Mage Tower timewalking

[Hctaz]

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).

Yeah it's a little crazy.

It SHOULD be around the same between specs with adjustments like how DH can double jump out of the ring of ice so they had the Comet Storm do more damage to DH than DK who has to meticulously kill the ice. That makes sense to me in some aspects, but I don't know how you'd counter that.
It definitely feels like a situation where the fights are tuned to be harder than they were day 1 in Legion which is also harder than Blizzard stated that they should be when they dropped and people couldn't beat them. So I am a little confused there. I'll have to do more specs and see how I feel, but I also literally have only one level 60 since I haven't played since BfA.

[L3fty]

Is there a consensus on the hardest classes to do this with?

Just completed it as MM hunt after approx 80 pulls...required me to use new macros and abilities i've not had to touch since rolling the class. Fun but equally frustrating. I consider myself to be quite a good player and that was pretty darn tough. Wonder if we will see more nerfs prior to Jan 4th, cos I can imagine a lot of tears otherwise.

[Huntermyth]

i did the beastmastery hunter one pretty easily! when it was current content and i am too scarred to do it one more time is the only thing i want to say about the matter. no thanks. oh no.

[Crysis]

Can I get answer on this from somebody who has done it perhaps?

Is it possible (in the most casual sense) to complete mage tower on chars with simple SL gear with no additional gem sockets or old enchants and other shit that Im too lazy to farm or buy (since people sell it like maniacs for zillion golds... no idea how someone can spend 50k for fucking gem) because of one x year old feature that gives me a transmog or two, and by completing I mean as a normal dude, who has done MT during Legion pre-nerf with chars he played and is able to have AOTCs pretty regularly with some attempts at mythic when WoW is fun (currently its not), or should I just not waste my time trying it? I tried 3 times on MM, 3 times on affli, 1 time on destro, and it seemed pretty undoable without tryharding.

[Gaidax]

Can I get answer on this from somebody who has done it perhaps?

Is it possible (in the most casual sense) to complete mage tower on chars with simple SL gear with no additional gem sockets or old enchants and other shit that Im too lazy to farm or buy (since people sell it like maniacs for zillion golds... no idea how someone can spend 50k for fucking gem) because of one x year old feature that gives me a transmog or two, and by completing I mean as a normal dude, who has done MT during Legion pre-nerf with chars he played and is able to have AOTCs pretty regularly with some attempts at mythic when WoW is fun (currently its not), or should I just not waste my time trying it? I tried 3 times on MM, 3 times on affli, 1 time on destro, and it seemed pretty undoable without tryharding.

Yes...

I just entered with plain SL gear and did it.

People do sockets and other BS to make it a bit easier, but it's unnecessary.

[Kallisto]

Doesn't matter when. The NPCs did not benefit from any gear you obtained. They could survive 3-4 stacks easily in Legion. Now you can't have 2.

yes it does matter. If you did it post antorus then you're basically outgearing the mage tower to stupid levels. if you did it pre Tomb of Sargeras opening. Then that's when you did it as it was balanced for.

[scubi666stacy]

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.

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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.

Well I did the majority with gear from the last patch - but I never had raid gear and often did not have optimal legendaries, so technically, my overgearing of the encounters was not that extreme without any tier set bonuses etc.

But I did my first kill on a fire mage without the extreme consumables exploit at a gear level of about 910 without tier set bonuses. Frost followed a bit later and then arcane. I have also done the mage challenges now.

Anyway, even overgearing these challenges it was not "fun" in the common sense - it was great finally beating the encounters, but they have been frustrating anyway. WW monk was kinda fun, and enhancement shaman / retribution paladin have also been a bit more fun. Boomkin was easy.

Besides all that - they made the encounters harder by including stronger enrage mechanics for example. You cannot just kill Karam in the last phase, because then Raest will one- or two-shot you. If you need to much time for the Fury of the Godqueen trio, they will enrage and kill you. Especially that fight never had this tight enrage in Legion, only a soft enrage with the caster putting up his shield again and again.

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i did the beastmastery hunter one pretty easily! when it was current content and i am too scarred to do it one more time is the only thing i want to say about the matter. no thanks. oh no.

Well I am practicing that currently and its harder because you have to kill Tugar and the worm at about the same time or the worm will oneshot you in his enrage. So you have to deal with Tugar mechanics longer.

