it was bat **** crazy to reintroduce it but desperate times call for desperate measures and this is kind of content they can recycle. Legion M+ was in the same boat - almost no need to do much about adding it, otherwise if they were serious about doing something in the TW area, they would have tried to reinvent pre-Legion dungeons for it too and they never did.
Anyway,there is a positive to it too. If you got a sick horse, you may as well shoot it to save it the prolonged suffering and the MT drama pretty much does it.
I have to disagree. The MT was released in the first half of legion, so the devs knew it would eventually be beatable by gearing up.
This is why templating sucks. It generally sucks in an MMO to be honest, because it removes gear and consumables as game-able elements.
The MT should be beatable in ‘standard’ gear, but getting gear from other sources should be the means to game it to the point where it is significantly less difficult.
This is in line with most other content, where if you fail you can both learn to do better or acquire stronger gear.
I’ll say this again: Templating sucks in WoW. Don’t ask for it, you’ll regret it.
But to expect the playerbase to go back to old content for that gear is silly.
Besides; many of the ‘things’ needed require professions; so either even more alts or you have to spend gold.
And all that trouble for those crappy rewards?
The effort-reward ratio with this thing is totally out of whack.
But yeah; I don’t think templates are the solution.
A big fat nerf is.
I find this such a weird line of reasoning. The devs - who were well aware that Legion still had a couple of raid tiers to go - released the MT at the earliest point at which it could be beaten.
It wasn’t removed or altered for the rest of the expac so just to be clear: They knew that people would end up outgearing it and reducing the difficulty. This wasn’t a shock, it was part of the plan for the content.
Stop claiming it was almost meant for the elite. It wasn’t. This is just retconning the actual events.
Sure, so if we want to be canonical, wait 1 year and try the mage tower again. Maybe they’ll make it easy again. No point complaining now, since it’s canonically supposed to be difficult, right?
Not sure if you think this is the right approach or not…
Canonical isn’t really applicable here. It’s a question of mechanics. The original plan for the MT was that it was content you could do when you chose to during the expac. If you wanted to do it early then cool, go for it. If you wanted to wait and have an easier time you could.
Obviously with scaled content, there is no utility in waiting, so what is the justification for making it harder than it was at the point of release? This is just bizarre reasoning.
They have the numbers for how many completed it in legion. They could have looked and said - well 25% completed it by this point, so we’ll set it at that difficulty. But they seem to have gone with the difficulty point of 1% completion.
I have no problem with content being restricted to a minority, I’m just disappointed that it was advertised as something that everyone could have a decent chance at. It isn’t, and that’s a problem.
No, I was being completely satirical of your earlier post where you said that the early mage tower is not applicable here because at the end of legion it was easy. Blizzard just wanted to give more casual players a chance for the appearances before they went away permanently, or they were just lazy and didn’t scale it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t designed to be hard originally, it definitely was.
This time, the appearances/achievements/mounts are here to stay, albeit they are on a rotation and you won’t always be able to try them. Still, you will always have a chance at doing the mage towers whenever they come around, you just need to reach a certain level of skill. And hey, I still think these timewalking mage tower challenges will eventually become a lot easier: Blizzard will probably give in bit by bit nerfing the fights, or then the scaling gets messed up etc.
I can’t specifically talk about Mage Tower but I can confidently say that a lot of people wanted hard to very hard solo content.
And all that trouble for those crappy rewards?
The effort-reward ratio with this thing is totally out of whack.
A lot of people will gladly do hard content just for a 10 point achievement and for the fun of it. People literally do SL1 Dark Souls runs for fun…
I don’t think templates are the solution. A big fat nerf is.
A big fat nerf steals the enjoyment of overcoming a challenge from a ton of players. You said it yourself, the rewards aren’t important to you, why are you pushing for a nerf? I am pushing for templates because I want a well-curated challenge. I don’t even care about the rewards, sell them outside on a vendor for 1 copper for all I care lmao.
