So for those who have done mage tower, I am currious as to what challenge or challenges were the hardest for you. I am 5/7 on the mage tower. I did Arms, Fury, WW, Guardian and Enhance. For me the hardest challenge I would have to say was Guardian. The most fun is tied between Enhance, Arms and Guardian.
The general sentiment I’ve seen is that Kruul is the hardest (with some honourable mentions to Xylem) and Agatha/Feltotem are the easiest. Though obviously YMMV based on specs.
For specs, most complaints have been about the Bear fight, but I dunno if that’s because it’s inherently harder or just because it’s got the most unique reward so you’ve got a lot of people trying it who aren’t familiar with the spec.
I only did Bear and Destruction cause I only wanted the Felbear and Warlock set. Feltotem was basically a one mechanic fight where the only mechanic that wasn’t completely trivial was keeping on top of Fel blast.
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The lock set does look cool and it’s def one of the best looking sets for the MT. For my bear challenge I did not play Balance affin I played Resto affin.
Demo lock felt very rewarding when I finally got it down, Ele shaman felt like a free win once I worked out CD timings, and Frost mage just took me a while to get back in the feel of playing a frost mage.
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I did quite a few of them. The hardest for me by far was the Havoc DH. The easiest was the Frost Mage.
Call me a masochist, but the most fun for me would also have had to be the Havoc DH. I also really enjoyed Tugar every time I did it because of how easy it was to script out and progress through it,
I just did a guardian and Feral Druid and I really enjoyed the Guardian one. Feral went down on the 3rd attempt
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Here’s my opinion (easiest to hardest) from completing the 7/7:
- Tugar (BM Hunter)
- Agatha (Fury Warrior)
- Sigryn (Ret Pally)
- Twins (Affliction Warlock)
- Xylem (Arms Warrior)
- Erdris (Holy Pally)
- Kruul (Guardian Druid)
Kruul just seems like a really tight/brutal DPS race, and there’s also elements of RNG (random infernal knockback, overlapping mechanics, Velen getting 2-shotted, etc) on top of it.
On the opposite end of the scale, BM Hunter actually felt even easier than the same exact challenge during Legion, very very easy 1-phase fight 
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That’s just because a ton of people were dusting off their bear after several years of not playing it. Havoc, Holy Priest and Shadow were all quite a bit worse.
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I only wanted the bear. Did the bear one, and tried the lock and shaman ones for funzies then said to meh with it.
It was hard and annoying but fun I enjoyed it. Lock one I gave it some goes for fun same with the shaman ones.
I’ve gotten every reward and then a few since there isn’t much else to do on live right now.
Mage: frost, arcane
priest: disc
warlock: demo
rogue: outlaw
dh: veng
druid: guardian
monk: ww
shaman: ele, resto
hunter: mm
paladin: holy
warrior: fury
dk: frost
Overall I felt that Xylem was the worst just for p2 health, and its the only one I didn’t do twice. I only did it on dk because I avoided the fight after clearing it. It feels like you have to be mage tower optimized in some metric to be able to beat that timer, especially since its fairly common to see 4-5 add waves when in legion it was 2-4.
Tank challenge was as I remembered it, it sucked but it was overall something that could be adapted to.
Priest also felt particularly bad in all three challenges. Holy challenge is outright unfair for the hardest part of the fight(phase 1) between add tuning and holy timewalking scaling. Shadow is missing alot of the tools that made it work on the twins, but its doable just wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. I did disc because it was only a matter of time, you get into a fight cadence in the first minute and you ride on that for the next 10-15 minutes because it takes that long. I was lucky to have played my priest as a main for bfa and had the cyclotronic device which had to have shaved 2 minutes off of my already 10 minute kill.
Also I am still somewhat seething about sigryn having a hard enrage. I don’t remember there being on in legion, and if it was there it was irrelevant because the damage check was attainable from the get go, unlike now where you can hit enrage and die if you so much as dare to play it safe on some classes.
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36/36 here, hardest one was by far holy priest and balance druid in my honest opinion. None of the tank challenges were difficult but I also been playing tank/dps classes for about 17 years. I’ll list for which class is the hardest per challenge and the easy to medium difficulty after that.
