The good thing about the mage tower rn is you can farm for stuff like leech and socket gear from raids which is nice.
Although having convoke for say the bear mage tower would be nice. Prepatch mt may be nice if you farm some of the gear.
Even Wowhead (typically a Blizzard apologist and a mouthpiece for hardcore players) reported that enemy health and damage for every Mage Tower challenge went live much higher than last seen on the PTR.
Countless players were posting screenshots to show how enemy tuning had shot up literally overnight.
There was no Blizzard announcement, so I have no official single citation. If you donât trust the community, and the numbers in the game itself, I donât know what to tell you.
Players were shocked at how much harder most of the challenges were on live than they were on PTR or in Legion, and they understandably wanted nerfs. What was even more shocking was the way that Blizzard caved in to the elitists rather than appropriately balance the content.
What we have now is not an evergreen version. Things are going to get harder or easier with the upcoming talent rework, and then again each time there is a stat or level squish.
Everyone is going to have a different opinion, but the Legion iterations seemed to be much better received. Even if you werenât the most skilled player or you didnât raid, you could gear up in Argus to the point where all of the challenges became much more reasonable (but still basically required key mechanics to be followed). You could get free legendaries from emissaries or save up Wakening Essence for specific ones.
Contrast this with the Shadowlands timewalking iterations where there is literally nothing you can do but wipe hundreds of times. Even if you follow key mechanics, you may still die from not executing your rotation perfectly, or from a poorly timed or placed add spawn. (Farming a timewalking set helps slightly, but not as much as gearing up normally through content helped in Legion.)
I would personally like to see more challenging solo content in the game, but it needs to provide progression (such as BfA Visions or a theoretical Torghast that drops gear). Or if there is a challenge that awards cosmetics only, the game needs to provide an accessible progression route outside of that challenge so that the challenge does not stay impossible forever.
Shadowlands Torghast and Mage Tower were poorly received because they had the wrong tuning and wrong rewards for the wrong audiences.
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If true, you can link it. And on that front, have you considered that the PTR version was intentionally under tuned to get more testing data?
âThroughout the community, many players have noted that the Mage Tower difficulty has felt overtuned (e.g. Reddit), especially since every challenge received health buffs since the last time on the PTR. Players have commented that many of the challenges feel as difficult as Week 1 version of the original Mage Tower (or even harder), which is almost 2 tiers of gear lower than the end of expansion difficulty of the Mage Tower.â
âWith the Mage Tower being hyped as one of the main pieces of content of Patch 9.1.5, many players in the community are frustrated that the Mage Tower is so difficult on live servers after an easier PTR testing. With Timewalking scaling this time, thereâs not much you can do to outgear the content. Many players are feeling forced to farm outdated gear to get an power boost in the challenge to gain any advantage.â
Hardcore streamers were saying that the instances were a reasonable level of challenge on the PTR. Why would it be wise for Blizzard to crank up all the numbers before releasing untested tuning to the general population? The data for PTR would not be relevant for the live version because itâs skilled players doing an easier version than intended.
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Gave the mage tower another shot (resto druid). Progressed to stage three, according to the guide, the timer for the stage is very generous, however upon trying it, doesnât seem like it. Watching some person do it via video with all the buffs, 10 seconds to spare lmao.
Doesnât seem worth the effort.
I had fun trying though, not getting past stage 1 consistently was entirely a skill issue.
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So? They can guess, but they donât actually know the intended level of difficulty. Them buffing hard instance content in between PTR and live isnât uncommon for raid, especially from mythic testing.
That assumes the intent of the testing was for tuning. It could (for all we know) have been just functionality testing. Asking the question of âdoes this boss still do what we think itâs going to do?â âis something working inside of the instance thatâs not supposed to?â
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so reading more on mage tower etc, using an outdated trinket, and outdated potion will triple your dps. lolâŠ
itâs not the mage tower that I donât like, itâs all these gimmicks.
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I agree
Itâs pretty considerable the difference between pre nerf crusader and post nerf crusader, and my biggest complaint is probably how certain specs getting reworks and losing talents since legion affected the challengeâs difficulty or how some classes just outright benefit more from timewalking scaling shenanigans
I had a lot of fun wiping and learning/adapting until i consistently made it past the phases iâd been struggling with, but definitely wasnât a fan of going out to get a legion trinket and getting my old bfa gear out the bank because it had sockets and better stat itemisation than my full vers sl pvp set with no sockets because i wasnât exalted with venari 
going from 2% haste in my SL set to 22% haste in my bfa set made phase 1 and 2 such a breeze it was ridiculous
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I did the original post-ânerfâ status (before it went away.)
There is an rng component to the mage tower for healing depending on who the npcs cast on. Which is annoying. I would say the hardest issue was the last boss for me when I did the healing challenges in legion. They have you purposely not heal your allies until a certain point. Which I thought was an interesting healing challenge. And also helping dps adds.
Healing challenges definetly are a bit frustrating I havenât tried them recently since those are the ones I hated the most in legion.
