Mage Tower

Community WoW Community Council
1

Let me start by saying the Mage Tower is awesome. I’ve rarely had more fun dying over and over and slowly making changes to get further into the fights and closer to my elusive transmog sets.

I’m personally very happy that it is a difficult challenge, and not a pushover. Yes there are tons of posts complaining about how it is too hard, impossible, or a waste of time. The beauty of it is that there is no power gain associated with the Mage Tower. All you can get is cosmetics for completing a very challenging, solo encounter.

If the tower had been a pushover, we would see the same posts in reverse. “What a joke” “Not worth the wait” “I thought this was supposed to be hard” kind of posts.

Frankly, I’m glad it’s the former.

With all that said, it would be tragic to put all the pulls and effort in to have the Mage Tower deactivate before getting rewarded with a kill. This time of year is busy for a lot of players and we look forward to the Christmas break to play some WoW. Extending the Mage tower beyond Christmas would be a welcome adjustment.

I’m on the fence if there should be tuning to some specs/fights or not; because I truly am enjoying the challenge, and no, I have not tried all 36 specs to be able to compare them equally. But the ones I have tried feel attainable. I understand some other specs may have it worse off.

Final thing I’ll say for now, maybe we could also make it not destroy our armor quite so quickly :wink:

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The challenge part is good i agree. I think the mage tower in particular should be available once per month tho since the 4month waiting time can feel quite a bit “meh”.

However we were told the balance would be around Argus level. Which was already “nerfed” so to say given the original balance was around ToS gear. Coupled with that some challenges do/did appear to have scaling issues for the timewalking (needless to say some challanges were faceroll on Class X and hard on Class Y even back in legion).

Right now, from what i’ve encountered personally, the balance of the mage tower feels around pre NH or NH at best. Im not exactly sure that this is a good idea given the ones of us that did it during that time did it while being, according to Blizzard, severely undergeared.

That is true. It shouldnt be a pushover and one should do the tactics etc. But it shouldnt be as NH in the very least. However i cant say for all of the challenges to begin with.

I agree. Keep it until lets say January 3th.

And that.

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I think the biggest difference between now and then is that as we are now, there is no borrowed power. There is no “grind one more artifact level to make it easier”. It makes it easier to balance, but there were also artifact powers and more importantly, legendary effects that were in the game that made the challenges easier which are not there anymore.

However, I don’t think reactivating artifacts or legion legendaries is anywhere close to the answer.

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It adds to it yes. Given Legion MT was designed with it in mind. However if you tune numbers correctly this can at least be softened. However some abilities not working make specs play kind of “meh” out of a sudden again. Sub rogue without Flag or Echoing most certainly feels like that.

Mhh. Back in Legion you could say “one more week (or til the next tower is built) and with the couple ILVL i get til then it will be a lot easier” rather than just getting one addtional legionfall trait.

looks at inactive healing pants

Preach it.

No i dont think so either. But some fine tuning might work.

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The amount of timewalking cheese available to players is a little much, and can significantly diminish the challenge in some cases. I think some of these should be clawed back if tuning is going to take effect. I don’t think this is a super intuitive nor fun way to try to emulate “outgearing the content” like you could do in Legion itself.

Also, some items from Legion itself don’t seem to be scaled to the normalized ilvl, they stay at their Legion ilvl including warforges and such. I am not sure this is a good idea either, if the Mage Tower wants to be focused on the play and not trivializing DPS and HPS checks.

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Personally as someone who has done almost all except shaman and hunter at around 900 ilvl with 1/no legendaries it felt like everything was doing too much unavoidable damage (xylem frostbolt for example) and us doing too little like on some classes that have the twins.

In fact I still have videos of me doing the kills and damage done/taken really is just off. Also some classes have lost or gotten certain talents nerfed such as havoc leech which basically sustained you through as long as you kept interrupting.

