Hi all!
I’ve been at the mage tower now for 30+ hours, hundreds of pulls, and am still really struggling. I’ve tried a bunch of different strats. Most guides recommend nuking Raest as quickly as possible. In videos, most players with the kill have him sub 30% before p5 starts. I’m not sure what their stat balances are, but I can never get him sub 40%, even with drums, pot, everything. There’s always a possibility I’m just screwing up rotation, but you can check my parses to see I’m not a terrible shadow priest (most >80% for my ilvl). With Raest still at 40% going into p5, I just can’t get enough damage into him to bring him down before Karam gets so fast I can’t kite him anymore. I can handle the hands just fine - I rotate silence, VoiT, silence. Disperse if I have to. That’s not really a problem.
Another start I’ve tried is actually blowing up Karam in p5 when he becomes active, and then outranging Raest’s shadowbolt while killing adds and waiting for cd’s to come back up. I’ve had limited success with this as well, usually the soak comes up and my health is just too low to survive the blasts. The enrage is a bit unfortunate and I don’t really understand the logic behind it - it wasn’t there in Legion, and frankly the challenge seems hard enough as is.
But the biggest issue I’m having is the RNG nature of the runes. I can be having an almost perfect pull, everything lined up well, and then the rune falls into a pack of adds. Fear is capped at 5, so I just don’t have anything to deal with it.
For you shadow priests that have completed it or those that are still trying, how was it for you? How many pulls did you put into it? I can’t help but feeling like, in comparison with other specs in this challenge, we have really poor tools in SL to deal with the mechanics. Balance has trees, mass entanglement, solar beam, typhoon. Everything a frost mage does slows adds, and they can use pet to soak runes like marksman (who also has tar trap and ice). Maybe the aff locks are having an issue? Though they at least have a mass stun in shadowfury.
Let me know what you think! Please keep it civil, I’m not really interested in “blizz bad” takes, I just wanna get this thing down and would love some advice or just to hear what your experience was. Thanks!