Why do Timewalking Dungeons feel like a slog

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

I swear doing Wrath dungeons back in wrath was faster than the current status. Wrath was one of my favorite expansions, and to revisit the old dungeons feels like it takes way too bloody long

I’m almost 100% sure the scaling is screwed up somehow.

Especially with those runeshaper dwarves in the Halls of Lightning, their spinning arcane bolt attack does a severely disproportionate amount of damage compared to everything else in the game.

The throw spamming trash mobs also seem to do alot more damage than anything else, the one’s that turn from statues to hostile mobs when your walking through the hallway.

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2

The problem is that the scaling tech does a bad job putting players at around the same gear they would’ve been when they did the content back in WotLK

Like when Cataclysm time walking came the End Times dungeons set players item level to something that was below the minimum required when it was current.

3

They’ve always done that much damage. The difference is, in WotLK people knew to interrupt the casts. Nowadays you’ll be lucky if half the playerbase has an interrupt on their bars at all.

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4

That doesn’t help me very much, several of those pulls have two, and people like to spam their stuns so I can’t capacitor totem them, and windshears got a cool down. Q_Q

5

Just hard CC them then. There’s so many ways to handle it.

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6

Yeah, I’ll take direct control over the party members of my group and do just that. :\

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7

Oh wait you’re right, multiple interrupts, stuns, and hard CCs aren’t enough. Gotta nerf 'em too.

2018 WoW right here folks.

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8

They wiped groups in Wotlk too. Stun them, interrupt them, don’t pull more than 1 pack ata time.

9

Ok. I like how many people here are sharing such a good insight… yeah cc them!

Ok, while that is partialy correct. Sometimes, even with the best group composition some of this week TW are just bad.

Please let me explain. I just ran PoS on my Enhancement shaman.

Fun side not. The other 4 people that joined droped the group the second they saw it was Pos. I had to wait for about a minute for a new group. Luckily this one stood.

The group compostion was not too bad for PoS. A holy priest, a shadow priest, ele shaman, warrior tank and of course myself as Enh shaman.

The new guys literaly had no idea what to do. Not too much of a problem. I am good at explaining the fights in a short manner. I did lead way too many groups and raids back in WotLK.

As enh shaman, i was putting earth shield on the tank constantly to help the healer a bit. Aoe stunning with capacitor totem pretty much on cd, and even tossing instant heals on tank quite often.

The pat with the Vrykul and the Drake almost killed the tank. I had to pretty much off heal that whole fight. 1st red flag. When you need 2 healers in a dungeon, just to be able to beat 1 patrol.

The 1st boss wasn’t too hard. However we did wipe once due to 2 people not hidding behind the rocks on the 2nd time he runs to the forge.

The 2nd boss was fine too. The other shaman did die from the poison nova but it wasnt a wipe.

The 1st group of trash on the ramp was a wipe because we tried to just pull with stuns and counterspells. 2nd attempt we used double shackle and counterspell to pull range. That was ok. So the next group worked ok.

Then on the skeletons trash, the tank did rush charge on them and pretty much insta died. 2nd take we did double shackle the mages, stuned the other 4 skelies, tank almost died but we got it. Then even with double shackle tank died on the next pull because we didn’t had capacitor totem ready. But we managed to finish the mobs using some kiting. I purpousedly saved my earth elemental…

On the cave… even with capacitor totem, double earth elemental, with offheals… nothing could prevent the tank from dying. Still, we managed to kill the mini boss as i died. I self rezzed to finis the rest of the trash. As we tried to rez the tank, new skeletons spawned (as is a gauntled) so it became obvious the rezzing spell was too slow to rez the tank before the next skeletons spawned. Luckily i am an engineer, so finished those 2 new skellies and i had JUST ENOUG TIME to pull a quick rez with goblin jumper cables as they have a much shorter cast time. And luckily they didn’t fail.

Then in our way out, the tank did die again from the rest of the trash…

Luckily after that i got time to explain the boss in detail, so with that and still thankfuly we had the earth elementals ready, we managed to 1 shot him. But there was a second i though we were gonna lose the tank.

So yeah the dungeon is posible… but we pretty much got a dream composition for PoS and still wiped way more times i could count. Or at the very least lost the tank even if we managed to save the wipe.

The point is. Not everybody will get as lucky. And even if you are like me and know how to explain the dungeon literaly step by step. Tell me how you gonna do that, if everybody that joins drops instantly after seeing is PoS?