On the other hand other classes right now have it incredibly easy even without any timewalking gear such as fire mage where almost all your spells oneshot the imps when that wasn’t the case back in legion. Fury warrior can hard cheese it with crusader as well.

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I wanted to go ahead and throw out my casual experience here.

I think Mage Tower absolutely needs to be tuned and tweaked. Some of my issues with Mage Tower:

  1. Borrowed Powers. They are disabled in the current iteration of the Mage Tower, yet I’m sure you all fondly remember going in with your artifact weapons outfitted with powerful relics and 1-2 legendaries! Memory of Sacrolash’s Dark Strike made the Affliction warlock challenge an utter joke if you were geared and only a moderate challenge if you weren’t. We could use these lovely “borrowed” powers that boosted our chances at success/completion, yet I cannot use my covenant abilities, legendaries, azerite, or anything along these lines for the current iteration. We were told this would be around an Argus level (as mentioned in a previous response) but it certainly isn’t.

  2. Scaling. I am sure we are all aware there’s usually an issue with scaling when it first comes out. Legion Timewalking dungeons right now feels like going through an old content dungeon unscaled. Then you have Mage Tower, which seems (from my casual perspective) ‘overtuned’ in comparison. I think this is something that definitely needs working on - especially with some items scaling and others not scaling as well.

  3. Class/Spec Nuances. Some specs are DAUNTING, and not in the “it’s a player skill issue!” sort of way. While some of the challenges are similar amongst varies classes/specs, encounters will hit for different numbers from one class/spec to the next. This makes some people who main these particularly unlucky classes/specs frustrated or feel like they’re just bad at the game. Examples - difference in % hit the NPC party members take between different healing classes, the simple ability to interrupt or purge with some healers while others cannot, etc.

The WoW Community Council members who posted before me have done so eloquently and touched upon a few of the things with which I take issue, as well as discussed some of the great things they enjoyed about it.

It’s been said prior that this is not supposed to be faceroll for us, and I agree. It’s also been said that being too hard -OR- too easy will cause frustration, and I agree with that as well. I don’t think you should be able to jump in and 1-shot these. They were meant to be challenging. They were meant for you to know your class’s strengths and weaknesses, or at least read a guide beforehand if it’s a new spec/class to you. I get it, but I also don’t know how I feel when someone who has a limited amount of WoW time per week spends 6 hours on just a single spec’s challenge and seems to make little or no progress. It’s just going to make those people not want to play.

I understand that it’s just cosmetic rewards and not a power gain, and is in no way mandatory or required for raiding, pvp, dungeons, M+, RP, or old content farming. I also don’t feel like it should feel like mythic progression raiding (especially with the amount of people buying consumables for this). It would be nice if some of the rough edges of the Mage Tower were smoothed out so we could enjoy a challenge and not being scared off when our high-end raider/theorycrafting friends are spending an entire day on a single challenge.

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I think that, outside of outliers that already have been confirmed to be brought in line with others, the difficulty is fine in a vacuum.

However, the current mage tower has three different components, that together make for a fairly potent and toxic mix if not adressed: Difficulty, availability, and scaling.

With the idea that gear, for the most part(and unlike in legion) is no factor, and its availability of two weeks every 9 months, the difficulty suddenly does become a factor.

As said before, I personally dont think the challenges are(for the most part) overtuned. I would however like to see the mage tower be available more than twice a year. The content is too good and engaging, and with more availability you wouldnt need to mess with the scaling or the difficulty.

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To throw some personal thoughts up about Mage Tower as a whole. I’d like to see the Mage Tower just as a permanent piece of solo challenging content. No need to tie it to Legion Timewalking, the game needs more solo content that is actively rewarding.

I wouldn’t want to see the challenges themselves adjusted to be easier more as attaining more skill through perseverance is something the game is sorely lacking and would personally like to see more content like this going forward.

