Mage Tower timewalking

[MakeMeLaugh]

It's almost definitely Demon Hunter. It's an incredibly simple spec to get 80% out of, & its toolkit is pretty solid for the encounter overall.

I'm watching a guildy on his 14th or 15th challenge, playing a spec he's barely played (Enhancement) & nearly getting it down in well under an hour. It annoys me how quick some people can get up & running mentally on a new character

Did you even try Xylem on DH? I did, and Arms is much, much easier. On DH it's actually pretty hard, and demon phase is waaaay too tight.

[heuheh]

Only left is to heal.. I 300% loathe healing classes./// but if i want the mount so badly then i gonna to do it. Fuck.. i Loathe healing.

I felt the same do it with resto druid if you have one, I went in with leveling gear and only 1 trinket and only phase 1 was "hard" until I learned how to press my buttons without looking at the actionbars where my spells was

[Kyux]

I have played it in Legion, and I have played Enhancement for 14 years, I am pretty confident I know when something is overturned.

I could probably down it after a lot of tries but I don't care enough to play perfectly for 10 minutes each time just to wipe because of some RNG ruining a perfect pull until I get lucky. That's "fake difficulty" to me.

This. I have been playing a bear for ~13 years and I did the Guardian MT back in Legion. It was NOWHERE near this hard, even after the recent nerf.

[Unlimited Power]

This. I have been playing a bear for ~13 years and I did the Guardian MT back in Legion. It was NOWHERE near this hard, even after the recent nerf.

I'm a horrendous guardian druid and I managed to do it. Gearwise, the only gear I had that was out of the ordinary were MoP crafted pvp gear, something that is fairly easy to acquire (I already have all the recipes on my LW alt and had the mats ready).

It took me a while to understand how to play for the first half of the encounter. Shifting back and forth between boomkin and bear form when appropriate, was a concept I struggled a lot with, but once I reached Kruul himself, the remaining fight wasn't actually that difficult.

I had 4 light runes ready by the end since I never needed them during the first boss, so I continuously chained them to prevent annihilates. I wouldn't have been able to go past 3 stacks regardless, but thankfully I never needed to.

There's really not much RNG on the tank challenge. The abilities that need interrupts have set cooldowns, adds spawn at set times and things that need active mitigation are cast with set cooldowns.

Any RNG is down to where the eyes and infernals spawn, and possibly where the pushback lines spawn, but neither really matters much in the grand scheme of things.

Like I said, I'm an absolute garbage Guardian druid player. I have horrendous reaction time, I get easily overwhelmed when dealing with multiple activities at once, and I still managed to beat it within 40 attempts. I don't think that's unreasonable.

OT: I just managed to complete the BM hunter challenge. I initially struggled dealing with the passive damage from the Worm until I realized I should be using a Ferocity pet. That did wonders, and I managed to get it down within 10 attempts after that.

It was mostly a matter of having some good macros for target switching and learning the muscle memory of switching between Freezing traps and interrupts on every other Tugar cast. Interrupting the worm with Fear Beast and Intimidation also helped reduce damage intake significantly.

On the attempt where I completed the challenge I even managed to screw up the interrupts repeatedly and had to resurrect my pet. I was worried dealing with the damage of the Worm after killing Tugar would be difficult, but it only managed to start 2 casts before it died, which I easily interrupted.

All in all, probably significantly easier than windwalker monk in hindsight since damage intake is never a serious concern.

[Jervaise]

Yeah I saw my guildy spawn into nothing a few times. All you can really do is hearthstone or die to the toxic pool. Not sure if that was a bug back then or not, but it's certainly a pain now.

If you just leave instance with right clicking on your frame, you get ported out.

[Kyux]

I'm a horrendous guardian druid and I managed to do it. Gearwise, the only gear I had that was out of the ordinary were MoP crafted pvp gear, something that is fairly easy to acquire (I already have all the recipes on my LW alt and had the mats ready).

[...]

Like I said, I'm an absolute garbage Guardian druid player. I have horrendous reaction time, I get easily overwhelmed when dealing with multiple activities at once, and I still managed to beat it within 40 attempts. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Well evidently not because a slow reaction in this means getting knocked off the platform. Getting easily overwhelmed here means dying in p2.

I remember doing it in about ~40 attempts in Legion. It is categorically far more difficult than then. And now it's timegated. And active during the time when people are most busy and away (Christmas holidays).

[Toybox]

Did you even try Xylem on DH? I did, and Arms is much, much easier. On DH it's actually pretty hard, and demon phase is waaaay too tight.

Ahh RIP. Havoc is undoubtedly the easiest of the specs to learn to a reasonable level though.