Twins - Balance without question (frost >mm hunter> affliction> spriest)
Agatha - Feral, for some reason this time around feral felt more complex compared to legion, not sure but also doesn’t help I don’t like feral and that it’s rotation is very clunky. ( Arms = Ele Shaman > Fire Mage > Outlaw rogue)
Sigryn - Demonology , I am not a fan of this spec as I prefer destro/affliction , Arcane = Ret = Enhance > Sin rogue. Honestly if you can play arcane, it’s probably the easiest due to high dps out vs sham/ret but ret/sham is definitely more forgiving due to self heals.
Tank - Tough call here because I found all of the tanks simple, might go with brewmaster being the most difficult one out of all the tanks. They get hit pretty hard, although so does warrior but at least warriors can spell reflect twisted reflection in p2 which makes the entire p2 a complete joke. On top of that BRM dps is on the weaker side compared to the rest. ( Veng > Bear > DK > Warrior > Paladin
Fel Totem - I am going to go with Disc, even though Fel totem was also simple, Disc is the only spec out of the rest of this challenge that can’t deal with the worm enraged. Everyone else has a way of killing it if you managed to kill the main dude first. Ravage seed pod however trivializes the add encounters entirely. (WW > BM> Destro)
Healing - Holy priest, it is literally the worst healer to do this challenge on, not to mention how dreadful doing the healing challenge is to begin with due to the amount of phases you have to go just to get to the end. (MW= Holy Paladin= Resto druid > Resto Shaman)
Xylem - Probably Havoc honestly , which is weird considering how free this was in legion. The dps check is extremely tight in P2 and survival can be iffy in P1 if you’re not your A game. (Arms > Survival Hunter > Frost DK > Sub rogue)
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So funny story about Guardian. When I first downed it in Legion after about 40 attempts, I got so mad that Velen kept dying that when I finally downed it I went out to the Exodar and solo killed him and THAT was so rewarding. Payback was mine LOL!
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In Legion I did Resto Druid 2nd rotation (was my main back then) and eventually got all 36/36 specs by the end of the expac. So far for the timewalking mage tower, I’m 5/7 (missing Xylem and healer) towards the mount.
My experiences so far in timewalking mage tower:
Easiest to Hardest: Twins (Frost) = Agatha (Ele) = Bloodtotem (WW) > Twins (Not Frost) > Sigryn (Demo) > Xylem > Tank > Healer
Most Fun to Least Fun: Bloodtotem (WW) > Twins (Frost) > Tank (HotW Bear) > Agatha > Xylem > Sigryn > Healer
Thoughts on the challenges in the order I progressed them:
Tank (pally/druid kills):
- Prot Paladin: 60ish pulls for a kill Before they nerfed it, it was exactly as I remembered: if judgement doesn’t crit, the eyes are left at a sliver of hp, post nerf they always die in 1 judgement which was huge. Having access to Turn Evil now to further delay Annihilation once I ran out of orbs in p2 made this easier than I remembered in Legion. Still very tough, but a very rewarding to kill.
- Guardian Druid: 80 pulls for a kill I tried both the resto/bash endurance strat and the moonkin/hotw zerg strat and found success w/ the zerg since the transition. Having a clean transition and maximizing uptime on boss via on use trinkets to kill adds for a fast phase made this a lot easier than back in Legion.
Tank challenge is still no joke, as evidenced by my pull counts. There’s a decent amount of RNG as to when abilities happen in p1 (drain life vs add spawns, for instance) that can drastically vary the difficulty from pull to pull. A few trinkets/consumables were insanely helpful since the scaling is so borked:
- Diamond-Laced Refracting Prism Auto shield that scales with Versatility (like a faster Prydaz) from Opulence in Battle of Dazar’alor - This competed with Word of Glory for overall healing on my pally
- Bloodthirsty Urchin Auto-heal that scales with Versatility - This did 20% of my healing on bear and smoothed out p2 enough that I stopped getting to 3rd Annihilate with only 50% hp.
- Umbral Moonglaives 1m30s AoE that can solo add waves - I used this to delete the first add wave while not stopping HotW/Moonkin boss dps in p1
- Potion of Unbridled Fury lasts 1 min and resets when you enter so if you pop one then immediately enter the challenge, you still have ~25s left of the potion for p1 and can 2nd pot for Kruul in p2. This potion does a single target proc that adds up to a huge amount of dps in this challenge.
