Mage Tower Feedback

Yeah, I know. Another mage tower thread. However, the problem I have with some of the others here is that there’s not a whole lot of feedback, other than “this is too hard”.

So I’m gonna explain why I think it’s too hard with anecdotal evidence.

As a disclaimer: I understand other people have gotten theirs done. I have put in many attempts. 20% in the ones I care about is as close as I’ve gotten and I understand, that if I play better, I might get it done.

However, I still wanna address this and the reason is because this feels like it was implemented in bad faith. This is another monkey paw situation. I’ll explain why.

First and foremost, for the people who wanna fact check me, I got my original mage tower done back in April of 2017, which was 2 months before the release of Tomb. I did it in a mix of Nighthold tier, and Legion season 3 PvP gear. I did not do it during Antorus, nor did I do it in a situation where I was “correctly” geared for it. I did it while I was “undergeared” by the current time’s standards.

Thus, I am speaking from that perspective. Using Tugar as an example, Tugar feels worse now than he did back then. Is it doable? Yes, discipline priests have downed Tugar. Does that make the point I am stating less true? No. If the point was to recapture the original challenge, and bring people back to that point (IE: The point of timewalking), this should not be the case.

Using Shadow as an example as well, the sheer amount of class changes has entirely changed how shadow handled the Twins from back then. Making it so people have to relearn a new fight from a new angle, with a different skillset, and further, one which is worse for handling this than the previous. It feels bad.

Now, how’s a solution work? Honestly? Here’s what you should have done. If you were gonna do this, you should have templated everybody. Have Chromie show up. Make it so gear literally means zero. I’ve said it more than once, I’m gonna say it again, what should matter is the person behind the wheel. The optimal strat should not be to go run SoO (and yes, I did) and hope you get high socketed mythic warforged gear.

Template everybody. Have the artifact weapon hanging on a weapon wrack. Have them grab said weapon, and have it be up to 1 stack of concordance. That’s it. Leave everything else as it is, but have it contain the 4 bonus ranks, and 1 rank of concordance. That’s it.

And in big friggin’ yellow letters,

CHROMIE GIVES YOU THREE MINUTES TO PREPARE. And you have the Legion talent trees.

Do you know why you do it like this? Because then you can properly tune it, and make appropriate adjustments to each spec. You know - like you did with Legion arena templates and you can fiddle with this and that and make it so people have an actually appropriate similar experience as to how they had it in Legion. Again, the point of timewalking.

This maintains a challenge, allows you to address problems (AKA current Xylem, just as an example) and removes the sheer stupidity of the best strat being to go farm Siege of Orgrimmar gear. I cannot stress how dumb that is from a development standpoint that the optimal strat is to go run a raid 2 expacs prior to the actual timewalking event because it’ll give people more of an edge. I find that ridiculous.

That’s my rant. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m not saying I can’t do it. Other people have done it, I can too with some more practice. But it does not change the fact this puts yet another sour taste in my mouth because of faulty, and outright bad implementation. This really feels half-baked is the best way I can think to describe it. You’ve thrown out a half-fluffy half-delicious and half-vomit worthy hunk of dough.

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PS: Currently classes are so dependent around the current borrowed power that taking that away from them makes most classes unplayable.

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There needs to be more feedback like this, and less “this is hard, fix it” after 5 attempts at the Mage Tower. If people have done enough attempts to realize they can’t get it done they should be able to formulate why into words.

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So you didnt read any of the other threads where there was actual evidence and feedback, dismissed them as not saying anything besides “its too hard,” proving you didnt read them… then posted a dissertation and expected everyone to give you the courtesy that you had no intention of reciprocating?

Got it.

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I didn’t say that. If you want, I’ll make an edit clarification. But I certainly didn’t blanket say “ALL” of them.

Relax.

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I’m upto 60 now and having to take a break again because when under high amounts of stress I develop terrible hand tremors.

I can, reliably get the p1 boss down to 60-70% and right now it’s just, not tenneble for the overwhelmingly vast majority of players

I’m in level 200+ ilvl gear
I get squashed to 50.
Vendor outside sells dauntless tokens that can random upgrade to warforged which was current at original MT, and that it ilvl 60 and gets squished down too.

