't really problem with warrior with the spell reflect but the first phase caused alot of issues since warriors dont have any kind of mitigation for the mind rend and the only warrior heal you have is based on your max health.

Can use spell reflect at start it will come back later on, can interrupt if you plan to stun the drain, but no tank except super lucky with procs paladin can chain interrupt him. Anyway I'm talking about now when it's easy to get 920-930 gear or more, I don't know how it was when people went there in 7.2. I tried back then on my main, wiped for few hours and decided to leave it until I have more gear and don't have to spend a few afternoons per each spec.

DK was easier because you could build up shield with death strike for the phases were you were taking more dmg.

Unfortunately blood shield only absorbs physical damage and most damage in p1 is magic.

(4th if Druid has no Ekowraith or Luffa)

I don't have luffa but I felt cloak + moonkin shoulder did job astonishingly well. I was a bit lucky with offspec leggos as my druid is resto main, so I have all resto ones, then I got survival instinct ring + cloak for guardian and boots + shoulders for boomkin, so didn't take me to shift through all of them to get that combo (in case of super bad luck). Was trying to get luffa, but I ended up getting guardian and feral mage tower without them (only got the feral boots that aren't very useful), so I think I'm gonna try to get some for the moonkin challenge instead. Even though I heard it's easier to do than frost mage so maybe should give it a go.

[Marrilaife]

I am surprised you guys used Stormbolt and Shockwave, I loved having Warbringer for this

How else do you interrupt variss if you are on high stacks and you really can't afford refreshing them and he decides to cast drain at really unfortunate moment?

[Zaganite]

I don't have luffa but I felt cloak + moonkin shoulder did job astonishingly well. I was a bit lucky with offspec leggos as my druid is resto main, so I have all resto ones, then I got survival instinct ring + cloak for guardian and boots + shoulders for boomkin, so didn't take me to shift through all of them to get that combo (in case of super bad luck). Was trying to get luffa, but I ended up getting guardian and feral mage tower without them (only got the feral boots that aren't very useful), so I think I'm gonna try to get some for the moonkin challenge instead. Even though I heard it's easier to do than frost mage so maybe should give it a go.

Boomkin was the first I downed before the Wax and Wane change (I had head and shoulders) so all I did was run around moonfire everything, starfall for the casts while running and threw star surges out. Just push him back with typhoon and use travel form for a bit of distance if you have to.

Feral I breezed with Ekowraith and feet but I did over gear it at 941. Guardian I used boomkin shoulders, Ekowraith, Balance affinity and then I had a caster trinket and healing shield trinket from first argus boss which just destroyed P1 and I took no damage except for when I had to interupt.

[Mighty Parrot]

Managed to get the challenge skin on my Alt Guardian...I am completely broken in gold and mind with how fucking trying it was. At least 30k Shards. Is the fight completely RNG based? Because most of the first phase, I’d get screwed over when Inquisitor would cast drain life AFTER the damn nether horrors spawned - leaving me with over 5 stacks and adding more just to interrupt. There is also a “clipping” issue when being struck by the Infernal’s smash. Half the time I’m fine, others im flung off the map.

Then there is Kruul. God, I spent most of the time watching his cast bar so I could interrupt Twisted Reflection and leaving me out of reach to try to help Velen if and almost always ganked by the horrors.

Manage to get Velen and whoever the DH name is to finish Kruul off when I fucking died at 1%.

I don’t think I ever had this much trouble with Affliction (which I main)...yeah, had troubles with large faceless ones at time, but that was all because the entire area is ALL PURPLE.

So got the Affliction challenge staff at 928 and for Guardian, I finally beat it at 937.