Twins (mage kill):
- Affliction Warlock: 27 pulls, no kill yet. Curse of weakness seemed really good, but not having the slow ring from Legion still hurts.
- Balance Druid: 3 pulls, no kill yet. New Stellar Drift putting a CD on Starfall feels garbo and I’m still salty so I stopped working on this challenge as I already got the appearance from bear and frost seemed easier.
- Frost Mage: 13 pulls for a kill Frost hard counters this challenge, once you learn how to kite Karam+adds in your blizzard while focusing Raest and sending your elemental into the runes it just falls over. If you don’t kite him properly or focus adds/Karam instead of funneling Raest, it feels impossible. I really enjoyed progressing this challenge again.
Bloodtotem (monk kill):
- Destruction Warlock: 3 pulls, no kill yet. I’m just bad at destro and the CC felt lacking so I swapped to WW.
- Windwalker Monk: 18 pulls for a kill Monk just hard counters this fight. You always have a kick for the cast and if you alternate leg sweep and paralyze, the worm never gets a shout off. The spinning crane kick proc is OP for the eggs and you can heal yourself if you make a mistake so it’s very forgiving.
Agatha (shaman kill):
- Fury Warrior: 16 pulls, no kill yet. All the guides I had read seemed to indicate that Fury was a hard counter, but I did not find that to be the case. I was constantly behind on adds and let the boss heal way too much if I didn’t get good procs so I tried other specs.
- Feral Druid: 2 pulls, no kill yet. Feral plays very differently to Legion. I remember coming in and slapping it with Brutal Slash back in the day. I cut my losses with this one.
- Elemental Shaman: 8 pulls for a kill Once I finally swapped to Ice Fury, I stopped having straggler adds sneak by when I was short on Lava Burst procs. Those buffed Frost Shocks do wonders for killing the healer or plague adds or if an Umbral teleports out of range of Chain Lightning. This ended up being a lot easier than I remembered it being in Legion.
Sigryn (warlock kill):
- Demonology Warlock: 42 pulls for a kill I really wanted the warlock mog so I persevered with this one, even though other specs might’ve been easier. It’s fairly RNG with how/when overlaps happen, but once I started using my pet to tank the rage, keeping doom up, prefearing the aoe, and didn’t get bad runes, I got the kill. Ravaged Seed Pod is OP AF for this, since the bosses share HP. Similarly, Unblinking Gaze of Sethe is also insanely good, since it can cleave all the bosses. They were 9.9% and 9.6% of my dps, respectively, just behind Doom at 11.3%.
Xylem (no kill):
- Arms Warrior: 2 pulls, no kill yet. I can barely live a single ice wave so I bailed quick.
- Survival Hunter: 10 pulls, no kill yet. By FAR the easiest in p1 (pet tank OP), but the intermission is bugged for me and will never end when I reach the boss, so I’m unable to prog with this class.
- Havoc Demon Hunter: 13 pulls, no kill yet. I’m able to reach the 2nd intermission, but since he’s so hard to move in p1 arcane I can’t zip across with Fel Rush. I need to just be patient and I can get this one.
- Frost Death Knight: 2 pulls, no kill yet. I’m bad at DK so I didn’t give this many pulls.
Healer (no kill):
- Resto Druid: 11 pulls, no kill yet. This is just as hard as I remember it being. P1 is a nightmare and requires insanely specific CC timing/plans. I’m able to zerg some waves a lot faster than I remember, but the 4th and 5th waves are just so much damage that I have to fully focus on healing, which means the soldiers get a second knife dance off and I’m done for. I just need to nolife this one like I did back in Legion, but the clocks ticking so I’m not sure if I’ll make it. Considering giving Holy Paladin a whirl as I hear they have an easier p1 (but harder p2-3).
Overall, it’s been a lot of fun revisiting and re-progressing these old challenges. I went ham back in Legion and I was excited to go ham again. With the time-limited nature of timewalking, the bugs have been infuriating and needing to go back and farm old raids for overtuned trinkets isn’t exactly what I was expecting when I heard the mage tower was returning. I wish this would stay up until 9.2 so I could play it more. I’ve already put in over 300 pulls this timewalking and would love to try even more.
