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.