The old legion mage tower was doable with artifact weapon+traits and legion legendaries. Since the artifact weapon and legion legendaries don’t and won’t work in the timewalking we will need our new borrowed powers. We don’t trust you to balance it you always fail at that (covenants most recently).
Most classes are a hollow shell without conduits/soulbind/legendary. Look at survival hunter… 2nd highest damage source is wildfire bomb legendary. Look at venthyr warrior… by far top damage is condemn.
Classes are balanced around these temporary borrowed power systems (grinds) and this means the mage towers will be a nightmare for classes that are HEAVILY tuned around their covenant ability/legendary.
You are going to make a lot of customers angry with this pointless change. The time to disable and never implement again borrowed power systems is a new expac. Not to make old content artificially harder during what is supposed to be fun timewalking.
Edit to propose the OBVIOUS and simple alternative to achieve their goal: Bolster the mage tower encounter’s health and/or damage… Then no specific class will feel gutted more than another with the current suggested change.
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Go ask Mike Ybarra one simple question: “Hey Mike, if we disable all Shadowlands borrowed power for Mage Tower Timewalking, will that impact all classes the same?”
He actually plays the game at a high level and will be able to tell you that is absolutely not the case. Just grow a brain and buff the encounters, don’t gut the players.
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The only one that’ll suck if you don’t bug it out is the affiction one without the snare.
I suspect that this was done to avoid cheesing the fights (since some of the covenant abilities do create a lot of cheese, looking at you druids) and to allow players who don’t have Shadowlands a shot at completing the encounters.
There’s only two ways Blizzard can really address this:
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They exclude all the borrowed power from Shadowlands for every class. This makes the encounters a bit tougher for players who are used to relying on their Shadowlands powers, but it makes the playing field fair for everyone, especially players who do not have Shadowlands or have not invested enough time in Shadowlands to have the best conduits, the empowered conduit slots etc.
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They allow the borrowed power from Shadowlands and balance the encounters around them, which makes it easier for those who have invested a lot of time into Shadowlands, but impossible for those who haven’t, since the encounters will be balanced around power that they don’t have.
From what I’ve heard though, the Heart of Azeroth is apparently still working in the Mage Tower (not sure if that will get fixed, probably will be), so if that’s still active when the content goes live and you finally jump into Legion TW, you should still be able to cheese it.
we dont want to depend on borrowed power. bring on the authentic magetower experience.
#NoChanges
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…Warlocks have Curse of Exhaustion now though.
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But the original Mage Tower was balanced around having borrowed power in the form of Legion legendaries and artifact weapon abilities. It also did not scale up or down depending on your level and/or item level.
So disabling Shadowlands borrowed power does not make the experience authentic, as some specs have been redesigned since Legion, and some of the Legion borrowed powers heavily impacted the difficulty of the Mage Tower when it was current.
In other words, the original experience and difficulty cannot be recreated, no matter what scaling, numerical tuning, and disabling/enabling of abilities is done.
I’m fine with disabling soulbinds. But Conduits are accessible to everyone, as are legendaries. So I don’t see a reason to disable them. Some classes rely on their legendaries to actually do adequate dps, same with conduits.
Soulbinds I do understand disabling, same with covenant skills, because for instance, if a balance druid does their challenge, Convoke will do a LOT more than a Kyrian, who will have literally no bonus due to not being in a group.
However, Conduits and LEgendaries SHOULD remain active. Just do not balance it around them, so level 50-59 characters can do it too, if they’re skilled enough.
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But are we going to be able to easily individually curse every single little add that spawns, as easily as we could apply Corruption (+Sacrolash) back in Legion to the whole cluster of adds?
I haven’t tested it out on PTR yet, but I have a feeling that the twins challenge is going to be harder for for Affliction than for other specs.
Also, unpopular opinion, but they need to disable gem sockets and old legendaries.
We should not have to go back and farm timewalking gear to have a decent time with the challenge. (As a sentiment that’s been echoed in the feedback thread, most of them feel overtuned, but too easy with timewalking gear)
Lol they do don’t they? I’m so used to not having it.
…why were you cursing the adds in Legion? You just needed to curse the twin. O_o
There was no need to curse the adds in Legion, as Corruption applied the Sacrolash slow.
The adds don’t die fast enough to DoTs, and they chase you as well. My lock was not well geared in Legion, so I could not have done it without the Sacrolash slow.
In Shadowlands, though, the only way to slow is with the Curse of Exhaustion, which can’t be applied to all the adds.
You do you need to curse the adds. IIRC when I did it in legion the adds explode/deal a lot of dmg to you when they reach you.
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