Hi everyone, thought I’d share something I recently did that I’m quite proud of. Completed both the unholy and frost mage tower challenges on a lvl 50 trial character. I used the default gear in addition to consumables. No enchants nor gems at all. I think this shows that anyone can complete the challenge, regardless of their current gear.
I’ve included commentary in both videos were I discuss the strategy, I hope you find it useful.
There are people that think current gear matters? Timewalking scales down your ilvl and a bunch of other stuff. Your level 50 trial is getting scaled down as well.
Agatha is also pretty easy since its almost entirely add control. If I could do Agatha absolutely no one should be having issues with it. Didnt do it on my DK because I think the Dk set looks like garbage, I was able to figure the fight out without a guide or great gear using heirlooms which a lot of times are worse than greens of the same ilvl.
Agatha as Unholy was pretty hard actually. I got it done, but it was 10 times harder than Ret and 100 times harder than Fury.
Some people apparently didn’t find it hard though. But a lot did.
The issue a lot of people had was they wouldnt tailor their build for the fight and just tried smashing their head against the wall until the wall fell.
That doesnt mean gear because its all scaled down though you can get items for certain stats and thats about it. So many people just pick talents and leave it at that.
With all this mage tower talk though, I seen someone, wasnt on the DK forums, say timewalking dungeons are as hard as a +15. If thats the case then +15 shouldnt be rewarding anything near mythic raid level gear. Its a cake walk.
You said yourself that you didn’t even do it, lol. I absolutely did tailor my build and do the mechanics properly. It was still hard.
I read some threads by people who did all 36 challenges and multiple said that Unholy was one of the harder ones.
Is the fight going to change just because I change classes?
I mean I said it was 100 times harder than it was on Fury. Meaning I did it on another spec.
I don’t know if the fight changed at all. Agatha certainly seemed to teleport more but that was probably partly because I just killed her faster on Fury.
The fights are scaled individually to different specs, so their difficulty changes.
So the fight doesnt change. Good glad we cleared that up.
I went in on my DK and Agatha took off. Gone. Nowhere to be found. Get a better gear option and I might go do it, but as it stands I have no reason to do it.
And you are saying its 100 times harder on Unholy than it was on Fury. So it should take me what 2500 tries to do it on unholy? Thats absolutely unreasonable because thats what 100 times harder would actually mean.
Dimiss your pet before you enter, it sometimes bugs out if you’ve got your pet out.
It did it on my warrior as well so it cant be because of a pet.
I made a thread in the bug forum about that. It was annoying me too. I guess Bicep knows the reason.
100 times is probably an exaggeration. Fury took me 5 and Unholy around 200. Ret took me 30 or 40 but it was a matter of me not having the correct strategy. Once I knew the proper strategy for Ret, it took me like 5.
I hadn’t played either Ret or Unholy since Legion and Unholy does have a steeper learning curve than Ret (and Fury). People who do a lot of Mythic plus with Unholy probably had a much easier time.
The reason I did it on Unholy (instead of Frost, which I normally play) is because Frost was really overtuned at the beginning. They later tuned it but I was determined to finish the Unholy one.
It happened on my warrior as well and the warrior doesnt have a pet to speak of.
Is its going to be harder on different specs? Yes. It is because they have different toolsets. Unholy cant leap to the Imp Servants and slow both of them and kill them before they get half way to Agatha like Fury can. Fury can Bladestorm the Umbra Imps. Its on a timer for Fury at least where leap lines up exactly with each Imp Servant, and Bladestorm lines up with every Umbra Imp wave.
Again, if the DK set was better, I would have some motivation to do it. I dont like it, so why do it. But the fact that people think your ilvl now matters when you enter timewalking from
is baffling to me. Has no one experienced timewalking? It scales you down unless you have certain Legion gear apparently.
I think you misunderstand. People think their current gear with sockets, stat distribution and trinkets are making them fail the mage tower. My aim was to prove that cannot be the case.
Aka gitgud… can’t say I disagree xD
Why in the world would people think that sockets are hurting their chances? Ive seen the complete opposite where they know sockets are beneficial but they dont want to go and get that gear, and then they dont want to get the gems to go in that gear, or this certain trinket.
I used ilvl 44 weapons, and 2 heirloom trinkets one being ilvl 44 as well. Thats basically level 39 gear that doesnt get scaled up.
When I go into the tower on my Unholy DK, I have 258 str. FC would only give me 39 str when it procs, but Crusader gives 46? now down from 100. Heals for around 300 now though and I have 7218 health. Unending Thirst at the moment against Agatha would be better since you have enough adds to kill that 360 heal per imp killed is pretty good, and you get 10% haste and movement speed. Everything about that runeforge is good for that fight. Even the Swift Hand of Justice is good if Unending Thirst and Swift Hand both heal you. If so That would be 361+144 so about 500 health per imp killed not counting Dark Succor healing either. You can also use something like the Eternal Will of the Martyr to give you an on demand heal without using RP on Death Strike if you needed it for some reason though its a 5m CD so its an uh-oh button.
On my warrior run I had one Fuming Imp go off, and was hit by one boulder. My priority was always Fuming Imp, Umbra, Imp Servant, Smoldering Agatha trying to prioritize Dark Void shield when I was able to attack it to be able to interrupt it. I wanted to be able to move without any issues, I wanted to be able to get any damage I could off on Agatha so Umbra, didnt want her to heal so Imp Servants, and a lot of it could be handled with cleave.
Control the adds, control the fight. Easy enough really.
Not to take away, assuming it hasn’t already been said, but you used BFA consumables which are completely busted for Mage Tower and haven’t received a single nerf compared to some other stuff. At that point you might as well have gone full turbo with Crusader enchant on an heirloom Thrashblade or w/e. Unbridled Fury potions are straight busted.
As far as lvl 50 characters, I’ve done it on my BM Hunter, Enh Sham, and Frost Mage with using BFA consumables. These were the easiest, so the loss of any QoL skillups on the way to 60 would only serve to make it even easier.
As for people saying Unholy challenge is hard–you’re just playing wrong. I did it the first day on my first try with a bunch of messups accidentally wearing my tank gear and barely any SL consumables I still had on after raid.
All the challenges are set to a very specific playstyle that generic raid or M+ spec is terrible for it. They did this on purpose to get people outside of their comfort zone. None of what you do in Mage Tower will translate meaningfully outside of it unless a specific encounter manages to mirror it. Its like saying playing Arena translates well into Raid or vice versa–they don’t.
The only worthwhile advice for Mage Tower is use BFA consumables/enchants/etc (Drums of Rage are the cheapest and easiest to make). If you’re a STR class, use Crusader. Everything else (sockets, shoulder/leg enchants, etc) will only really help if you’re consistently wiping around 1% range.
This frost dk video was good motivation for me. I was stuck here for so long. It was actually the dps tips that helped me the most (I don’t play frost, so my dps was the biggest problem for me to fix).
It was very tempting to say it was just too hard, but after I watched you beat it like this, it made me think I was doing it wrong. And I was.
That’s awesome, I’m happy you stuck with the challenge and managed to complete it!