Also Only really worth doing for the armor sets imo. The title is a bit crazy to get. For druid guardian seems like the best to do since it gives you a new bear form.
Honestly you are going to want to use old gear anyway since the repair bill on current gear is kilter. You save gold using old stuff/ stuff without durability like heirlooms.
Used a twink set from auction house greens and some leech enchants for say assasination rogue mage tower. Saved a bunch of gold using old consumables and old armor on repair bills.
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Internal testing should first determine the basic functionality, then the PTR should be used to confirm the functionality while also test tuning. (Tuning is a part of functionality because bugs might not show up until players behave more realistically.)
But Blizzard is trying to run WoW with as little investment costs as humanly possible, and WoW has scores of fans and content creators so dedicated that they will spend hours testing content without pay, so the PTR ended up serving as internal testing, and the actual live challenges ended up serving as the PTR.
WoW devs were either too proud to backtrack on botched tuning, they were hoping to rev up time played by having players wipe repeatedly, or this is just another byproduct of their âreward the elitists but punish the casuals and soloersâ policy.
There is no âwarâ on solo gameplay in WoW. Itâs an MMO, and has been since the beginning. The second âMâ in MMO stands for âMULTIPLAYERâ.
Then why have devs nerfed or completely removed gear rewards from unrated PvP, queueable PvE content, open world systems, and instanced content that scales to solo players?
The shift in design philosophy as we moved from the Legion/BfA era to the SL/DF era is quite obvious.
Solo-minded players are well aware of that, and have enjoyed WoWâs open world and queued content for years.
An MMO is simply multiple gamers playing together in the same world, realm, or zone. Power progression does not have to be restricted to instanced content for pre-organized groups.
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Found this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdyE8Ty3GE4
And this document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AALKJEGU_PJmurTubS8JbFrV8CRN5H7XCKgYeQ2lFhM/edit#gid=988230328
One thing of note is that professions are under the world content pillar, could that mean that solo/world content runners will be able to make this gear if they work hard on the professions, or get the mats/gold to have it made for them?
Iâll just say that any against the changes being made, like say the materials for the higher crafted gear are just what one who specializes or works on the gathering/making the materials, will need to shut up.
Iâm super late to this but you are right, you pretty much have to abuse gear that can help your DPS on the timer part of the resto Tower. I had the bracers from mechagon that zaps the enemy for 555 damage and the card trinket from AH that dealt 404 damage to the enemy. I used to fail the timer but the can constantly have like 30 - 45 seconds to spare the more I got better at it.
Ultimately itâs a skill check but you need to rely on trinkets with wonky scaling to make it all happen. I can understand some of the complaints regarding MT balancing.
its pretty simple to me, it takes waaaay more effort to get a group of good players together and coordinate something than it is to just be good yourself and do something yourself, so solo gear shouldnt even come close to group gear, and since its a multi player game first and foremost i dont see why soloing should reward anything besides mounts and titles. The more you make a game solo friendly the less people group, making it even harder to find groups for people that want to do so, and making it less of a âWorldâ when you shut everything else out around you because its easier and more convenient for you, the rewards match the difficulty thats why world quest gear should always be bottom of the barrel
If youâd like people to spend endless hours writing you a novel length dissertation on what they think is wrong with the game, guess what? Everything has been said already. Everyone who was annoyed has (or had) a long list of things that were making the game less enjoyable for them. Not only that, but many of those items were common to a lot of peopleâs lists.
Devs know what people want. Thereâs zero reason why people should individually come up with very similar lists, when youâre just going to shoot them down item by item, as though nobody has ever left because they had 10 things that were bugging the crap out of them.
That chart might be very misleading.
As far as I can tell, solo players in DF will able to craft Normal raid iLvl for for themselves with the right soulbound reagents, but they will only be able to craft Heroic and Mythic raid iLvl for other people (who have their own soulbound reagents from hardcore content) and not for themselves.
As far as we can see on Beta, the Normal raid iLvl gear from the new Renown system only covers a few slots (and world quests only award Normal dungeon iLvl gear), so this is yet again another significant nerf.
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The chart was a link from the video, and Soul did make it sound like that the crafting mats for the heroic/mythic levels could easily be the higher quality ores, skins, etc or the mats made from them. We are talking DEEP into the new gathering and crafting professions, where people will be having to choose what they want to specialize in.
The chart also promotes the idea that some of those high level mats will be available to world content/solo content runners. As one thing I did notice was that âheroicâ craft starts at about the mid normal raid range, and âmythicâ craft starts at the mid heroic range. To better show this, the only soul bind mats I saw on WoW head were sparks of ingenuity, which takes an item earned from world content, another item that is found in âcontainersâ found across the isles, and items that can be gathered only by engineers (though I hope they change this one). So, for all we know, the raid might provide the mats at a faster rate but world content runners will be able to get such.
I will also note that normal and heroic are not exactly âhard coreâ content, but it is group content.
Keep in mind I want solo/world content that I can use to supplement/complement my M+ and raiding and both the vid and chart give me hope that such will be included.
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