I saw the Warlock set last night. That & the Druid set are must-gets for me. Just gotta muster up the energy - can't really be bothered since finishing the Warrior challenges.

[mothandras]

Guess I am retarted, Guardian Druid I get knocked off the platform by a blast that sends me for about 300 yards, or die instantly to the adds after already interrupting their cast. Sometimes I get the adds and drain life on me at the same time and dont have enough interrupts/health to survive. I only have 7k health and everything is hitting me for 1k, is there a minimum amount of health you need to survive? Maybe I am under geared.

[TaurenFemaleLovah]

They were never going to please everyone with this content. It comes down to what was their design intent with bringing the Mage Tower back?

In my opinion the difficulty should be learning the fights, as it was back in the day, not having to farm an "ideal" set of gear or tuning it so tight that one mistake means a wipe. But, when have Blizzard ever implemented a squish or scale that has been anywhere near on the money Day 1.

Timewalking should be really about nostalgia, the rewards aren't as good this time, subjective, and given the relatively short window to do the fights beyond the initial drop do they really need to be another epeen topic? Of course, Mythic raiders will find it easier - they are the best players, but you have Mythic raiding as your exclusive content - this should really be more accessible to lower skill levels.

I'm not sure the proposed "balancing" they've proposed in a recent post is going to make it all that more accessible to the curve of players WoW truly has. What can you do though? Good luck getting your Spelltome mounts and recoloured tier set.

[Unlimited Power]

Guess I am retarted, Guardian Druid I get knocked off the platform by a blast that sends me for about 300 yards, or die instantly to the adds after already interrupting their cast. Sometimes I get the adds and drain life on me at the same time and dont have enough interrupts/health to survive. I only have 7k health and everything is hitting me for 1k, is there a minimum amount of health you need to survive? Maybe I am under geared.

I suggest you watch a video to get a grasp on which cooldowns to use when. For the adds, you should be using disorienting shout right as their cast finishes (right at the start of the channel) to interrupt it. Only ever use your interrupt on life drain.

If their channel gets interrupted they never cast the ability again, but if you use it too early (during the cast) they start casting it again as soon as the disorient ends.

And pick balance affinity if that wasn't already clear. You can interrupt every other life drain with the knockback without ever having to change back into bear form.

[DechCJC]

You know I was thinking, the model of having new systems and borrowed powers each expansion actually makes timewalking events like the mage tower work really well.

If the design intent is to keep classes more or less the same each expansion, with the majority of new spells coming from borrowed powers, surely Blizzard can just create a snapshot template for each spec and keep it that way forever (Assuming abilities aren’t removed from the game)?

Clearly, templates are needed as scaling will never be perfect and surely it’s easy enough to do? Just take the average stat profile from each specs completion and keep damage modifiers as their own variable inside the instance separate from any future changes. Seeing someone else do, for example, the eye challenge 30-60s faster than they should due to funky gear is very frustrating, as they get the same reward for what’s essentially an exploit, but not really.

Doing path of the dead in FF was fun because I never had to think about gear or scaling; no matter when I go in, I’m at the same power. I want the mage tower and future ‘challenge’ timewalking events to be like this.

[Ielenia]

This is meant to be a prestigious reward, it absolutely should be adequately challenging.

Unique weapon customization options that are not available anywhere else are prestigious.

Recolors of existing armor sets are not prestigious.

You can argue "the mount is prestigious!" and I'd agree, but then it's the kind of mount that will be the rarest in the game after the black Ahn-Qiraji mount, considering you have to beat all seven challenges, meaning you'll need... what? Seven specs. At the very minimum, that means you have to be very skilled in all specs of at least three classes. And then you have only a week of training before you can try again in... what? Seven, eight months?

[Toybox]

Unique weapon customization options that are not available anywhere else are prestigious.

Recolors of existing armor sets are not prestigious.

You can argue "the mount is prestigious!" and I'd agree, but then it's the kind of mount that will be the rarest in the game after the black Ahn-Qiraji mount, considering you have to beat all seven challenges, meaning you'll need... what? Seven specs. At the very minimum, that means you have to be very skilled in all specs of at least three classes. And then you have only a week of training before you can try again in... what? Seven, eight months?

Absolutely not. I've seen more Spell Tomes in the last few days than I've seen AQ mounts in the last 15 years. You don't have to be very skilled at a spec to do its challenge either - I saw a friend do the Enhancement challenge without cheese gear (but with full consumables) in 90m or so, having not played that spec before. He's had his Shaman forever & has a total of 14 days /played on it, most of it as resto.

Granted, he's a very good player in general, but you don't need to be a 99th percentile veteran of a class to do a particular mage tower, unless perhaps it's one of those that's tuned high.