[Mardux]

I haven't tried anything but Xylem yet, but he is 100% objectively overtuned, and I say that as someone who did him on 3 specs during Legion.

In the Legion iteration his razor ice/comet storm attack would hit you for maybe 10-15% of your HP every couple seconds, giving you 10-15 seconds to kill the ice and get out (with passive healing and such). I hopped on my DH alt just to go see what the tuning was like since this was an encounter I remembered quite well--and had the first two hits of comet storm hit me for, and I am giving you actual numbers here 41% of my total HP and then 37% of my total HP, with the third hitting for another 41% (half of that being overkill)--and all of that happened in under 5 seconds.

They are not correctly tuned.

This is just straight up false. Razor ice did 2.8 million damage instantly if you touched them. Comet storm did a little under 500k *every 5 seconds*. The only major difference is you can't simply outgear the fight now, you have to be bothered to do mechanics.

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Yeah it's a little crazy.

It SHOULD be around the same between specs with adjustments like how DH can double jump out of the ring of ice so they had the Comet Storm do more damage to DH than DK who has to meticulously kill the ice. That makes sense to me in some aspects, but I don't know how you'd counter that.
It definitely feels like a situation where the fights are tuned to be harder than they were day 1 in Legion which is also harder than Blizzard stated that they should be when they dropped and people couldn't beat them. So I am a little confused there. I'll have to do more specs and see how I feel, but I also literally have only one level 60 since I haven't played since BfA.

The fights were always going to be a little more challenging than they were in Legion. In Legion we had tier sets, legendaries, artifact weapons, and could outgear the fights. In the timewalking version, none of those are viable options (aside from rolling in there with 2 dozen sockets to make the fight slightly easier).

[Hctaz]

The fights were always going to be a little more challenging than they were in Legion. In Legion we had tier sets, legendaries, artifact weapons, and could outgear the fights. In the timewalking version, none of those are viable options (aside from rolling in there with 2 dozen sockets to make the fight slightly easier).

I mean.. not really? My point is that they made these encounters in Legion with a specific amount of power/difficulty in mind.
When it was available for the VERY FIRST TIME, the Frost DK challenge was easier than it currently is in the timewalking version of the fight. Blizzard's quote from that first Mage Tower was that the encounters were tuned to be doable with the next tier's raid and that they would be nigh impossible unless you had perfect legendary items and were one of the better players in the game. The fact that it's even harder than that is a little silly.

And there's no excuse of like... the challenges being more challenging as they could easily tweak the numbers. If Xylem's Frost Bolt was designed to do 8-10% of your max health per cast, then they could have made it do the same in the timewalking version. There's no real reason why it should be harder than it was in Legion unless they just literally didn't touch it. If they didn't adjust for the loss in player power, then that's incredibly lazy.

[Relapses]

I mean.. not really? My point is that they made these encounters in Legion with a specific amount of power/difficulty in mind.
When it was available for the VERY FIRST TIME, the Frost DK challenge was easier than it currently is in the timewalking version of the fight. Blizzard's quote from that first Mage Tower was that the encounters were tuned to be doable with the next tier's raid and that they would be nigh impossible unless you had perfect legendary items and were one of the better players in the game. The fact that it's even harder than that is a little silly.

And there's no excuse of like... the challenges being more challenging as they could easily tweak the numbers. If Xylem's Frost Bolt was designed to do 8-10% of your max health per cast, then they could have made it do the same in the timewalking version. There's no real reason why it should be harder than it was in Legion unless they just literally didn't touch it. If they didn't adjust for the loss in player power, then that's incredibly lazy.

Honestly, kind of wish they'd gone the template route. Imagine if Blizzard kept MT completely unchanged from its Legion iteration and instead essentially teleported your character back to Legion times -- level 110, the ability to choose your own Legiondary, artifact weapon, all the same talents/abilities, a set of Mythic Nighthold gear. Maybe that's just not possible, but it would at least have allowed them to provide a truly 1:1 experience for the challenge.

[muto]

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?

No. Any of the TCG mounts minus the Turtle will be rarer in time along with mounts that spawn once a week like Voidtalon. I’d also argue that the Violet Proto-Drake will be rarer as well as is a lot of the raid metas that you need x number of people for such as the EN/NH meta. The Ultramarine Qiraji Battle Tank from Archaeology will be rarer as well. Also learning a spec doesn’t take long. I hadn’t played Holy Priest since Cataclysm and I got that challenge down in a couple hours back in Legion.