Also think the adjustments to Timewalking gear a bit weird, if it was to be done without it why not just use stat templates? Timewalking Gear for me serves a few very important purposes:

  1. It allows you to build crutches to get past the challenge and then repeat it with less of them and see if you’ve improved or not.
  2. It reinvigorates older content and gives more of the game a purpose (rather than just the current expansion)

I’ve seen so many success stories in Discords that I’m part of from people who come in saying it’s impossible, us looking through their VoDs and pointing out adjustments they can do rotationally, them improving and becoming better players as a result as they had a defined end goal and ultimately became a better player.

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Yeah I think having it be permanent would be awesome. I’d also like to see there just be a standardized gear set for each class. That way each fight can be balanced perfectly and it isn’t reliant on farming a certain trinket or gem slot. With a stat template everyone would be on an equal footing. I’d love to try all 36 specs, but I just don’t have the time to put into it so I will miss out on that FoS.

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I have very fond memories of the Mage Tower back in Legion, both in preparation and execution, and I was very excited for the new iteration of it for the Legion timewalking event. It did not disappoint and has been some of the most fun and challenging solo content I have experienced in a long time.

I can understand that for those that never experienced the Mage Tower in Legion, it could feel quite daunting going into this, but it was never meant to be a push-over and required you to utilise most of the abilities and spells at your disposal. It also provides a good environment to test and master different classes and specialisations.

Overall, I believe the difficulties were balanced quite nicely, some on the easier side, some on the more difficult side, and a good chunk in the middle, but that may boil down to personal knowledge of the different specs and how they play. Admittedly, some of the classes and specialisations I had not played since I did the challenges back in Legion, so these may have come across as more difficult than they actually are. On the other hand, some of the classes and specs I play regularly were still quite challenging and took many attempts to best.

I thoroughly enjoyed the planning and preparation for each class challenge and finding gear and items that could optimise a gear set was some good solo content as well, and coincidentally also made good sets for future timewalking events as an added bonus. How this would come across as an annoyance is relatable, but since you also had to farm not only gear, but also nethershards to compete back in Legion, I don’t see this is a huge negative. The idea of a standardised gear set is interesting though.

My only gripe would be how frequent the Mage Tower is available. I believe having it appear with every timewalking event would be more in tune with how it was available back in Legion.

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I think the tuning is great. I found it very challenging, but doable if I put in a lot of effort (and farmed some gear for it), which felt just right.

I’m worried about the next appearance of the Mage Tower being only one week, though. Four weeks over the holidays was great, and I think two weeks would be fine, but with just one week I think there are going to be a lot of people who work really hard on a scenario but don’t get it that first week, and then have to wait a long time for it to come around again. And when they pick it up again they’ll be rusty and have to relearn a lot of the fight.

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The only Mage Tower I tried was the Guardian Druid one because well, it was the only one that gave a reward that I wanted.

It reminded me of the original X-Wing game from the '90s where some of the missions were so hard I would have to practice them (a 10 minute mission when completed) for an entire week and become a human macro to do every single step perfectly to beat it. I did eventually beat it but I can’t say it was fun. There were other missions to do after those few so I suffered through it to play the rest of the game.

The guardian druid Mage Tower felt a lot like that and after giving a shot a few time came to the conclusion that this would be a miserable slog like X-Wing was and simply decided I didn’t want to invest a few days or a week into it. I just had better things to do with my time I suppose.

I’ve included my thoughts about it, that I wrote at the time in the forums, below as they were my fresh take on it:

If its necessary to farm old gear to be successful then it’s not a skill test its a gear test, just a backwards one.

Requiring moonkin affinity to do enough damage to get through ph1 has nothing to do with tanking.

Even with moonfire and swipe on the 4 adds once they start casting they are stuck in one spot and if that spot is near you or velan it’s a wipe. 9 times out of 10 velan dies. So there is no tank positioning component with regard to them. So have to consume an orb to distract them and kill them.

The damage of the mobs is too high and for the most part 3 shots me.

