For the most part, they were fun solo challenges for people to do. The rewards were purely cosmetic… which, quite frankly, made them more valuable than any gear upgrade as well.
One of the main reasons people want them to come back is the artifact appearances. Some because they never had the chance to earn them or were unable to complete it… or in my case, because I think the act of arbitrarily limiting rewards to make them “special” is stupid and counter-productive.
That being said, the encounters themselves were neat. Not all of them were of equal quality however, some were DEFINITELY better than the others.
The giant Fel Worm was a joke of a fight… heck, I had almost forgotten about it completely.
The three Vry’kul in Halls of Valor was something of a disappointment, 90% of the mechanics just stopped after a certain point and the fight actually got easier.
The twins were… ok, I guess. All I really remember is the one add I missed several times (didn’t know about it) which one-shotted me out of nowhere.
The Imp Mother fight was one of WILDLY varying difficulty, depending on the class/spec. It could be a rough challenge for a Fury Warrior (especially if you didn’t approach it right), while an Unholy DK would utterly crush it without even trying. It also tended to allow you to get “further” without you realizing you did something wrong early on that needed to be fixed, so it could be annoying like that.
I actually enjoyed the Xylem fight. Maybe a bit predictable and formulaic, but it’s strong focus on doing the mechanics is what made it enjoyable. The second phase was a “meh” DPS race for the most part.
The Kruul fight remains my personal favorite by a long shot, I did it on all tanks except Druid (and only because I don’t have druid with a high enough level). SO many mechanics going on, and it couldn’t be overpowered by gear because so many of them just punted you off the stage or otherwise didn’t care. Many people complained about this one, mostly because the standard “brute force” strategies couldn’t be applied… and those were the very reasons I loved it.
The people complaining about it back in Legion were the bads who couldn’t play their class.
Now in BFA they’re begging for it back so they can get their Tumblr-lite sparkle kitties for their role-playing Druid who is half fairy or whatever.
I think Mage Tower was great. And I’m happy that I managed to get all the skins for my Warrior and my Druid (minus resto), among with a few others for my Mage, Demon Hunter, Paladin, etc…
It was pretty fun in the sense that it made me learn every spec in the game because I wanted all the appearances. The last bit of Legion it was ridiculously easy to get geared enough to do them, just took a bit of patience.
I don’t remember that happening when I did it on my rogue. Personally, I enjoyed it more than Xylem. I felt like you had to pay a lot more attention to what was going on whereas Xylem the mechanics were pretty straight forward but had a gearcheck built in.
I did enjoy the Kruul fight a lot (even if Kor’vas did get on my nerves by standing in the bad every other attempt).
Yeah, some people did say that it wasn’t necessary but most of what I saw said it made it so much easier. I never did any of the druid ones so I can’t speak personally.
The Vry’kul encounter had a case of “managed chaos” where there was a bunch of mechanics happening at once from all three targets. Individually these mechanics weren’t a big deal, but all of them at the same time it could be rough.
But it all followed a set sequence… and when that sequence was done, all three bosses literally just started spamming one or two mechanics and the fight became a very basic (and surprisingly low) gear check with some rudimentary dodging. This only happened if the fight went on long enough… and really took the wind out of the sails as far as impressions go.
I ended up doing that encounter only on some lesser geared alts of mine (I think it was Ret Pally, Demo Lock and Enhancement Shaman) which I wasn’t exactly performing at a high level with… so yeah, once you were over “the hump”, it was an easy finish.
Xylem had less chaos because it was only one target to deal with (adds in phase 2 not withstanding)… but I didn’t mind that myself. In some ways, it reminded me of FFXIV encounters where you had clear and precise things to respond to what was going on. Oh, and LOTS of dodging, which I greatly prefer to focusing on raw damage output.
Finally beating the tank challenge on my paladin after I don’t know how many times was probably my proudest in game moment behind solo grinding to champion in ye olde PvP days.
The vast majority of people want incredibly easy content that looks cool and gives them cool things.
It was not well liked until it became easy content.
Personally did it on the specs I cared about the night it released, absolutely loved pushing to get it done while it was hard, then forgot about it for the remaining 7 months of the expansion.
The main complaint I saw was that it wasn’t up often enough. There were complaints about specific scenarios, usually for certain tanks, the Frost Mage version of that Twins scenario, and one or two others.
That some people complained on the forum about it doesn’t mean most people were.
The challenge varied a bit by class, but it was some nice challenging solo content. Some of the most fun I’ve had was going for a mage tower appearance and finally getting it. Then again, collecting artifact appearances was a high point in legion in general.
This. In Mage Tower threads there are always a group that claim gear made it all “trivial”, despite that it did not for many of the encounters unless your gear came from rarified air. They’re usually the same ones insisting “everyone hated it until it got easy, but I did it when it was hard and then never thought about it again.”
If you didn’t have smooth FPS and little to no lag it was very hard to navigate all the crap on the floor while dealing with adds. Depending on who you ask it was also impossible for many specs until the end of ToS; that coupled with having limited tries based on how much currency you farmed, it left a lot of people upset and resulted in lots of complaint and troll threads.
Mage tower wasn’t fun. It was an objective test of your precision, awareness, gear, talents, legendaries and reflexes and rewareded players with transmogs that they couldn’t get any other way.
The joy of it though, was that when you had those mogs, other players knew just by looking at you that you were the real deal and hadn’t just been carried to victory.