[beratish]

Honestly, kind of wish they'd gone the template route. Imagine if Blizzard kept MT completely unchanged from its Legion iteration and instead essentially teleported your character back to Legion times -- level 110, the ability to choose your own Legiondary, artifact weapon, all the same talents/abilities, a set of Mythic Nighthold gear. Maybe that's just not possible, but it would at least have allowed them to provide a truly 1:1 experience for the challenge.

I think it isn't possible but only due to an odd technical reason. Trial of ascension has you playing different characters so taking over a template should be possible I just don't know if they can map that many abilities using that system since it still technically is counted as a vehicle in the game and I think the engine caps them.

[Sialina]

Can I get answer on this from somebody who has done it perhaps?

Is it possible (in the most casual sense) to complete mage tower on chars with simple SL gear with no additional gem sockets or old enchants and other shit that Im too lazy to farm or buy (since people sell it like maniacs for zillion golds... no idea how someone can spend 50k for fucking gem) because of one x year old feature that gives me a transmog or two, and by completing I mean as a normal dude, who has done MT during Legion pre-nerf with chars he played and is able to have AOTCs pretty regularly with some attempts at mythic when WoW is fun (currently its not), or should I just not waste my time trying it? I tried 3 times on MM, 3 times on affli, 1 time on destro, and it seemed pretty undoable without tryharding.

It is very doable, I did all 4 druid challenges in my normal SL gear, no fancy stuff, just regular SL food. flask, rune and oil. I used the speed food for the boomkin challenge, apart from that nothing fancy.

[Arcreid]

People just have to stop being bad, the game difficulty is already being dumbed down since WOD.

How do you even fail at this "challenge" when most classes only have 3 ability rotations? This is not MOP.

If you die, you're bad, find out what makes you bad, stop doing it, and BAM, you're not bad anymore.

[chiddie]

Honestly, kind of wish they'd gone the template route. Imagine if Blizzard kept MT completely unchanged from its Legion iteration and instead essentially teleported your character back to Legion times -- level 110, the ability to choose your own Legiondary, artifact weapon, all the same talents/abilities, a set of Mythic Nighthold gear. Maybe that's just not possible, but it would at least have allowed them to provide a truly 1:1 experience for the challenge.

I can’t really understand why they did not stick with templates, tuning and further adjustments would have been so WAY easier.

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People just have to stop being bad, the game difficulty is already being dumbed down since WOD.

How do you even fail at this "challenge" when most classes only have 3 ability rotations? This is not MOP.

If you die, you're bad, find out what makes you bad, stop doing it, and BAM, you're not bad anymore.

People have no interest in getting good for a game where you chances of success rely so heavily on gear and gear is incredibly difficult to obtain.

Change the combat system to Dark Souls combat system, then I will fight to git gud like I did in DS.

[Unlimited Power]

So I managed to get down Destruction Warlock and Havoc DH. Now I've officially collected all the transmog rewards from the Mage Tower challenges, including the fel werebear. Only thing remaining on my list is completing a healing challenge for the mount.

I've quite deliberately put it off. I know the first part of the challenge is probably some of the hardest, with the middle part being far more forgiving, but I've always struggled with healing in any aspect of the game, and the thought of each attempt at the later stages taking upwards of 10+ minutes has me reeling.

Also unsure which class to attempt it on. I'm frankly unfamiliar with all the healing specs since I did the challenges back in Legion, but Mistweaver is probably my least disliked spec of any of the healing specs, and I feel they have a decent toolset for the challenge. Their perceived weakness, mana retention, also doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as the MT healing challenge has plenty of opportunities to drink between stages.

[melzas]

Can I get answer on this from somebody who has done it perhaps?

Is it possible (in the most casual sense) to complete mage tower on chars with simple SL gear with no additional gem sockets or old enchants and other shit that Im too lazy to farm or buy (since people sell it like maniacs for zillion golds... no idea how someone can spend 50k for fucking gem) because of one x year old feature that gives me a transmog or two, and by completing I mean as a normal dude, who has done MT during Legion pre-nerf with chars he played and is able to have AOTCs pretty regularly with some attempts at mythic when WoW is fun (currently its not), or should I just not waste my time trying it? I tried 3 times on MM, 3 times on affli, 1 time on destro, and it seemed pretty undoable without tryharding.