My damage is too low (in 226 korthia gear) and its taking forever to kill anything (3 moonfires for an eye or waiting around for ticks to kill it)

Ultimately its a DPS race and I don’t have enough in my korthia gear to do enough. Not exactly sure how this is a tanking challenge at all.

All mage tower proves is that without borrowed power all the classes are completely gimped and are useless on their own without a combination of numerous archaic pieces of old gear, pots, drums, food, consumables, hacks and whatever other ridiculous pseudo cheats people can come up with.

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I can relate to the frustration of spending hours upon hours without feeling you’re going anywhere. Guardian druid also took me a long time to complete, and this was without using the balance affinity.

However, I do believe the challenge in itself is great for guardian druids, and I believe you are not giving it enough credit as a solo challenge, which allows you to utilise many different spells and abilities at your disposal. The other challenges across the different classes has you use a wide variety of spells and abilities you would (probably) not use normally, like kiting and crowd control.

The challenges are meant to test your skills and knowledge of the class and specialisation, not purely test how my damage you can do or mitigate, or how much healing you can do. At least going into challenges with this in mind made a lot of sense to me.

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I am, I’m just saying that it’s not for me. I simply don’t want to spend many hours or days to master a 10 minute sequence of events. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t, I just don’t want to invest the time to find out, and that is a choice.

I’m certainly not saying that it doesn’t have a place in the game; and as part of a time walking event it’s good content for a good population of players.

I will say that for a substantial amount of players (my subjective opinion) it is either not achievable, not worth the effort, and in my case in particular, not fun.

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I will say that for a substantial amount of players (my subjective opinion) it is either not achievable, not worth the effort, and in my case in particular, not fun.

Honestly I’m okay with this though. Personally, I worked really hard to acquire the Spellbook mount, and I feel a sense of pride using it knowing the amount of effort I took to get it. Adding those types of difficult rewards feels good to competitive players. Afterall, it should feel like an “achievement.”

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I really enjoyed mage tower this time, because last time i only did my main spec and guardian druid. It was a time when i didn’t play that much.
It was a little unlucky in my opinion that it started over the christmas days but I used the time before for my main and the last week for some alts. I started with guardian druid which felt a lot harder then back in legion, when I did it when it came out and not in the end when it was free.
It was the challenge i needed most attempts on, even if I have never played some other specs ever before. I managed to get the mount by doing every boss at least once.
What i noticed was a enormous skill gap between challenges and classes to finish every single challenge. For example i tried xylem with a vengeance dh i just couldnt do it… i kicked as many frostbolts as i could but always died because of getting to much dmg, especially when there where no frost shards to leech yourself to full hp.
I did it with a sv hunter afterwards which i have never been played until then and it took me not more then 20 trys to beat him. Phase 1 was a total difference because the pet took all the dmg from bolts, i didnt even had to kick regularly.
So i dont know how one class has to kick and stun everything they can and still struggle to survive while another class doesn’t have to pay attention on anything.
I did half of the class sets in the last week but I am not sure if i really want to go for the achievement with some classes being that hard. I’m pretty sure i can do any of these challenges but it will cost a big amout of time (or i will have to farm timewalking gear) just for an achievement.
And i think thats the biggest problem in the end, that most players dont have so much time to waste for it. Especially as it’s a time gated event, which only appears every 4 months or so.
Yes it’s nice to have the mount as something special, but to be honest I’ve seen a lot of them and there will be more and more every time the legion mage tower comes up again.
In the future I would consider some more nerfs at least for some classes or specs which have it way harder than others.
But i really really love mage tower because it’s nice solo content which was mostly well tuned and i hope to see more of this kind of content in the future.

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So the news just dropped that the mage tower is gonna be added permanently after march 29th, and that seems like a very welcome change :> I never got the chance to try it because of a tight schedule in december, so I’m looking forward to collecting these sets!

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With it coming back I would really like to see templates used. Otherwise people are just going to make a “BiS list” to make the Mage Tower “easier”. Having templates would be a time saver and put people on the same level so everyone is completing the same challenge.

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