And even then, after managing to finish the place… the rewards are so lame, i can’t tell if is even worth it. I got a 335 helm… yeah… what am i gonna do with that? is not azerite gear. I think someone got a 345 neck… yay? And the quest is a 355… honestly, 355 is not that hard to get. Timewalking should serve as a catch up mechanism… but when that “catch up” mechanism is way harder then the other ways to get 355 gear… how good is it?

And i’d say people are aware of that. As a dps my que times are around 30 mins. Sometimes more. People are not doing TW. Because the effort at the moment is disproportional to the reward. And some people can’t even clear the dungeon because this is above their skill level.

I’m not saying they have to completely nerf TW. But atm, the challenge is way off. My guess this is due them being tuned since Legion around Artifacts. We lost a lot of everything in BfA. Survivability, dmg, etc. I used to be able to blink and get a bunch of healt on my mage. A good way to keep myself up and not make the healer burn tru their mana. My rogue, with the legendary pants, had a lot of self healing. And so every class lost a lot. That’s fine. But they need to re-tune the dungeons.

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10

I think you are underestimating how bad that healer and/or tank were. I did PoS three times now and they went fine. There was no CC used. There’s been a couple wipes to pulling way too much (both groups on ramp lol) and people not dropping stacks on the first boss but it wasn’t too bad overall.

Granted I’m a resto druid and have pretty decent 5-man healing capabilities. Better than a holy priest.

11

I’ve found groups often wipe on Garfrost because they push his phase before he can throw any boulders at all.

Like, this is how much the boss has been nerfed – that you can wipe because he goes down too quickly for key defensive mechanics to appear.

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12

They are most definitely overtuned…It took almost an hour to get through Halls of Lightening, and the big guys that pat in the center towards the last boss, pulled from over a room away , we had no ranged except me as heals…were a guild, and we all know the mechanics of the dungeon, people were getting one and two shotted by the dwarf mobs, even when they completely backed away from the whirlwind…this is a big problem…

13

They should just remove Pit of Saron from the possible Timewalking dungeon list. It was released in 3.3 and does not scale well iLvl-wise like the majority of WotLK Timewalking dungeons do.

Halls of Lightning is another one they should consider removing from the list. While it was not released later, the mechanics in that are just very unforgiving compared to most other Timewalking dungeons.

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14

No it just shows you people are terrible because I blitzed it with my fresh MW in a pug.

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15

Yup its everyone else…its the multiple people with multiple groups, and youre the lone one, so it MUST be ALL the other people…how stupid is that logic

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16

Just did it (HOL). Wasn’t hard. Lazy people who don’t do mechanics will have a hard time.

If you don’t trust your team to know mechanics, call them out on the way to the boss.

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17

Nah I was just referring to you.

18

I find that if you are willing to be patient and explain the mechanics to inexperienced people without being condescending, things go a lot smoother.

I’ve explained several PoS and HoL mechanics in this manner, and most would start doing them.

It’s all a matter of patience. Would I rather them at least look up the guides before going in? Sure, but how are they going to learn otherwise if people are jerks to them?

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19

Yeah seriously, if you know there’s something to warn the party about, do it. Don’t keep silent on a deadly mechanic and then say it’s too hard when people stand in it.

There was precisely one place in HOL where there appeared to be an actual tuning issue. In the slag room, the armor reduction debuff is still at WOTLK levels and hasn’t been adjusted for two stat squishes, so your tank will have zero armor. That’s not actually a problem for the slags themselves, but the debuff lasts long enough that your tank might get chunked if he races to the next pull.

This is pretty much identical to why people thought Arcatraz was overtuned in TW – the maggots in between most of the rooms did the same thing. The mobs were strong but not actually that bad as long as you paid attention to your debuffs and realized before you pulled the next thing that your tank was wearing a Brewfest dress for the next 10 seconds.

EDIT:

Finally got Pit of Saron and checked the ilvl you’re set to, and I can confirm that one is actually mistuned. Same problem as End Time: it’s still tuned to end of xpac epics but the player’s ilvl isn’t adjusted to be specific to it like they did with End Time a few days in and Magister’s before the event dropped.

It’s still quite doable for a mediocre team as long as they’re awake, whereas End Time wasn’t due to unreasonable DPS checks. It’s much easier than Normal while leveling up (where it had the same problem), and still somewhat easier than its original difficulty as current content (where we probably wouldn’t have been able to get away with no CC). Wipes were just caused by the tank getting greedy and people not knowing what to do on Garfrost (second try was fine once they saw the mechanic). There was too much trash in the cavern to run clear to the halfway point, so we just cleared as we went and danced around swirlies while we killed it one pack at a time – goodness knows we’ve had practice at that these days – and ended up getting the achievement for nobody taking damage from icicles.

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20

I tanked one the other day, it was a little long but very easy.