I'll admit it. Mage Tower is overtuned

Community General Discussion
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Yup. I was here earlier in the week arguing against nerfing it. Even took a forced vacation from the forums for telling someone they wouldn’t get the transmog. And then I tried it.

Look, I’m not a bad player. I’m not the best, but my guild has 5 bosses down in mythic. And when the mage tower came out originally, I don’t think I did it in the first round through, but I’m pretty sure I downed it in the second cycle. I remember it being difficult, and I remember going through food and flasks and what have you.

I finally lasted six minutes against Sigryn, but none of the mobs were dead. I must not be pulling the kind of numbers I used to. (I mean, obviously. The gear and levels have been squished.)

So the problem is one of two things. Either I’m not geared correctly, or I’m not playing correctly. And honestly, both of them are bad options.

The popular opinion is that I’m not geared correctly. Our current gear is downleveled, and the interplay of gear and sockets means our current gear is not desirable. Sure, it’s possible to fix this. I can craft Pandaria PVP gear with Relics to boost it to 48 and socket it with agility gems, which is supposed to be more damage. I could farm 65 Blood of Sargeras and craft the legendary legion boots for an item with three sockets.

But… should I have to? Was that the point of Timewalking Mage Tower? To craft or collect gear with the most sockets to optimize our DPS for the mage tower? Is looking gear up on WoWhead compelling gameplay? Look, we used to collect Fire Resistance for Ragnaros and Nature Resistance for Huhuran, and those sorts of fights led to the removal of resistance gear.

But maybe I just suck. Maybe the problem is I’m not playing correctly for Legion gear levels and content. And then the problem would appear to be on me. But let me ask this: is that any better? Now I need to know how to play current content at my current gear level and I should know how to play Legion content at Legion gear level?

I think the mechanics of the fight are solid. But the focus of the challenge should be the mechanics, not relearning how to gear and play your class from four years ago.

One or the other? Sure, that makes more sense. If I can assume that the mage tower had tuning done with a certain set of gear in mind, then by all means, just plop me in the mage tower with that set of gear.

But as it is now? I’m not really sure it’s worth the effort.

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I have no idea how the balance is for rogues. For all I know, it’s out of whack. But Sigryn was the first MT I beat as enhancement back on Wednesday.

I did spend time in the previous weeks farming siege of orgrimmar for socketable gear and gemmed and wore that. I had a lot of fun doing that (I loved MoP and that raid in particular was great imo), and didn’t mind the time and gold investment if it meant Mage Tower would be more accessible for me. In fact, I leveled half a dozen characters during the anniversary event and farmed SOO gear for most of them.

I almost never play enhancement. I am very bad at it. On my kill attempt, I took a really long time, and it was pretty dicey at the end. Each of the three mobs have their two mechanics they cycle between, and the rate at which they use those mechanics hastens as the fight goes on.

That said, unless you take so long that e.g. your CC for sigryn’s big aoe isn’t up again by the time she next uses it, it doesn’t matter how long you take, just that you can survive. I beat the windwalker challenge this morning after surviving the encounter for nearly 13 minutes. :joy: I’ve seen vids of people doing it in under 6.

If I were in your shoes, I’d be asking the question, what is causing me to fail, and what can I do to make sure I don’t continue failing to that thing or those things.

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At some point I considered having someone whose cleared the fury boss point out my mistakes while looking at my recorded fights or use disc to coach me in exchange for gold. I don’t know what I’m doing worng or what to avoid.

Suck on too many runs too count and zero progresion… the Legion one took me a few hours.

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You need to triple dot and basically do as much damage as possible, when Sig uses the ability you’re meant to CC you just blind then break it instantly and keep cleaving.

From what I heard you don’t even evenom, just use all your combo points and energy on keeping as many dots as you can on all 3.

Some minor cheese is getting the seed pod trinket from first boss in Emerald Nightmare, can run it on all 4 difficulties to try get 1, only takes 10 mins. It does really good AoE damage.

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How about both? and why are they bad options???

Understanding your class, and getting ideal stats is part of knowing your class. so yeah… thats the point of mage tower, how good are you, at that class.

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Sockets are important and strong.

But you’re more than likely simply not executing the fight correctly. The difference between you and the players who managed to do all 36 Mage Tower specs pre-nerf isn’t simply good sockets and enchantments.

It’s that they’re really good players who are used to executing complex fights with minimal gear.

I’m currently putting in attempts in the Bear challenge. My druid is a SL reroll, so I don’t have any of the cheesy stuff from previous expansions except the Garrosh heirloom weapon. I have an okay selection of trinkets, but it’s all Shadowlands stuff like Blood Spattered Scale and Infinitely Divisible Ooze.

