CONTEXT
My general philosophy on Timewalking difficulty is that it should be easy enough that you don’t have to know boss mechanics (a lot of the older expansions don’t have them in the adventure guide), but you need to move out of obvious bad stuff and each role needs to do their basic job (no tank soloing the dungeon, no healer in dps spec, etc). For this to happen, enemies need to hit hard enough but not kill bad players too quickly, so they also need to survive long enough to kill players over time if the healer isn’t healing or the tank isn’t getting aggro or using defensives. Trash needs to last around 15 seconds for all dps specs to have fun, bosses 45.
Timewalking used to scale everyone’s gear down to a certain ilvl. Max level characters did more damage than low level characters due to talents and some OP-per-ilvl gear like tier sets, artifacts, legendaries, etc, but anyone with skill and effort had a meaningful contribution to the group.
11.0 changed timewalking in a couple disastrous ways:
- You could now queue for timewalking at level 10 (was 30 or higher depending on which timewalking expansion it was). Conceptually this is a W, but the tuning was off; a fresh level 10 character could kill a pack of elites in a few seconds.
- Gear scaling was removed, allowing geared max level characters or low level twinks to kill anything (including bosses) in a couple seconds. Even without those hard carries, bosses generally died in around 10 seconds.
11.1.7 gave us some timewalking changes starting two weeks ago with the new BFA timewalking, which consisted of a few things:
- More general enemy health.
- A lot more boss health.
- Some new gear scaling system, which was advertised as geared players taking more damage from mechanics but it also essentially makes them deal less damage (I will go into detail on this later).
For BFA I did 1 each on my 23 max level characters, all around 636 ilvl. (I currently have no desire to level additional alts). Trash still dies a little fast, but way better than it’s been since 11.0. I hate that you can skip bosses (Freehold) but that’s not new. Bosses seemed to have in the range of 120-150M health (roughly 25% less than current season heroic dungeons).
MOP TIMEWALKING TUNING
This week, it was very obvious MoP Timewalking tuning was not up to the new BFA standard. I got Scholomance right away and the bosses die 3x as fast (a combination of less health and more dps uptime due to negligible mechanics). So I decided to spam dozens of MoP timewalking dungeons on a healer and investigate the tuning. Numbers are from a Disc priest in full 636 ilvl gear (Veteran 5).
- Scholomance
- Most of this dungeon needs 2x or 3x health, except the students after Lilian Voss and the casters in Rattlegore’s room. The enemies before 1st boss could do more damage.
- Instructor Chillheart has 31.2M health and then you have to kill the phylactery with 23.4M health. This fight is way too fast. The dot she puts on one person (and it jumps to someone else when it expires) does a little too much damage.
- Jandice Barov at 48.7M health usually gets 1 phase of clones and dies shortly after. I don’t know if there’s some way to get through that phase besides just running around spamming aoe damage. The phase is annoying, but she probably needs double health. Maybe make it so she only phases once?
- Rattlegore at 58.5M health needs 3x the health because dps uptime is very high.
- Lilian Voss same health, same problem.
- Darkmaster Gandling has 68.2M health but still dies as quick as the rest if you saved lust for him. I got teleported to the side room a couple times and it seems like you’re supposed to dispel to help kill the adds faster, but the dispel did almost nothing; maybe bugged or broken scaling. In general that mechanic is just an annoyance when the enemies are too easy.
- Gate of the Setting Sun
- There’s very little trash in this dungeon. Health is okay but more damage would be good. The bosses have most of the problems.
- Saboteur Kip’tilak at 87.7M health dies way too fast (unless the tank rushed in there and locked people out). The mechanic should do a little more damage because it’s very obvious you should avoid it.
- Striker Ga’dok at 70.2M health dies too fast unless your group is lacking ranged damage. He needs like a damage reduction buff while strafing, and buff his adds a lot so players focus on them during that phase. Also make the ground effect a lot stronger so people aren’t standing in the bad for dps uptime, that’s just lame. It’s really annoying he can’t die during the strafing run, and painful if you don’t kill him before he starts a second one. I think it’ll be fine if you just increase the cooldown on it.
- Commander Ri’mok at 70.2M health dies too fast, unless he despawns (which causes the doors to open and allows him to be skipped). I think it’s a terrain pathing bug. Part of him dying so fast is the adds and acid puddle are too weak and can be ignored. He needs like a sound effect on his frenzied attack thing because it is deadly but some people don’t move out of it.
- Raigon’s weak point only has 15.6M health, it should be a bit more. It is a problem when people don’t know the mechanic; the launchers need some extra highlighting. Also make him immune to damage before the weak spot is broken; some people don’t notice when they’re only doing 1% of their normal damage (this happens in the last section of Darkflame Cleft also). The adds need a big buff so the people who aren’t killing the weak spot have something to do. After the weak spot is killed, he has 121.8M health, but he takes 300% increased damage so he basically only has 30M health. Remove that damage multiplier and the fight will be much more fun. Also it’s really annoying not knowing his attack range when he’s chasing you.
