Mage Tower (bugs and adjustment requests)

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Starting this to provide valid feedback around the mage tower scenarios. So far I’ve only done the tank challenge as a guardian druid and Agatha as a fury warrior, but hopefully, this will serve as a good source for feedback.

I’m open to tips and tricks being posted. Please don’t use this to complain about the difficulty unless you’re going to explain why you feel it’s difficult and also bring valid solutions.

The Highlord’s Return:

  • The orbs from Velen appear bugged. I had 8ish wipes yesterday where I was halfway across the orb edge border and the orb didn’t pop. I believe the hitbox is smaller than the spell effect indicator on the ground and I think this should be looked into. Note this pertains Guardian since that’s the only tank I’ve run the challenge on, but this may be consistent across all tank challenges.
  • I feel the cutter beam pushback could be tuned back slightly. I feel the pushback is a bit too severe. Sometimes the overlap happens with orbs, a stomp+slow application, horrors rushing to Velen, and an infernal smash all at the same time. While you can recover with roar, charging to an add, or buying time with an incap (and cat dashing if needed), it’s super frustrating knowing that your run is basically scuffed when this happens 99% of the time. (assuming you’re kiting around the edges to keep the orb area clean)
  • The infernal’s smash hitbox seems bigger than the animation. Another thing that I think needs to be looked at.
  • I’d like to see the enemy spell animation clutter reduced. It’s super difficult to see the healing orbs with a stomp puddle, infernal smash, infernal aoe pulse, and the horror’s all nearby or on top of one. Personally, I think either the orbs should have better highlighting, the beam coming out of them from the top should be brighter, or the infernal smash and stomp puddle animations should not cover up the bottom circle of the orb. You can see it slightly through the stomp but you can’t really see it through the infernal smash. FYI, I recognize this is part of the skill, so I am not asking for this to be completely reworked, just adjusted slightly.
  • I think Kruul could benefit from another 2-5% hp nerf. And before anyone says anything, I killed it day 2 pre-nerfs but his hp seems to be a problem for a lot of folks and forces most of them to go get old gear and trinkets to get that final edge.

An Impossible Foe (Agatha):

  • I know this is an endurance fight, but I would like to see an adjustment to Agatha’s hp. I think everything else is tuned well for fury, but the hp just makes it drag on and on and on and it’s adding to the difficulty imo.

I’d love for others post on the other tower challenges in a similar fashion. And no, I don’t want to trivialize any of the difficulty unless something is just completely overblown.

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The Druid tank chalenge is still way overtuned with the nerfs in place. Ive farmed all the aproprate gear and its still extremely difficult for the average player.

I agree it should be a challenege but 100+ attempts is rediculous.

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I’ve done 24 challenges so far. All the tank ones. I have not seen any bugs. I’ve only seen things kill me due to me failing a mechanic. Things are differentially tuned spec to spec. Example bdk much easier than bear or ww and BM.

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I suppose my deaths when I was clearly halfway in the orbs could have been ping related, maybe. It is still something I think they should look into since it wasn’t a one off. It happened numerous times.

That said, I’ve done the guardian challenge 6 times since it’s been back to test things out and try and help my guildmates out. I know they are tuned by spec and guardian is one of the harder tank challenges currently. That is another reason why I think another slight hp nerf to Kruul wouldn’t be a bad thing. As I said, I killed it day 2 pre-nerf with about 60ish total pulls, so my suggestions aren’t for my benefit. Just an observation between what I have personally experienced in my numerous runs and what I have been reading on the forums. The spell clutter seems to be an issue for some people. I know that’s part of the challenge and I wouldn’t want to see that completely removed, but I think making the orb locations more apparent and adjusting the infernal smash to not cover everything up would be solid changes.

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I do think some more tuning is warranted - or just creating gear templates ‘don the initiate’s garb and accept this challenge hero’ type deal. This way it really is just you vs the encounter.

One thing that I think is a bug that I didn’t notice until I did it on guardian druid is the infernal wake up channel. On my pally I sometimes thought the knockback spell was coming out too fast, but I was always moving around so it didn’t matter as much. But on druid, I really noticed it on p1 when in boomkin. I had an infernal reconstitute itself AND complete a knock back channel within a single wrath cast. Something was super off, maybe it was latency, but it really felt like it had started the channel before actually being functional again.

Another way to tune kruul while keeping the spirit of the challenge is to just have annihilates spaced out a bit more. Maybe +10 seconds apart. As they are, they’re incredibly tight. I currently working on prot warrior and having a hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to use to survive. 1) Ignore pain 2) IP + Last Stand 3) IP + Shield Wall 4) …? Demoralizing Roar + IP + Commanding Shout? That doesn’t seem to be enough. idk.

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Agreed, stat templates should have been made for all the challenges tbh. I supposed they did want some ways to min-max though but I still think it was the wrong choice.

While I do like the suggestion for longer spacing between annihilates, if they just adjust Kruul’s hp a little more, that would accomplish the same thing. I think it would be more fun since CD timing wouldn’t change. The spacing and CD timing may end up trivializing the annihilates if they were spaced out more and I don’t think that would be a good change.

For war, try this. It’s what I did in Legion and it made it a cake walk.

  1. SB (shield block)+IP
  2. SB+IP (get full hp first)
  3. SB+IP+Rally
  4. SB+IP+LS+Demo shout.

Annihilate is physical damage so you should be using SB on every one of them. You didn’t say you were using SB so I am not sure if that was because you consider it a given, didn’t realize it was physical damage, or just forgot to include it.

Last stand gives the biggest HP buff so burning that on the second Annihilate is a waste imo. Should definitely save that for the 4th hit where it matters the most.