[DechCJC]

Unique weapon customization options that are not available anywhere else are prestigious.

Recolors of existing armor sets are not prestigious.

You can argue "the mount is prestigious!" and I'd agree, but then it's the kind of mount that will be the rarest in the game after the black Ahn-Qiraji mount, considering you have to beat all seven challenges, meaning you'll need... what? Seven specs. At the very minimum, that means you have to be very skilled in all specs of at least three classes. And then you have only a week of training before you can try again in... what? Seven, eight months?

I mean, the mount is prestigious, but you’re overblowing how difficult the achievement is.

Some challenges are very hard, the most difficult that I did was the holy priest and sub rogue ones; but there are alternatives that people will use after it becomes common knowledge which are the easiest.

Arcane mage, for example, I have no clue how to play. I jumped in circles spamming arcane explosion/barrage for ten minutes while doing the basic mechanics of the fight. Took me 7 or so attempts to just remember the fight itself, but I still don’t have a clue what I’m doing on arcane.

I actually think some challenges need to be tuned up.

[scubi666stacy]

I mean, the mount is prestigious, but you’re overblowing how difficult the achievement is.

Some challenges are very hard, the most difficult that I did was the holy priest and sub rogue ones; but there are alternatives that people will use after it becomes common knowledge which are the easiest.

Arcane mage, for example, I have no clue how to play. I jumped in circles spamming arcane explosion/barrage for ten minutes while doing the basic mechanics of the fight. Took me 7 or so attempts to just remember the fight itself, but I still don’t have a clue what I’m doing on arcane.

I actually think some challenges need to be tuned up.

Surely not 10 minutes because in my Arcane mage trys they went enrage much earlier.

[DechCJC]

Surely not 10 minutes because in my Arcane mage trys they went enrage much earlier.

10 minutes, 5 minutes, I don’t know, it felt like 10 I wasn’t timing it.

[Relapses]

After doing the mage tower as vengeance demon hunter, I killed kruul at 3 annihilates and he was almost dead with 2 annihilates.

Meanwhile on my druid, I'm dying to the 5th annihilate and kruul is at like 5% hp at this point.

I think they need to do some serious changes here, guardian druids are doing so much less damage than a vengeance demon hunter that it's embarrassing.

They already nerfed Kruul's HP for Guardian. It's unlikely they nerf it again.

[crazyman2]

Further thoughts after a kill on Tugar (no comment on other encounters)

When I hear people going "I got all 36 mage tower appearances in legion and it was a fun challenge, this is overtuned"
If you got the bulk of those during 7.3 after Antorus released, you really have no clue.
Mage tower was a pushover at the end of the expansion, I went in and oneshot appearances for a bunch of alts right before they took it away.
I'm sure there's people who got all 36 in the first couple resets, but those players are far more skilled than the rest of us and they know it.

I don't think this was that much harder than doing this at 885 in legion.
A couple notes
- Mythic raiders were well above 885 when this came out. I was taking a break from raiding at the time and was just pugging normal/occasionally heroic raids.
- They fixed some bugs that trivialized the encounters (Tugar not spawning eggs if he was CCd immediately on earthquake cast)
- No legendaries. But I had garbage legendaries at the time anyway. Prydaz added a little forgiveness, but it didn't trivialize anything by any means.

[Hctaz]

Further thoughts after a kill on Tugar (no comment on other encounters)

When I hear people going "I got all 36 mage tower appearances in legion and it was a fun challenge, this is overtuned"
If you got the bulk of those during 7.3 after Antorus released, you really have no clue.
Mage tower was a pushover at the end of the expansion, I went in and oneshot appearances for a bunch of alts right before they took it away.
I'm sure there's people who got all 36 in the first couple resets, but those players are far more skilled than the rest of us and they know it.

I don't think this was that much harder than doing this at 885 in legion.
A couple notes
- Mythic raiders were well above 885 when this came out. I was taking a break from raiding at the time and was just pugging normal/occasionally heroic raids.
- They fixed some bugs that trivialized the encounters (Tugar not spawning eggs if he was CCd immediately on earthquake cast)
- No legendaries. But I had garbage legendaries at the time anyway. Prydaz added a little forgiveness, but it didn't trivialize anything by any means.

I completed all the mage tower challenges in Legion minus the healer ones.

I will say that the very first week they were out, it was difficult for a 902 ilvl mythic raider to clear the content simply because the strategies were not optimized and we were essentially having to learn difficult fights for the first time.

The tuning was not perfect however. There were absolutely some specs that were significantly easier than others, BUT here's the point I wanted to make with this post. When the mage tower first came out, there was a massive amount of bitching for nerfs from players who felt the challenges were impossible. Blizzard's response was that the challenges were not tuned with the average gear level a player would have at that time, and that they were tuned more for the Tomb of Sargeras gear which wasn't available yet.

