Spriest MT is broken, hell the whole damn thing is in all honesty.
You shouldn’t have to be gearing into past expansion gear to get a slight edge up over this because Blizz decided we don’t get covenants and legendries.
Unlike the original MT challenge where we had artifact weapons, the skill trees behind them and legion leggos on top of all that. Oh and that one didn’t rely on a broken scaling system.
Like I get it, people have completed it, but at what point is Blizzard going to admit that it’s over tuned and causing people to have to borderline manipulate the game’s busted scaling system to get even close to finishing it.
It highlights a core problem with a lot of specs: building your class identity and the core power of your character on borrowed power is awful and causes the players to never really learn their spec.
Every xpac Blizz makes the same mistake: add borrowed power - realize it’s unbalanced and broken in some way - add a system to band-aid it - that system is broken too - remove restrictions on first system to try and fix issues caused by second system - introduce another system to fix the first two broken systems or make them obselete - oh hey xpac is over time to do it again. Can we stop please?
Starting to feel like this is a poorly hidden sub grab by blizzard to pump up holiday numbers and keep current players subbed because they have no compelling content to release until they manage to squeeze out 9.2 and a half-baked xpac announcement that is going to trivialize everything we do for the remainder of this xpac.
If it wasn’t so tightly time gated and the restrictions on SL leggos and Covenants weren’t a thing this would actually be decent, but again, Blizzard dicked themselves (and players by extension) by having to make it exclusive in a timewalking system that is poorly set up from the get go because all it is used for is old appearances and mounts.
Honestly, sure, keep it hard but at least let us have the abilities that our specs are relying on to be viable in current content, otherwise all we’re going to see is people who can put endless pulls into it for the 2-3 weeks it’s available like the streamers, gamer chads and world first raiders complete it.
Honestly I think it’s only overturned in the sense that the best strategy is to purposefully enrage the boss to deal 500% increased damage and burn him down from there
When that’s the best strategy there’s obviously something wrong with the “proper” way to do it.
Did anyone at blizzard actually play this before it went live? Kinda feels like they didn’t
I actually have nearly completed the shadow challenge with no enrage on the boss.
I only tried 10 times and got him to 10% and I don’t really know how to play shadow correctly since I’m a holy main.
I only used the cyclotronic blast trinket from BFA which you can get very easy, the rest of my gear is all shadowlands 248 ilvl.
tbh it is the easiest one of all priest specs and very doable.
This is not true, a lot of people have completed the MT by now even casuals. I consider myself a casual player and competed the holy challenge before the last nerf and holy challenge is probably one of if not the hardest challenges of the MT.
I’ve honestly gotta say shadow feels like the spec that is least tied to borrowed power in SL. I didn’t feel like I was ‘missing’ any spells.
As for the challenge itself, it’s hard for two reasons I’ve come to find as the person who wrote the guide and as someone who’s been helping people for the last week and a half.
1: Honestly, the challenge asks you to perform a skill no shadow priest has ever had to use let alone perfect. Kiting NPC mobs (Which is different from kiting players). Nowhere else in the game do you have to deal with something like Karam.
2: Shadow has no redundant spells in this challenge. Mostly referring to hands, but it applies elsewhere as well. You use tools in specific places, and if you have to use a tool in the wrong place because you made a mistake, you’re likely just going to die.
To end, this challenge is absolutely doable in shadowlands only gear with shadowlands only consumables, even without going down the kill Karam route (Which I do think is easier). The fight’s a DPS check as much as it is a mechanics check, and you’re playing to optimise / find damage every pull as much as you are trying to learn the strategy to handle the mechanics.
OP, where are you getting stuck, what’s killing you, and which strategy are you trying?
I didn’t do the Mage Tower back in Legion, so this is all new to me. I tried the 3 specs (5-10 pulls each) and found Holy to be the easiest, then Shadow, and Disc hardest.
The part where I’m getting stuck at in Shadow is kiting the adds during the soak mechanic. It feels like 90% of the time, the soak puddle appears right next to the mobs. Any tips?
Note: there’s a bug affecting the fight right now where spawning pets against raest makes him move a bit, changing locations of the runes.
The runes only have 4~ spawn locations, and all 4 are in the front left corner of the room from where you enter. The strategy is to play around the back half / right side of the room, kiting the adds out of the location for any potential soaks, then loop around them and move into the now clean space as the soak spawns.
Get your intellect to at least 380 after buffs. 380ish stamina. 78+ armor. 25% haste. And you got yourself enough stats for the kill.
Elli’s #2 point hits the nail on the head. Be efficient. Don’t be wasteful of resources… and you’ll see Phase 5 more often than not, then it’s all down to kiting low, soaking high, and staying alive.
You can do it.
It only feels hopeless when you don’t have a true plan.
If the mechanics are there and your hand dmg is good, you’ll be fine.