It’s hard. But every single wipe I’ve had was due to mechanical issues. All the sockets in the world aren’t going to save me from screwing up adds and getting punted off the edge.

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This right here. I spent time on the arcane one just getting reps in and I told myself I’d use flasks and all that once I felt I stood a chance. Then I suddenly downed it without doing so. Get comfortable first, then worry about the rest.

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Like 5 of my guardian wipes were wild charging off the platform backwards in boomy form after I got knocked. That took some getting used to.

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Haha, thats EXACTLY what my last wipe was too.

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Honestly at this point, I think they just tuned it to op time walking gear, I love watching YouTube videos of people downing the guardian challenge in like 3 min while It’s taking me over 5 min to go down to kruul at 10% with full duelist pvp gear, really thought it was supposed to be an even playing field but it’s not at all.

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Sig and agatha were both fine imo. Sig was really fun, like you actually had to pay attention. Very challenging and that’s what mage towers were designed to be!

Xylem as sub is a joke but, extremely overtuned.

Didn’t have a problem with the sin/outlaw fights though :slight_smile:

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I feel your pain, but I assure you it is possible. Keep optimizing.

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I thought it was impossible on my disc priest, first time I entered I got one shotted but then I watched some videos, picked the right talents, wiped a bunch of times and at some point I became so comfortable that I was wiping from stupid mistakes like I was forgetting to use a defensive on a very deadly ability.

I managed to complete it tonight, it’s definitely doable, saying it’s overtuned is like the easy thing to do right now. There some people who are 36/36, they managed to do it on every single spec in the game.

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The hilarious thing about Mage Tower imo is that it is proof positive that we have without a doubt gotten weaker over the last couple expansions. Several specs are lacking the tools they had before, and BFA and Shadowlands gear is weakee for Mage Tower than MoP through Legion gear… where is the logic in that?

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If you ignore the part where they aren’t weaker, and you’re just running content that actually brings the power down…

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Oh but we are weaker. Even if we ignore the ridiculous gear scaling, many specs lack the tools they once had for these challenges. Destro, for example, had rifts that were powerful instant cast burst damage spells that also generated Shards, giving them something with much more impact when they were forced to move. Havoc used to have a lot more self healing. Survival had a much more reliable AoE to get out of the ice. Guardian had an extended range on swipe making adds and dpsing Kruul easier. And so forth.

We have most certainly gotten weaker. Mostly because of borrowed power, but also in large part to various spec changes.

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I have Keystone Master this season. I’m halfway through the raid on mythic. Is that typical for a bad player?

Does farming an offset specifically for mage tower scream good gameplay?

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Mostly depends on your values, but as a generality, yes… it does.

It provides value to old content that you might not have valued.

It can be a long term goal to work towards, which i think is a good thing.

To me, both of these things say persistence more than anything.

Rating everything as good and bad player is very black and white.
Most people, with enough practice can eventually learn the dance of any fight. The way gearing works, every week we are a little bit stronger, so going through this content does technically get easier.
People prepare as much as they can to make this content more likely to succeed. Just being a mythic raider doesn’t scream good player. having consistently high performance while mythic raiding does, so without looking at ALL of your mythic logs, it would be hard to judge.

Achievements don’t demonstrate your peak.

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While I agree, I think it’s good to note that TONS of players were ‘exploiting’ the challenges for the first couple days. Every other video I have seen either directly mentions them or inadvertently used them. I’m not saying ANY of those players cheated, but that lots of people who burned through the mage tower early this time around did so because of cheesy mechanics.

As the OP said, the towers are far to tight imo. I was able to complete the SV hunter one and honestly the dps check is absurd. I can’t imagine 90% or more of the players doing it. That isn’t a nod to how good I am, but just how ridiculous the requirements are. Players should be rewarded for doing mechanics right and honestly, most of the fights feel incredibly punishing even when you’re doing the right thing because of some of the RNG each fight has. Then, couple that with the length required, it just removes a huge portion of the player base from ever attempting them.

They should have made this event about ability only. Completely remove the relevance of gear and consumables. Also, reduce the fight length substantially. Many of them are 10+ minutes, with the majority of difficulty being the last minute or less.

It’s irritating that players were ‘rewarded’ for simply trying early. So sick of this content not being tested prior. It’s a big event. It should have been properly tested. Tons of players were looking forward to it and they botched it.

Edit: Just want to add further, I think a lot of the frustration being vented right now comes from the facts players feel cheated. There are players out there, right now, riding around on their mounts with the ‘new’ gear and did so by exploiting mechanics early. Players should be angry right now. Blizzard should do more than just extend the event. This company needs to have a conversation with the community… and certainly not in some ‘community’ council.

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To the tryhards it is.

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