I'm saying this as somebody who finished the Frost DK mage tower appearance the first week the mage tower was active with none of the new artifact traits and 902 ilvl: This version of the Frost DK challenge is definitely "harder" than the Legion version. The mechanics are the same, and some of them are even more trivialized with the changes to Death's Advance, but I'm slogging through some parts of the fight in ways that I did not during Legion. Xylem's frost bolt damage and comet storm damage seem to be higher than in Legion, and the Comet Storm ice shards definitely die a lot slower. There was an artifact trait in Legion where Remorseless Winter would explode for AoE damage upon expiration, so timing Remorseless Winter correctly was a key factor in handling the shards. Even without that, however, you could still make it through by spamming Dark Succor procs and just using Obliterate to kill individual shards. The Comet Storm would tick for about 10-13% of your health in Legion whereas it's now more like 20% on top of Xylem's frost bolts doing about 8% per cast.
I'm not 100% on how the damage and healing have changed from Legion moving forwards and I have not played Shadowlands minus getting to level 60.

The damage output required seems to be higher and the damage intake also seems to be higher than in Legion week one when Blizzard also claimed that the Mage Tower was ideally tuned for Tomb of Sargeras gear. I'm not sure I understand why. There's seems to be a disconnect with how the Mage Tower was balanced then versus now.

Maybe Prydaz actually did trivialize the Frost DK encounter since the only thing that wipes me on the encounter is the Comet Storm RNG. Maybe I should level one of the characters/classes that does Sigryn and see if it's any easier since that fight (from memory) is more about mechanics and less about managing incoming damage. If you do the mechanics correctly you don't take damage versus the unavoidable damage from the Xylem fight.

- - - Updated - - -

Absolutely not. I've seen more Spell Tomes in the last few days than I've seen AQ mounts in the last 15 years. You don't have to be very skilled at a spec to do its challenge either - I saw a friend do the Enhancement challenge without cheese gear (but with full consumables) in 90m or so, having not played that spec before. He's had his Shaman forever & has a total of 14 days /played on it, most of it as resto.

Granted, he's a very good player in general, but you don't need to be a 99th percentile veteran of a class to do a particular mage tower, unless perhaps it's one of those that's tuned high.

The Enhancement shaman challenge is Sigryn, right? That challenge in particular is pretty easy once you learn the mechanics of the class itself. That challenge is one of the most mechanically challenging fights where you have to manage a ton of things at once, but there's not a lot of unavoidable damage that goes out. I also recall it being fairly easy compared to other specs with the same fight like Ret pally. But essentially you can mitigate a lot of incoming damage on that encounter by playing well, and there's really not a hard DPS check like some of the other encounters.

[MakeMeLaugh]

The Enhancement shaman challenge is Sigryn, right? That challenge in particular is pretty easy once you learn the mechanics of the class itself. That challenge is one of the most mechanically challenging fights where you have to manage a ton of things at once, but there's not a lot of unavoidable damage that goes out. I also recall it being fairly easy compared to other specs with the same fight like Ret pally. But essentially you can mitigate a lot of incoming damage on that encounter by playing well, and there's really not a hard DPS check like some of the other encounters.

Sigryn does indeed have a lot of mechanics and someone that isn't familiar with a class could get overwhelmed by it. My main was enhanc in legion, I was not a mythic raider but did heroics. I completed the enhanc mage tower challenge in the first day it launched in about 5 tries I believe, and I remember it quite well, the previous 4 tries were just me adjusting to the mechanics of the fight, once I got that Sigryn just died.

Now, shaman is still my main, played enhanc since the beginning but changed to elemental recently and got Sigryn done in 6 tries. What I noticed this time, is that dps is more tight, you have to cleave more or else you will die to the soft enrage(shield spam), so there' some dps check.

Some specs struggle a lot more than others in the same fight, and that was the same back then, and something I still don't understand why. Difficulty should be around the same for everyone(specs), no? I'm playing DH havoc this expansion and after 30~40 I still could not kill Xylem, my best attempt was 16% on P2 I believe. Logged on my level 51 warrior, which I never play as arms, last time was probably legion mage tower, and got the Xylem fight done in like 5 attemps? What the hell... and let's not forget, warrior had a legion legendary that gave you 2 more charges of heroic leap, so it was even easier back then. Now, reading their last round of balances for mage tower, they nerfed P1 for Havoc, which I agree the damage is too high, but the problem was darkness phase, which does an insane amount of damage and the clones have too much hp and they didn't touch that at all! Not only that, but the real problem is how tight the dps is in p2(demon phase).