I defeated the mage tower tonight. My thoughts

Here’s the problem.

There’s nothing wrong with having encounters that require a certain level of skill to overcome.

Every raid encounter requires some baseline level. As you go from LFR to Normal to Heroic to Mythic, the encounters get less forgiving, rewarding precise, knowledgeable and skillful play.

The problem, of course, is that not only is there a disparity in player skill sets, some players are flat out better than others, there will always be a disparity. Some of the “git gud” players plateau at “not good enough”. This is fundamental. The vagaries of innate player skill, but also equipment, ping rate, internet connection qualtiy, etc. There are all sorts of factors that impact “perfect play”.

However, normally we have a technique to augment player skill.

We call it “gearing”.

We can take a contrived example of a raid group reaching a DPS check. At some point its possible for the best players to not be able to meet a DPS check because they are not geared enough.

The way to get geared is to continue to defeat earlier bosses and gear up the raid party over time until that one day when they eek out that extra .5% DPS necessary to defeat the DPS check boss.

That’s an extreme case, obviously it’s a spectrum. Players get better, gear gets better, there’s out of raid mechanisms to empower players (like getting their legendary in SL).

But the point is that the defeat of the encounter happens with the players skills (or lack off) and the raw capability of their gear, which normally slowly improves over time, reaches equilibrium with the encounter mechanics.

Simply, if your group is struggling with an encounter, getting better gear is an aspect of improvement.

When I did Green Fire, I saw other with a much lower iLevel than me, defeating the encounter. It took me almost 200 tries, but at the same time I was gearing up. I was over 530 when I finally defeated the encounter late in the game. That whole process: learning the fight, customizing my UI, getting better gear, etc. was necessary to defeat an encounter that was “easy” for others.

Same thing with the original MT. I defeated the Feral encounter only after not just getting better gear, but augmenting with things like pots and what not. Things I don’t normally do. But they were necessary for this encounter.

The issue here, is that, on its face, since it’s “scaled”, there is no gearing path for weaker players to “power through it”. That makes it innately less accessible to the player base in contrast to earlier encounters.

Now, in time maybe we’ll get guides about how older gear is better. Some suggest older gear with lots of sockets for example. This part is certainly not intuitive and many will rely on the mixed experience of others to coalesce some best practices on how to better gear for these fights to give the player an advantage over just showing up with off the shelf, random SL gear.

But in the end, it’s not going to be “more iLevel” is better. There’s nothing to suggest that after 9.2 launches and we all jump up a tier in gear, that the encounters will be any easier.

Consider, Green Fire today is trivially done (but doesn’t offer the same reward, notably the title). MT was removed specifically so as to not be trivialized by late BFA geared toons going in and stomping on the monsters.

But even during it’s run, toons were able to “power up” somewhat to better attack the problem, to “DPS” their way out of areas that their skill and other limitation prevented them from succeeding.

Right now, though, it’s not clear that there’s a defined path like this for the current MT.

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Good point. Also, not one single peep from Blizzard which means, I think the tower is staying the way it is for now.

We were scaled down and told we couldn’t use items that were current to that content.

It’s the typical Blizzard move.

The only thing they never seem to want to change is its sleazy management

Quoted for the truth. The game cannot afford unfairness anymore. With the announcing of the newest Council member I actually lost my final hope in this game. WoW doesn’t need raiders and hardcore players, they were never the reason for its success. The casuals brought the 10m players to the game, not the 10%. And the mage tower adjustments (+ removing the Legion legendaries) just sealed the deal what we all know for a while now:

This developer team is not good anymore.

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Seems like Blizzard always takes the casual player base for granted lol. Unforch.

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Hello everyone! Thank you so much for your ongoing feedback about the Mage Tower.

We are currently evaluating the data regarding Mage Tower success rates, and we have identified that some of the challenges for certain specializations are more difficult than intended. We will return once we have more information to provide on what changes we have planned to bring those specializations more in line with the rest.

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oh thank god for that

Huh…

Nerfs before I get to my warrior and dk?

Just nerf it to the ground like intended for timewalking type of content.

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Thank you for the very prompt response <3

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THANK YOU FOR COMMUNICATING!

As someone who already completed some, I still think this is a welcome post!
I want everyone to be able to get their transmogs!!!

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Not enough with some changes to some specializations, it needs an overall nerf to everthing

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Don’t nerf it until the 2 week time period is up and we have to wait another 6 months :pray:

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It’s hard for specs that were gutted after scaling with corruption too hard.

Just remove the time restriction. Easy.

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Exactly this.

Cue the locks, hunters, and warriors who are screaming that its fine as is because it can be done with their specs.

Seriously… reduce the unbuffed caster damage for resto shaman by half.

I hope you have data to show WHERE, aka… how long into the encounter people are failing… because phase 1 of 7 encounters being 100% determined by super lucky RNG is what needs fixing…

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Thank you for the update.

No, you don’t understand, every Warrior is just super skilled and cool and also cute. That’s why there’s so many warriors running around with the set.

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there was no corruption when i did it.

corruption was the patch after the tower opened???