And you don’t find it odd, that most of the people who have done the druid tanking challenge have been using trinkets from HFC or Emerald Nightmare, or the Engineering made whelping trinket for the over budgeted cog gems and a 30 second proc that fights for you?
Don’t get me wrong, the MT should absolutely be a challenge. But anyone who says it isn’t overtuned when compared to what the original tower was balanced for during Legion(artifact, two legendaries and ToS gear), then they are delusional.
Yes it can be done. Yes all the challenges can be done. But fights that were 5-8 minutes during Legion are suddenly 10-20 minute slogs. That alone says something isn’t tuned right. The God Queens Fury strategy being completely different with an inflated health pool meaning you have to survive way more chaotic mechanic overlaps than you ever had to during Legion. That screams an intentional change which by default throws a wrench in the whole idea of “bringing back the MT for the experience”.
Killing Karem on the twins and then running to the edge of the map to outrange Raests shadowbolts and just killing adds and healing while waiting for runes to spawn to run in and stand on them before running back out to wait for CD’s. That isn’t how the fight was intended. But due to Blizzard massively increasing Raest’s health, that is the method most people are using. That is bad design and also points that the tower isn’t tuned properly.
No one is asking for these challenges to be freebies. But they 100% need to be inline with what the original was balanced around with further tweaks done to compensate for our loss of tools to deal with certain mechanics, and our sheer loss of power since we keep being designed around having borrowed power, which is stripped away for these.
Even during Legion Nighthold, these challenges had no where NEAR the insane dps checks this current iteration has. All because Blizzard decided to massively inflate the health of almost every boss. Turning what would otherwise be a fun mechanical challenge into a stressful anti fun war of attrition.
I’m not a bad player. I do reasonably difficult things in game. I did all 36 during Legion with most being completed before Antorus. Warlocks green fire in 2 pulls in Timeless Isle gear. These are overtuned for both what the content should be inline with, and what the content should represent. (IE, with no borrowed power and us being balanced/designed around such things, these should be tuned to be easier than they were during ToS, but harder than during Antorus. And Timewalking is meant to be a fun throwback, not something harder than the original).
The biggest issue is, Blizzard gave us zero communication and no reason why they did the huge shadow buff over what was available during PTR. Which, mind you, most people testing the PTR are already higher caliber players. And I didn’t see a single post, or single youtube video or anyone saying “lul the challenges were easy”. Most people outright said they were reasonably challenging and some made you think outside the box with regards to talents.
It was in a good spot to be reasonably challenging for the masses. Given how dead the Broken Shore already is, and most people I know not even bothering, Blizzard failed. The hype is dead for the masses now. The hype is dead for lots of folks who resubscribed solely for the Mage Tower. The hype is dead for lots of folks who stayed subscribed for the Mage Tower.
Again, it shouldn’t be easy. It absolutely should be a challenge. But it shouldn’t be harder than the original was during Nighthold.