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Am 7/7.
Tanking was by far the most… ‘difficult’ of them all. The animation for the infernal yeet cannon happens too quickly and is impossible to see when there is a lot of ground clutter. Way, way too much RNG.
The healing one was a bit long, but it felt like what all the challenges should have felt like. Once you figured out one section or phase, getting past that point moving forward was simple. I’m guessing I did 40-50 serious pulls on my resto druid. Got to the last boss around 10 times before killing.
The easiest ones I did were WW and Fury. The WW one felt undertuned. Once you understand the fight, there really isn’t much development. It’s rinse and repeat. Fury was slightly more complex, but same deal. Once you got the pacing and rhythm down, not much changed. I actually enjoyed doing the fury one. I don’t play fury, but it was a find fight overall. Took me 15 minutes. MM wasn’t bad and enhance felt like the proper level of difficulty.
I’ve completed all 36 challenges, and later on I’ll specify which ones I think are the hardest for each challenge. In general, the tank challenges tend to be perceived hardest by most because there are a lot of mechanics that are just wipes such as improper CD usage on annihilate or getting knocked off, whereas most challenges they can be made up for. For each challenge though, there was usually an outlier in terms of how difficult they were.
Xylem: the hardest by far was Havoc, the damage in phase 1 was just insane and you had to play it pretty well to live through, especially pre-nerf. I feel they had one of the harder times killing adds P2 as well.
Agatha: Outlaw rogue felt the hardest, mostly because you had very little healing unless you roll grand melee often, and mistakes are significantly more punishing than on the other classes that can do that challenge.
Sigryn: This is probably a toss up, the fight just sucks if you get bad rune / valk placement. The change from Legion where there is actually an enrage timer changes the fight significantly. You really need to utilize aoe spells and multi-dotting to meet dps checks. Demo lock or Ret were probably the hardest simply due to mobility reasons.
Healer challenge: Resto shaman or holy priest. These two (especially pre-nerf) were significantly harder than the others. P1 for both is really difficult, you really have to be spot-on for the casters or they will kill someone, and if the same person gets targeted repeatedly it can just be a death. Phase 4/5 is easy on shaman, but is actually really draining on the priest. Holy priest is probably a bit harder than shaman overall.
Twins: Might be controversial, but I think balance druid is the hardest here. You don’t have a permanent slow and you have to alternate between root cyclone and typhoon, but you can accidentally DR ursol’s vortex and typhoon resulting in a wipe if you aren’t carefuly which is really annoying. It just felt the hardest to dps down before karam starts catching you. (I never used any strats where you heal through enrage for boomkin, so this is assuming you are just focusing Raest)
Worm: Windwalker is the easiest by far. You can interrupt every single thing in this fight, and when you can’t, you can karma a sonic blast to heal from it. You have big mobility, enough healing to live, and huge aoe to burst worms down easily while moving as well. This challenge in general is pretty easy, but windwalker has the edge.
Kruul: This one is hard to say because I really feel like barring getting knocked off, this challenge isn’t too difficult. I would say brewmaster has the most difficult phase 1, and prot paladin has the most difficult phase 2 (most susceptible to dying it felt like).
I think all the challenges have the potential to be fairly easy if you even just use some of the stronger trinkets such as ravaged seed pod, draught of souls etc. I didn’t have the luxury of doing so, but I went back with them on a few to test it out and they were significantly easier.
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Once you figure it out, it’s really pretty easy.
For wave 4, everyone should be topped going into it. Ideally, you’re kiting the last mob of phase 3 to the top of the key, so they start killing right away. As soon as the mage is active, bash them and keep hotting. Typhoon the knife dance (x2), pop tree + innervate, and start running to the opposite side. One will chase you. While in tree, you get instant roots, root it and keep spamming heals. Once it unaggros, move up and get ready to clone it. Mage is dead at this point and the other knife dance should be half health. The mob will again chase you, same deal… root it again and make distance. By this point you should be down to one mob.