- Stormstout Brewery
- This is a short dungeon but the trash is weird. The big hozen at the start of the dungeon hit like a truck, and a tank rushing in before the healer is ready might get killed. After that, the healer doesn’t get to play the game because the rabbits and alementals don’t do enough damage.
- Ook-Ook has 112.1M health which is better than a lot of other bosses, but it should still be higher. Barrels should do more damage to him and to players.
- Hoptallus has 87.7M health which wouldn’t be so bad if you actually had to run away from Furlwind or whatever it’s called. He usually dies before adds come out, which is sad. Using the hammers is fun.
- Yan-Zhu the Uncasked has 97.5M health and is one of my favorite boss fights because the random mechanic selection instead of things happening in the same order every time. However, the mechanics are annoying for someone who doesn’t know them and he needs to do more damage. When people do know the mechanics, he dies too fast.
- Shado-Pan Monastery
- Trash in the first half of the dungeon doesn’t do enough damage. Fighting the students should feel more like a battle of attrition than a faceroll. The enemies between 2nd and 3rd boss are good. The enemies after 3rd boss don’t do enough damage, but they need less ways to interrupt the purify casts.
- Gu Cloudstrike has 68.2M health with a phase of killing a 48.7M health serpent. A little more health would be good, but damage would be better. The static field does good damage but people regularly stand in it; I’m guessing it doesn’t have a screen effect for the less-aware players. The serpent’s breath is very obvious so it should do more damage.
- Master Snowdrift (82.9M health) could use a little more health and damage. The illusions slow the fight for only a few seconds because they die almost instantly; pointless at that tuning.
- Sha of Violence (107.2M health) is decent but the add is completely ignorable and there needs to be some cue for the healer to dispel the tank disorient instead of staring at the UI. The boss should do more damage too.
- Taran Zhu (87.7M health) is undertuned and the grippy hands are too anti-melee. Being gripped is currently just an annoyance, needs to be a bigger problem so players will want to avoid it, but melee don’t want to kill them because it’s a big dps loss; hands need more health and less spawns. IMO mind control players if they get full hatred.
- Temple of the Jade Serpent
- This dungeon is in a decent tuning state thanks to a revamp for M+ in Dragonflight, but it still has issues.
- Wise Mari has 61.4M health, but has 4 stacks of 25% damage reduction that you have to kill the 18.3M health elementals to remove stacks so the fight lasts a good length. The real problem is the tank runs ahead and gets killed in the courtyard while everyone else is waiting on the RP to loot the body. Spawn a loot chest IMO.
- The other side is skipped 99% of the time, I didn’t get their health amount. That “boss fight” has a very bad mechanic, especially because players never want to stop doing damage, even if it means the fight will take longer. The mechanic needs to punish players more at high stacks, and give them more health so players switch targets as intended instead of nuking one before it gets to max stacks. Also spawn them farther apart so noobs aren’t cleaving.
- Liu Flameheart (122.8M health) is okay.
- Sha of Doubt (also 122.8M health) could use a little more health and the adds are a joke.
- Mogu’shan Palace
- Best dungeon on trash tuning. Enemies last a decent amount of time and have effective mechanics.
- Trial of the King (65.8M, 65.8M, 58.5M + 29.2M lion) is on the long side. Each of them has as much health as a Scholomance boss. However, all of their damage/mechanics are too weak.
- Gekkan has 87.7M health, but he comes with 4 adds with ~30M health each so the fight takes time. There’s 2 problems with the fight:
- No one does add mechanics, causing the fight to take longer than it should.
- Usually the tank jumps down to start the fight, and a pet or something aggros the 2 oracles near the exit. Just make it so you can’t jump down, so people will always kill those first.
- Xin the Weaponmaster has 97.5M health, which is a little lower than I’d like but all the weapons flying around the room are glorious chaos. The cone attack should do more damage but have a better telegraph.
TIMEWALKING GEAR SCALING
In my dozens of runs I did get one level 11 fury warrior tank (with the sockets and enchants). They absolutely still do 680+ levels of damage and self-sustain thanks to the busted lifesteal enchant. I also got a brewmaster twink which at least was playing the right spec for his role, but a tank spec shouldn’t do that much damage.
But what really needs attention is how much enemy health increases with gear, compared to how much your dps increases with that gear. I farmed an entire set of 610 ilvl gear to compare with my full set of 636 ilvl gear. 610 ilvl Shadow spec sims at 659,679 dps. Simming that gear upped to 636 ilvl (to avoid damage spike from tier set and to keep same secondary stat ratios) I get 843,851 dps. This is a 27.9% dps increase. How much does enemy health change when switching my gear sets?
- Taran Zhu goes from 79.1M to 87.7M health
- Sha of Doubt goes from 110.7M to 122.8M health
That’s only a 10.9% enemy health increase compared to a 27.9% damage increase, which means those 26 ilvls still have me killing enemies ~15.3% faster. If you want gear to still matter in timewalking, fine, but it needs to be a reasonable amount so the top-geared people aren’t soloing the dungeon.
Additionally, there is a perception that geared characters are carrying a little harder than they actually are because the Details damage meter does not account for the enemy health scaling. It will be more inaccurate if the health scaling is increased. If this can’t be fixed, just give us the old gear scaling system back.