How much fun was the mage tower?

Sure dps mattered, but to say it wasn’t a test of tanking skill is just completely and totally incorrect.

You have an NPC to protect, you have to position yourself and the boss so you don’t get thrown off/NPC doesn’t get hit, you have stacking debuffs to manage, you have points of burst damage to counter, and you have a stacking tank buster mechanic to rotate CDs on.

What exactly else would you like to make this a “tank” challenge?

Fact of the matter is, tank DPS mattering has been a thing since MoP. Sure in Normal/Heroic it doesn’t matter, but in Mythic and upper level M+ it matters… So it only makes sense that you should have to maximize your dps in a challenge meant to push you to your limits.

I can guarantee you that if DPS didn’t matter at all in that challenge (and they had an NPC doing all the DPS for you), it’d be ranked the worst challenge out of the lot and considered by far the easiest of the challenges. Instead of last gasp smacking the boss with everything you got because the next tank buster is going to kill you… You’d have tanks getting threat and just running away…

On release, it was fun. By the end of the Expansion when the content became more trivial, less fun.

Frustrating sometimes, but fun enough for Blizz to take it away.

I despised it from its horrendous difficulty. I didn’t bother going back.

Too fun.

It was a masterpiece of content, quite frankly.

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It was made for DPS. They made massive numbers nerfs to them for healers and tanks after the fact.

They said something along the lines of “we don’t want people to have to change specs to get their cloaks upgraded” and made the changes.

They are fine for healers and tanks now but I wouldn’t say that they weren’t made with DPS specs in mind initially. Pretty big oversight, that they at least rectified.

The changes are documented in the hotfix thread for sometime during January: Hotfixes - Updated October 5

I think it worked very well. It started off on the hard side, so it wasn’t trivial for the better players on their mains. Then with gear it became significantly easier as time went on so it was doable for less good players or alts that you aren’t so proficient with.

Also one challenge per spec gave you more opportunity to enjoy your favorite classes and try specs you wouldn’t otherwise.

I mean, it was fun. But also made me rage quit multiple times.

It wasn’t as bad doing it in my demon hunter.

But doing it on my resto druid has probably reduced my life span. Thanks for that, Blizzard.

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I loved the mage tower. As others have said, it got really easy with ABT gear and maxed out artifact weapons. However, it was still a lot of fun to gear up an alt you haven’t played in a while and give it a go. It was also fun to try it on a spec you don’t usually play. I completed it on Unholy DK which I hadn’t played since I tanked as Unholy in Wrath.

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I got all six tanks and enjoyed it when I wasn’t shouting at the screen :slight_smile:

Also I agree, I find balancing survival and dps more fun than what the more inexperienced tanks want: basically an immortal meatwall that does 0 dps but everyone is impressed by how much of a meat wall they are.

I wish a few more specs had more secondary synergy. I enjoy the way all stats are important and impact monk tanking. I find some of the other specs previous iterations of “just stack one stat bro” a bit uninteresting.

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it was “ok”. Beat it on my main, never bothered on any other toons. I’m glad it was cosmetics only.

Of all the one-off 'repeatable" side games Blizzard has come up with, Withered Army training was by far the most enjoyable to me. Frankly, we should get rid of mission tables completely, and your small army of followers should assist you in something similar.

Maybe the expac after Shadowlands.

Man, how about that for a non tank at release. Worse than visions pre nerf for tank/heals.

I think I did it a few times on rogue before giving up. My alts probably never touched it and I just got the hidden skins other ways.

They were different for tanks/heals on launch. They just further increased those numbers later on.

it was really fun because it was a genuine challenge, even though gear was necessary (especially the tank one), you couldn’t just outgear everything, there was a lot of mechanics to the encounter. it was extremely satisfying to complete it

Doesn’t matter. The staggering numbers changes later on coupled with the lack of healer and tank specific mechanics and the ability to solo them pretty much means they weren’t designed with healers and tanks in mind - they’ve just been heavily doctored so healers and tanks can do them.

The only change was more % hp reduction. That’s not insane in any way.
They even did it for Mythic Ra-Den like the first week.

They’d have to make entirely different visions to cater specifically to healers/tanks though. I don’t see that being a feasible request…

To be completely fair here though… it was quite a large nerf… Like on the magnitude to state that this was clearly overtuned… by a large margin…

“healers will face enemies with 42% less health and tanks will fight enemies with 25% reduced health.”

I don’t think they nerfed Mythic Ra-den by 42%…

42% change for healers, which were already given plenty of ways to do damage in BfA even though they don’t necessarily need it.

42% is also pretty big, kinda tells me they didn’t do much testing.

Oh yeah, well I’m not requesting any further changes. I’m just pointing out these things weren’t really designed for healers and tanks. They were just changed after the fact.

It went from like 20% to 42%.
Deathstrike nerfs were 50% last patch.
Big %s don’t mean as much as you think they do.

Percentages are pretty straightforward my man. I’m not even sure what point you are trying to make. Even if they went from “X% to Y%” what matters is Y%.