Before 3 and 4 try to get full hp with an orb right before the cast if possible.

You can also farm an absorb shield trinket like blood-spattered scale or get a cheat death trinket for the 4th. Don’t forget to try and delay the 4th as much as you can with orbs, intim, and shockwave. If you play clean you should be able to kill it before the 4th annihilate if you delay it long enough, but if not, the delay may allow for some CD usage or if you die it could allow Velen and Kor’vas to eek out the last few bits of HP.

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Ty, that helped. I got him to .1% TWICE. I’m pretty close now.

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You’re very welcome. I hope you get him soon if you haven’t already. You’re right there!

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Yep, got it this morning thanks again!

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I did get one bug on the Ardent Defender buff not registering issue for the 5th stack of Annihilate for tank challenge. I have video to prove that. The buff was up 1,2 seconds before the 5th Annihilate, but still killed me. It only happened once. I was able to complete on the next try when it didn’t bug.

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I have had an occasional issue when using Skull Bash to interrupt Variss cause me to charge across the entire platform past the boss, turn me around and then charge back up to the boss. It was quite thrilling.

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The fact that these were all balanced around Legion legendaries, denied such legendaries because let’s not make people farm them who didn’t play(fair idea), then also denied current power(fair if not coupled with the previous), and including the various changes classes have undergone since Legion, this was a pretty awful iteration of mage tower. Druids are one of the prime examples of this. There are cases of people crying over nothing like Affliction Warlocks about the corruption leggo, but with CoEx baseline, it’s not that big of an issue like Guardian.

Judging by how this is going now, their plan is and maybe was always to nerf it the next time it comes around. There’s no way they let their casual children not be able to faceroll this and this is VERY far from being able to do that.

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Bugs: Varris’ Aura is fast / double stacking on occasion. I will have stepped out of his aura a fair distance and then back in and get an immediate 2 stacks in a single tick.

Bug: On few debuff stacks (5 or less) of Varris’ aura I have been one shotted from full health and no horror debuffs right at the start of an attempt.

Bug: an anomaly I’ve experienced is that on another occasion, like every 8 attempts on Varris/Kruul, things will be spawning in rapid succession, eyes, horrors, infernals, in no time at all (less than 3 minutes in).

Bug / Issue : Eyes and Infernal Slams stack and I’ve been hit with them while OFF the platform and got stuck just floating in space (horrors killed velen and didn’t have another target so the scenario “ended” but didn’t end.)

Bug / Issue: Velens orbs are spawning ontop of each other rendering more than one of them useless at a time. I’ve run across stacked orbs more than a few times and have lost because of not being able to space out their use.

Without drums or scrolls or gearing down at all, the lowest I’ve managed to get Kruul is 18% to 19% hp before overwhelmed by Infernals yeeting me, Horrors killing Velen, or a 3rd annihilate ending me.

Fixes: Obviously address the bugs I’ve encountered, and I would say spacing out Kruuls casting time to at least be a minute apart would make this part of the challenge fair, and not absolutely absurd. OR allow them to be interrupted.

Other Suggestion: Give Velen more HP, like 1,200 more. Increase the refresh cast on his orbs so there’s at least one on the field every 20 seconds, but never more than 3, Diversify the spacing of orbs to set casting distance around Velen, and definitely do not let them stack on each other.

Healing and DPS challenges have not gotten as much attention, but on the few attempts I did give them they seemed untenable deeper into their phases in current conditions.

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Aura bug: I’d be curious if it’s a latency issue. Maybe it was clipping the last tick of the debuff but showing it had fallen off on your end.

1-shot: I’d be curious to see the death log. I would have this happen when I was over 6 stacks but it usually also coincided with multiple events at the same time. Infernal aura tick, mind blast hit, and maybe a debuff or just melee hit from the horrors.

Rapid spawn: I definitely didn’t experience this but I would definitely consider that to be a horrible bug to encounter. Were the spawns just cycling back to back to back without any downtime?

Orb spawns: I’ve had that happen a few times, it’s super unfortunate, and I agree this shouldn’t happen. I am not sure that’s a bug though. I think there is an invisible radius around Velen’s character position and the orbs are capable of spawning anywhere within that radius.

Drums/scrolls comments: I don’t think this is a bug. The fight in p2 is meant to be a damage and mechanic check. Consumables are standard for any challenging content, so I don’t think there is anything wrong with most people needing consumables. There are videos of people killing him without any consumables or crazy broken gear as well. I think another slight hp nerf would be fine but the only thing I think should change with consumables would be that they are all adjusted to give the same value in the encounter. Also, you should be able to live through 4 annihilates, so if you’re dying at the 3rd that’s a planning and CD issue more than anything else.

Fixes: I agree that if they don’t adjust the hp of Kruul, spacing the annihilate timers could be an option. That may be tricky to balance though with the frequency of CDs and depending on how things lined up, this may completely trivialize this phase for some classes. I don’t think allowing the annihilates to be interrupted would be a good change. Again, it would trivialize the phase to a large degree. You can currently stun him and use orbs to delay the cast, and I think that is more than enough.

Other suggestions: Velen’s only real danger is the nether horrors. I think maybe a slight adjustment to the damage he takes from their cast and debuff to buy another second or two of life would be okay, but if you treat the horrors as your main priority, you shouldn’t have much of an issue with Velen dying. As far as the orbs, the spacing should be adjusted for sure. The respawn rate would be a solid effective nerf to the encounter to help those who are more casual, lesser-skilled, or unfamiliar with the class they are attempting the fight on. I wouldn’t be against that.