This isn’t remotely a challenge for bear tanks as much as it is a ‘can you burn the adds’ test, which news flash, isn’t what tanks are about.

Honestly well said, and I agree. This type of implementation would’ve been a lot better.

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No, Shadina pointed out something that’s true - that there isn’t a lot of feedback that isn’t just “this is too hard” which a vast majority of the posts and threads say about it.

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Awesome feedback. Completely agree but I’ll add that it shouldn’t be time restricted. Your community is thirsty for challenging solo content and here it is.

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This is the issue that everyone is goiy to have and why I kept saying MT couldn’t come back, because we don’t even have the same playstyle or even some of the same abilities we used to have.

That would have made sense. We’d have our old abilities and talents back. But I feel that’s not something they wanted to spend time on or are incapable of doing. I’ll go with the former, rather than the latter.

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The reason why it’s worse for priest is because it fundamentally changes every aspect of the encounter.

Originally, shadow priest had no hope of doing the encounter as it was intended to be done like Boomkin, Hunter and Mage. The trade-off was priest would run S2M, and 1 phase Raest. You’d pop it before void form, kite Karem a bit longer, pop void form as Karem was going to die, blow every CD known to man (while judggling void form so you didn’t insta-die) and 1 phase Raest.

Because of the changes, Shadow now has to do the encounter like the others, but has none of the kiting capability of the others mentioned, and has none of the tools the other have. Including no actual slow, other than mind flay, which requires you be standing still in the first place.

I see what you’re saying, but I do feel shadow is a bit of an extreme case. Aff’s also in the same boat.

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No, I get that, I’m just saying that you’re right and this is why we’re running into some of the issues we’re having with it.

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Yeah, for sure. It’s more of that half-baked problem.

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Above all I think the reimplementation of the Mage Tower has been lazy and ignores a lot of the issues the game has since Legion.

To me it’s sort of a big picture thing in the sense that they threw this together and released it to try to make people happy, while ignoring or doing:

  1. Having only one specialization-specific reward for specialization-based challenges
  2. The many dozens of artifact traits, legendary effects, and general class design that existed during Legion that aren’t around anymore
  3. While I like that they clearly decided the PTR tuning was too easy, they didn’t consider how doing things like tripling the amount of health of a boss would impact the challenges for certain specs
  4. Knowingly making the challenges much more difficult than originally intended while planning on having an 18 week window in between opportunities

But I think the worst thing was…

They did all this without being prepared for what the community would think. This is obvious due to the lack of response. Yes, I don’t particularly believe in superficial feedback like “I’m sad that this is so hard” but I somewhat sympathize because people were looking forward to this and so many were let down. I can understand that even if I don’t agree with someone’s feedback specifically.

There’s a lot of incompetence, laziness and what feels like “lost its way” with the development team that works on this game now. It makes me sad and it feels a bit pathetic to me that they used this as an olive branch for the community but it missed a lot of marks.

I’ve had fun working on my challenges. Don’t get me wrong, but I can feel the apathy. It doesn’t just show, I can feel it. While I will defend the idea that people should put more effort into their thoughts and feedback here, I still recognize a lot of failures.

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Attended and failed. It is impossible to pass it for a tank druid without any flasks and potions, not even able to finish the p1. I might quit now. Got work to do

I beat Tugar. I agree with you. It is for sure harder then legion.

Coming from someone who has already beat it, I would be more then fine if they nerfed it a little.

What I noticed about Tugar the most was the increase in “passive damage”. It seems like the things outside of the intercut cast and the cc of the snake spells do a lot more damage. It is doable tho. The gear and talents I used are still on my character if you want to see what I used as Monk

It is doable, yes. I’ve gotten within striking distance on the priest. It’s just incredibly annoying how much harder it is than it was in Legion, when the whole point of this was to bring people back to that challenge.

Side note: For fun, I got on my Alliance warrior who has quite literally nothing. And she 3 shot Agatha. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Agatha, who was much harder back in Legion, became such a joke in comparison to the other mage towers like Tugar, which are such a nightmare to go through.

It’s not even fun, it’s just irritating.

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