So as the title suggests, I have completed every single Mage Tower possible. Which makes this my second full run, as I did the same in in Legion.
It took me roughly two weeks since it was released.
Ever since PTR testing I was gravely dissapointed that no adjustments were done and some classes, because of the way they changed, just had a harder time than they did in Legion.
Also they wanted it to be this HYPER SPECIAL thing that they hyped up so much that we only got 1 day of testing. Which then was irrelevant anyways, because they decided to stealthbuff every single challange by a ton.
Sadly some numbnut players supported this:
“just git gud”; “I did it in Nighthold gear”; “its supposed to be a challange”; “you only did it in antorus gear towards the end of legion”
Only so they could feel good and boast about finishing a single challange on a pushover class like fire mage. The people that were saying these things usually didnt have any noteworthy achievements.
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I did a few challanges in Nighthold gear myself: it was vastly easier back then, the hardest part was people not having a clue how the fights worked.
Even in Nighthold you had trinkets like draught of souls that would trivialize fights. -
Blizzard even said back then that this is 7.2 content, so it was tuned for 7.2 gear. So why the hell would NH gear be the benchmark that they aimed for? making it harder than ever intended?
Just as a quick example from a few videos I dug up. Xylem encounters in NH gear used to finish with around 15-20% of the platform left. Every xylem encounter despite sub rogue had barely any space left. The only people I saw it doing with some noteable amount of space left, were the ones that were running timewalking gear. -
You realize that very few people actually had the time to fully deck out every class they wanted to do mage tower on, even when Antorus was out. Of course the fights just blew up with bis legendaries and full mythic gear.
But if you wanted to do multiple classes you had to: Level that class, get the class campagin done, farm your legendaries, farm the gear, farm the broken shore and get nethershards for the entry in the mage tower. That is far from the pushover you are making it seem to be, especially the nethershards. So even when antorus was around, most people that did multiple classes had a bare minimum of gear and any legendary that dropped. The overhead would have been insane otherwise
Scaling has and will always be the most broken, useless and unnecesary sytem that wow has ever gotten. All for the sake of “muh numbers are to big, I can only count to 100”. While fundamentlly breaking the game at various points, just to name a few: Timewalking gear, alt boosting in bfa, scaling issues with open world mobs, having your level 60 char be weaker than it was on level 50 in old raids (suddenly not being able to solo certain raids anymore after new expansion). It has always been a mess and the fact that you decided to defile such pristine content as the mage tower with it is just sickening.
The amount of gold I made by selling old potions I had piled in my banks is huge, as is the amount of gold people are aparently willing to spent to make these challanges a little more bareable. Just because you didnt bother to fix your game so the armor they probably farmed a ton of m+ for is just flatout worse than some crafted cata/mop blue. You were on such a high horse of keeping everything “pristine”, disabeling all kinds of borrowed power. But then you leave sockets enabled ???
Why didnt you bother adjusting consumables as well? Pretty much every expansion had something that was op in mage tower, most of the time SL stuff was garbage. For example the BFA Flasks gave like 30-40% more mainstat than the SL ones. Why are you unable to adjust these numbers, if you wanna have scaling? It feels like your scaling is just attaching a dice to every item, that rolls how good it is after scaling.
You didnt bother to adjust anything besides hyperscale the HP up. The amount of unavoidable damage going out in each challange is FAR to high. In Legion small artifact traits used to give you heals and shields. All of that is missing now and you end up either just slowly ticking down, or having to spent a ton of resources + time on sustaining. This is an overarching issue with all of the challanges.
Now some specifics to the challanges:
Kruul:
Not much to say, as rng as it used to be with lines pusing you in the infernals strike or orbs despawning a millisecond before you touch them, with no indication.
Agatha:
Her fights were actually undertuned compared to everything else. Fire mage just 2 Shots all imps with Arcane explosion and most classes have a decent 1 min cd to deal with umbral adds. There was barely any need to cc the healing imps.
Xylem:
What a dumpsterfire. Go watch a Legion video from nighthold, the ice rain did barely half the damage it does now. It basically 3 shots any havoc dh. Also massive sustain issues, because classes changed and Traits are missing, so you would end up ticking down hard to his casts. As for P2 it was massively overtuned, none of the videos i found from legion had the space issues people had left now. Even in NH gear, people had ~20% of the platform left. Now each class was fighting for every pixel (except sub rogue that had the mob enrage).
