The problem is that is this mage tower is objectively harder then it was in legion which to me means its way overtuned. Worse, even though challenges can be fun its not fun because we have to play with one hand tied behind our back since all the playstyles that we got used to in shadowlands are disabled with our borrowed power. So just for this content we have to relearn our class in an impractical manner for a challenge that doesn’t live up to the legion equivalent. A big part of this is players were much more robust in legion, if only because prdyaz also known as 30% hp shield every 30 seconds forever existed. It was common for some classes to just do double sustain legendaries for mage tower.
For context every kill I’ve watched of current Xylem mage tower p2 lasts until 4th and sometimes in the middle of spawning a 5th wave of adds, in legion killing it between 3 and 4 waves was about par, with antorus gear and consumables I’d reckon 2 waves was possible.
Agatha does no damage in the current iteration which is why people are claiming shes easy, she can’t kill you after all. But she takes way too long, her damage increasing is supposed to be a sign that damage isn’t high enough, in the current mage tower thats just the design net more damage then the imps and healing do and eventually you win. Her health+imps should be lower and the damage should be higher her cast should be able to kill a player if its ignored.
Tank challenge is consistently lasting too long, you know this because of average infernal drops the longer p1 lasts the more infernals you get the harder the fight becomes and p1 lasts way longer then it did in legion. Worse the adds have too much health, I’ve spent so many hours on this one as guardian and my biggest gripe is that if I’m in berserk spamming thrash, and I stop the adds at the end of their cast and keep spamming thrash they should die before they naturally get their next cast off, in this tuning they don’t, let alone without berserk. I’ve had to start doing creative use of game mechanics to preserve my orbs for p2, and even then p2 is a mess because you only have so much control with velen dropping orbs where he pleases combined with several layers of knockback and stampeding roar only does so much if you need to orb the adds and are being pushed away from that orb.
Sigryn is the one that truly angers me though, in legion I did all variations of that fight, well I did all variations of the mage tower to begin with but in the case of sigryn I did it early. The reason was I didn’t need gear to do it, the fight was a pure mechanics check. If you could do the dance and pop the shields you could do the fight. In timewalking I learned there was an enrage on this fight, something I never knew despite having first completed this challenge in nighthold on a demo lock. It wasn’t a dps check but it is now.
Healing challenge is the most egregious by far, but only for resto sham and holy priest. The p1 caster adds do more damage at 0 stacks then they do for the other healers at 3-4 stacks, and the only way past that is “creative use of game mechanics™”. I’m glad I did that on paladin where it was comparibly well tuned…except for the final boss not naturally dying to ambient damage and the npc groups dps, you actually have to actively dps it or he simply won’t die before the floor is entirely covered. Once again this is something that is not true to legion.
Simply put the bosses have too much health, and we do too little damage. Its easy to see because just having the power of a more optimized gear set shows that the issue is often damage, which is awful when we’re force scaled to an ilvl. Its less fun because we can’t use our current full kit despite having a great box of tools in legion. And the tuning is such that even if we did the bosses are tuned closer to “theoretically possible with near perfect play” rather then “possible with good play”.
Thanks blizz!