I've done it on character with super duper optimised gear sockets consumables and shit (not the best timewalking setup, but pretty decent, lots of sockets, best flask, great trinkets etc.) and then I did some with characters that have 0 sockets and SL pvp gear and to be honest, the difference isnt worth the gold and effort you have to put into obtaining those optimised sets. I've spent about 100k gold on that first character and I regretted it.

Even best gear won't allow you to ignore mechanics that need to be executed perfectly, at best it will make some dps checks easier but overall the fights arent balanced around them.

That said, if you were hoping to "get somewhere" within 3 tries, then you are in for a bumpy ride. These aren't casual encounters you walk in and defeat after few attempts, they are pretty much solo mode mythic raid fights, where you need to know exactly what to do and how the fight mechanics go, you probably gonna need addons, macros and overall idea how to play your spec pretty well. So to answer your question - possible without timewalking gimmicky gear, but you need to "tryhard" them, no matter what gear you gonna use.

The difficulty between specs is also pretty dire.The easiest one of them all is probably windwalker monk, I got it done within 3 tries (but I knew the fight from Legion and had DBM/macros ready). Badly optimised gear (full pvp versa stats), 0 sockets, no consumables, crap trinekts. For comparison, protection paladin took me almost 4 hours with tons of sockets consumables.

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Also unsure which class to attempt it on. I'm frankly unfamiliar with all the healing specs since I did the challenges back in Legion, but Mistweaver is probably my least disliked spec of any of the healing specs, and I feel they have a decent toolset for the challenge. Their perceived weakness, mana retention, also doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as the MT healing challenge has plenty of opportunities to drink between stages.

I too have healing one left, and while I havent tried it yet, I did some internet digging and my research ranks them from easiest to hardest like this: Hpaladin > Mw monk > holy priest > resto sham. So if monk shouldn't be a bad option for it in your case.

[Niwes]

i did Raest and the other one with my frost mage yesterday. and its called one of the easier ones. that fight fucked me so hard around 70 times and i just had luck in the end.

Raest is running so fast to you, you have literally 1-2s between handling him and target switch to the hand for damage and interrupt. and between you have to slow and Blizzard the small adds. its all so damn close. all the time.

i just did it, with using extra addons, some target macros and stuff. imo you just cant do it by „only knowing the class well“.

i play wow since 16 years. i know 9/12 classes very well. i did mage tower in Legion with some of them (4-5). 2 days ago i was fully straight forward in the „now i get that tome mount“ mood. hell. after my frost mage i have ZERO interest in doing it with some other class again.

maybe i am just too old now. for me it feels definetely just too hard. and what stressed me the most, was the fact, that it always took 3-4mins to come to the critical point, having 1 chance, fucked up and again 3-4 mins … rinse and repeat. the fight hadnt stressed me so much, if the critical thing had come directly at the first part of the fight. that was rather annoying.

now i am in full „wait until Blizzard nerf it“ mood.

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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).

yep. would sign the Legion comment with my blood.

i did it on 4-5 classes (every spec, so around 12-15 specs) and it was mostly 1-2 hours, 30-40 tries or so.

Legion was in NO WAY same hard as that actual MT timewalking thing.

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tbh: i found 30 waves Proving Grounds way easier than actual MT.

[Elias1337]

I mean.. not really? My point is that they made these encounters in Legion with a specific amount of power/difficulty in mind.
When it was available for the VERY FIRST TIME, the Frost DK challenge was easier than it currently is in the timewalking version of the fight. Blizzard's quote from that first Mage Tower was that the encounters were tuned to be doable with the next tier's raid and that they would be nigh impossible unless you had perfect legendary items and were one of the better players in the game. The fact that it's even harder than that is a little silly.

And there's no excuse of like... the challenges being more challenging as they could easily tweak the numbers. If Xylem's Frost Bolt was designed to do 8-10% of your max health per cast, then they could have made it do the same in the timewalking version. There's no real reason why it should be harder than it was in Legion unless they just literally didn't touch it. If they didn't adjust for the loss in player power, then that's incredibly lazy.

There is plenty of reasons why it should be harder. But lazy casuals like yourself will never understand it.

[Valysar]

I have a question for survival hunters doing Xylem.

Sometimes, on the ice prison thing, my disengage seems buggued. I jump, I disengage and it works, OR, I jump, I disengage, I hit some invisible wall and I fall straight into the spikes and die ... Am I the only one ?