The shadow challenge exploits all the thing that shadow is bad at. Compared to the other specs doing this challenge, we are lacking tools to deal with most of the mechanics. We have no baseline movement not tied to a major defensive cd, no pets to soak runes for us or a reliable way to snare or slow mobs (fear capped at 5, mind bomb takes 2 sec to go off). Our best tool to deal with hands is VoiT, which must be freakin’ channeled so we have to somehow find time to stand still for 3 full seconds. Other specs easily trivialize these - frost mage literally has a 24 sec interrupt, slows for days, AND a pet to soak runes. Marksman has tar traps and binding shot, pet for soaks; affliction has demonic circle, gates, pet for soaks. Even boomie has mass entanglement and typhoon, excellent mobility in catform, great instant AoE to apply DoTs (while shadow’s SN costs 2 GCDs to cast and must be channelled, again, stand still!), trees that can passively nuke down hands, etc.
Shadow is definitely doable. But I get the impression that the challenges were designed to make the player use our full toolkit to succeed. The MT just exposes how shadow’s toolkit is really lacking in good utility (outside of good defensives like dispersion and vampiric embrace). I hope shadow’s utility toolkit gets reworked going forward, not only to help us in the MT but to increase our viability in M+.
Watching warlock and hunter runs is so funny because I’m like… holy cow… they have tools for so much. It’s kind of awesome to watch.
Then you see us and it’s… you have a mind bomb/fear, a single silence if you screw up the hand, and a shield on cooldown to run faster at times. It’s pretty brutal. Love our p2 and p4 burst tho.
But very very doable. The long winded complaints aren’t needed. I’ve seen loads do it. I’ve seen Ellipsis do it with garbage talents on purpose and test all sorts of things.
It’s worth noting that shadow’s version of karam is SIGNIFICANTLTY SLOWER than frost and MM’s and even balance’s version. He gains stacks at a much reduced rate and it’s possible to out manoeuvre him for a good minute and a half without even pressing power word shield.
Sure but it also says the challenge is at least in some ways tuned around the capabilities of the specs doing it.
I do think it asks Shadow to do something that the players who play it won’t have necessarily practiced in their day to day gameplay, namely kiting, but it does make that kiting something within they can do.
I didn’t really have too much issue with Karam ever reaching me but that could have had more to do with the Worgen Racial being very useful when things got spicy. I also did a completion using Fried Bonefish with searing and the movement speed you get from staggering kills on the little mobs has a very high uptime later in the fight when movement is important.
Yeah those tools do certainly help, I set myself a challenge (As Oniun mentioned) of doing it in my regular gear with the worst talent build I could imagine for it, which involved not having any movement speed except for the odd dispersion during a hand cast.
You should take a look at these numbers I found while examining videos of the shadow priest challenge when it was released in 7.2. I’m sorry I do not have links to actual videos. I just watched whatever I could find on YouTube. The conclusion is that Raest’s health was severely inflated in the Shadowlands release even though shadow priests are weaker at handling this encounter than they were in Legion.
If you reduced raests HP to 1.2x karam’s you would kill him 100-0 zero in phase 2, or at most leave him at 10%. To do that in legion required us to be doing THREE TO FOUR TIMES the dps of any other dps spec during their cooldowns. I can go into the mage tower in SL gear, get to phase 2, pop an SL pot, drums, and all my cds, and do 55-60k damage in the first burn. With original Legion values, the fight would be over.
The fact is that every single number, be it health, damage, relative hp, ilvl, haste, crit, mastery, vers, whatever, has changed. On both the player and the encounter. The fights aren’t comparable.
Now I’m not saying the fight couldn’t stand a nerf. Absolutely for those who aren’t as good at optimising damage knocking 5-8% off Raest’s hp would make burning phase 5 feel significantly more achievable, but everything is so different that pulling up old numbers feels like it misses the point.
Not to mention the fact that in the original tower we only had one cooldown that could survive a hand, now we have 2, and in Legion we did not have the damage to ever kill a hand before its cast went off in any circumstance, something that is no longer true.
I’d say shadow is better at the SL Tower than it was at the Legion one, once you discount the ability to skip every single mechanic by burning it 100-0 in phase 2.
The fight then and the fight now is definitely comparable. The rate at which the NPCs go down can definitely be compared. The fact is, Raest would indeed go down much faster (ignoring the StM strategy in Legion 7.3) than he does in today’s release. The biggest complaint today is that Raest goes down too slow from his massive health pool.
I’ve watched your videos. You’re very good, but you just barely complete the encounter even while using all the consumables you can. Even other pros today post videos of themselves completing the challenge while just barely making it to a rune or getting lucky and not dying from a Hand from Beyond cast (all defensive cooldowns not ready). This was rarely the case in old 7.2 videos of the encounter from other players. They were not relying on drums, flasks, potions, to have a mere chance to completing the challenge. They were providing an edge to the player.
I would say the shadow priest challenge in Shadowlands is worse and you are not making anything better by ignoring the past.