Same deal for wave 5. Bash mage on opener, typhoon knife dance and stand by grandma. The archer will target you just when the knife dancer will aggro to you. Root him and granny eats the arrow. Mage should be dead by now. Wait for knife dancer to dance again… clone it. It’s important that you’re cycling between clone/root. Since root and vortex share DR. Well, since you just clone him, next aggro you vortex him. This part can be tricky if the NPCs don’t target the mobs correctly.
I would def stick with resto if you know the spec. The final boss is really strong as resto. Tranq completely heals a wave of the spirits. It’s massive and helps conserve mana.
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I did 14 of the Challenges, 11 mog sets :
Agatha : Fury, Unholy, Outlaw
Tugar : Beast Mastery, Destruction
Risen Threat : Holy Paladin
Xylem: Arms
Twins : Frost Mage
Sigryn: Arcane, Enhancement
Kruul : Prot Paladin, Guardian, Brewmaster, Vengeance
I attempted many others, but at the end, opted to lower my attempt count by focusing on the easier ones. The harder ones were just too aggravating for the rewards and time was limited, so no use wasting time on them.
By far, the harder ones seem to be the Priests ones, that class got shafted, and that’s the only class I’m not going to do. Affliction was also completely shafted after the Twins fixes. Shoulda done it pre-Twins buff. Guardian Bears also have the hardest Kruul P2 DPS check of the bunch. Havoc DH is massively overtuned compared to Arms, even though Havoc healing isn’t that much better than Arms, again, no reason to be that aggravating. Agatha is also all over the place, Fury just deletes it, everyone else seems to have to plan CD management for add waves and bad overlaps.
Overall, what could have been a fun event was overshadowed by poor tuning and Blizzard’s complete absence and lack of communication.
Brewmaster ? 
I beat Brewmaster in 7 pulls on a level 51 Brewmaster (I needed 51 to use the flasks/consumables I had laying around), killed Kruul just as he did annihilate 3, basically Touch of Death’d 1/6th of his health pool. Brewmaster has high DPS, high mobility and the Ox Statue so adds can’t even attack Velen. The Horrors don’t cast their AoE either. The only thing easier than Brewmaster is Vengeance.
Do yourself a favor, put Crusader on a Weapon. Razor Ice : Heroic Leap odd ones, Bladestorm even Ones. Crusader will heal you on ticks on Bladestorm, so Bladestorm ones you’ll exit at full health and the Leap ones you’ll exit at 80% health. Spell Reflect while running and charging to him on the ones you don’t Blade storm. Crusader will keep you topped off easily through P1.
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Seems weird. I did only 10 attempts on the boomi one and almost had it. Got bored and did it on MM instead. The prot warrior one took me 100-150 pulls. Too much RNG. The animations were impossible to see. Even when pooling rage for annihilate, sometimes I just didn’t have enough for defensives. Also, way too many bugs on the tanking one. Invisible orbs. Aura of Decay stacks happening too quickly or at random intervals. Eyes spawning in odd spots. Velen running… well, wherever he wanted.
They need to cut down on the RNG on the tanking one. While the healer one was a lot more scripted, I felt like it gave some actual sense of progression and learning the fight. Tank one was just constant frustration.
Of the 5 I’ve done, Fury warrior was the easiest by a mile.
Hardest so far was combat rogue. The margin for error is actually very small, you catch a boulder, youre pretty much done, you dont focus up and play near perfectly, you are gonna get a bad overlap and get wiped.
I’d also suggest that crusader is near mandatory as well. Good luck to any masochist that tries outlaw rogue tower relying on nothing but crimson vial for self sustain.
Most fun - Enhance shaman imo. Nicely tuned, very fair and forgiving, and just a really damn fun fight.
Just about had my 6th tower done not 20 mins ago with Arcane mage but had a power outage at 40% on Siggy, was fairly certain I was on the kill run then. Arcane is also very fun and quite simple once you get the opener figured out and timing on things / when to start kiting. No extra cheese gear required at all, just a fun fight.
I struggled the most with holy paladin, despite it having easier mechanics than other challenges. I’d never played holy paladin or a healer in general before going into the challenge.
So not only was I learning the challenge, but I was simultaneously learning new binds and tweaking my UI to be more healer friendly.
Mechanically though? Marksman Hunter was probably the highest difficulty out of the specs I tried.