Sygrin:
Overall an easy challange, but again the unavoidable damage is far to high. On my paladin I spent at least 20% of my Holy Power on heals. It wasnt that way in Legion. Also the soft enrage where all 3 of them keep casting their “ultimates” at the same time wasnt a thing in legion. I grinded the boss down on my warlock back then and all that was happening is that the runeseer kept casting his shield faster and faster.
Tugar:
Again unavoidable damage to high. Though every class has a reliable way of interuppting the scream of the worm, it wasnt possible without that. Whereas in Legion you would only need to make sure to not get interrupted by the cast. Some issues with class changes came to light especially on this boss. Warlock used to have the ability to clone his Fehlhunter to have 2 kicks + coil. That way you can rotate between them and kick tugar. Now you cannot clone your pet anymore and need to do curse of tongues + fear on tugar, which leaves you with barely half a second to react. All possible, but much harder than legion.
Twins:
As another post from the (i think US) forum suggested: you massively overtuned raests HP. Final phase took me at least twice as long as on PTR, which is pretty harsh, considering Karam keeps chasing you faster and faster. Shadowpriest used to be able to cheese it in the beggining, which was later fixxed, leaving everyone else (including me) with a much harder fight for the same rewards and also sometimes bugging out raest like crazy so that he would charge and 1shot meele you. The announcements that you nerfed his enrage damage to compensate for this is an insult, since it barely did anything. I personally preffered it when different classes played the bosses differently. For example Legion surrender to madness burn the boss (arguably much easier, but also alot of fun).
Risen Threaht (Healing):
You really outdid yourself on this one:
Holy Priest Flash heal heals for 10-15% hp.
Risen Mages take much fewer stacks than in Legion to oneshot.
The eyes in p2 used to do like 40-50% max hp dmg, now its more like 70-75%.
Some classes didnt have the second to last phase ghosts adjusted and just topped them with 2 spells, whereas other classes had to burn their mana bar (holy priest was the most extreme) to make it happen.
Last phase still completly bugged, with him sometimes not spawning puddles + the boss having WAAAAY more hp than in Legion. In Legion you just needed to lay down the puddles with a general overlap and you would still have a decent amount of space left (check old videos). Now you need to stack puddles into one another and still run out of space if you do it only 2-3 times.
You just leeched of the prestige of mage tower and necroed it for some content while the only stuff that you have put out I had to describe to my friends as “feels like playing abandonware”. Take the Korthia vehicle quests and archivists Kodex Rep for example.
“Why did you do all mage towers then if you hate it so much?”
I love the mage tower and always have. It brought me to try out different classes and got me a basic understanding of every specc in the game. It was a fun challange with a unique reward. Sadly even with 95% of the work done blizzard is unable to provide content this good anymore. They didnt do any reasonable PTR testing to flesh out the last 5% of the issues + fix consumables. Hey maybe even balance them for covenants (combine old and new for a refreshed experience).
They would rather create FOMO and pressure people into subbing than provide a good experience and have people come naturally. Their only save and grace was, that the mage tower, even in its scuffed state, is so good that i still had fun doing it.
The fact that mage tower is up only 2 times a year is truly sad. They obviously just want to have more reoccuring events to have people constantly sub. No matter if these events are good or not, they just want you to feel like you are missing out.
This is my biggest issue with the current mage tower. Have it as hard as can be, hell buff the hp of all challanges for all I care, but let people play at their own pace.
It has happend far too often during the past years that they implement something that is barely playable and later revitalized it, by patching it to a state that it should have been in from the beginning (most notable recent example is archivists codex rep and anima gains ). By doing this they invalidate a ton of time that people spent on something and create resentment. But just when you think you wait for them to fix something that you wanna do later, it never gets fixxed or even made harder (Great Sea Ray for example).
At this point I am not letting them get away with just being incompetent, its actualy malice by the people that make the design/pacing decisions. Maybe as an act of revenge towards the playerbase that constantly criticises them idk.
Anyways thanks for reading this. I tried to support as many people as i could in getting their mage towers done: in discord with my guild and friends, in front of mage tower chatting to random people and just ideling on my longboi next to mage tower, so people could shop.
It was 2 weeks of ups and downs and now im back to hibernating and trying to farm these last 2 Pandaria Worldboss mounts.
TLDR:
Mage Tower good content
Blizzard wants fomo → no ptr
Bad implementation
Scaling Sucks
Timegating sucks