Just like I rail against people who want nerfs, I have to rail against people trying to downgrade the screwup of Blizzard’s current implementation.
People wanted hard and challenging content, but nobody wanted the current version of Mage Tower because:
Scaling is weird
It is limited-time only.
It is massive goldsink (just using simply the consumables adds up)
What they could have done?
A template version so it really is about skill, but you also know that it is reasonably beatable (might take you 300 tries, might take you 500 tries but you know that the gear isn’t the problem, it’s you)
It is permanent and not limited time, so you can just do it at your own time in between raids, dungeons etc and spread it over a year.
Just make consumables, sockets, trinkets etc not work and balance accordingly. Or make them be balanced and correctly scaled.
Right now, we have a weird mishmash of things that nobody asked for. My SoD gear that I have cultivated over the months is worse than average because Dom gear items can’t be socketed. My weapons are worse than level 50 greens because they cannot be enchanted with the enhancements that video guides are suggesting. My SL flask is worse than BFA flask(less than %50 effective), my SL pot (%3 of overall dmg) is worse than BFA pot (%6-7 of overall dmg). My SL trinkets (other than 1) are worse than any alternative.
They implemented this “challenge” in the worst way possible. You don’t even get the enjoyment when you beat it, because you are left wondering “Did I beat it or did my trinket beat it even though it was %75 nerfed?”
I keep saying this but again, the problem is we don’t know what it’s tuned against. What gear are we supposed to use? If it’s SL gear, SL weaponry, SL enchants, SL consumes then yes. It most certainly is overtuned. If we are supposed to change stuff up, then no, it may not be overtuned.
Literally all “look at me boyzz I’m doing the Mage Tower” videos I see are using something different than the regular SL stuff they use, either BFA flask, BFA prepot+pot, some trinket, some weapon enchant, shoulder enchant, gems etc etc. You don’t need everything of course, but you need “something”. I’m not trying to downplay people’s accomplishments here, but if you aren’t using that “something”, it seems akin to bashing your head against a wall. No amount of “doing the mechanics” or “getting better at the game” can make you kill a Mythic Sludgefist with a ilvl200 raid group.
Ok that’s fine, but I disagree. The devs that created and released the MT did so knowing the expac was going to run for some time and award stronger gear. As content it was always intended to be something you could do on a variety of settings. Saying that blizz wanted more casual players to have a chance doesn’t really make sense - they knew it would become easier. This was part of their intention.
I did 27/36 of the challenges in Legion at varying levels of difficulty and was looking forward to having a decent go at it again. My personal view is that the obsession with ‘difficult’ content has been killing WoW for many years. The more WoW caters to the minority, the more of the majority will leave.
I’ll leave you with this thought: As a GM or designer you can always ‘beat’ the players. This isn’t hard, it’s the most trivial mode for the game maker to work on. The hard work is to produce something that feels difficult but is also achieveable with cunning and a certain amount of metagaming. This rewards players for putting time and effort into thinking through the challenge beforehand, but the MT isn’t doing that. You have to be capable of high APM and focus to win. I don’t want WoW to turn into dance-dance revolution and if you do, then I hope you enjoy watching it die.
My personal view is that the obsession with ‘difficult’ content has been killing WoW for many years.
What difficult content is there outside of Mythic Raids and higher key levels? The majority of World content you can’t even die in. Low level dungeons get outgeared by mains on the first week. Literally everyone who puts their mind to it can get AoTC, unless they have a genuine physical condition or zero time to commit. Even then these content has a lower difficulty level counterpart.
I don’t want WoW to turn into dance-dance revolution and if you do, then I hope you enjoy watching it die.
It is a single challenge mode(with bad implementation) that gives recolors of old sets. It’s not close to mandatory. People keep saying how bad the reward is, then complaining about not getting them in the same breath…
That’s fair, I haven’t done that specific challenge so I can’t comment with knowledge. What are the people that have done it on video doing differently?
The campaigns are nice, LFR and normal raid might be fun. Lower level dungeons can still be challenging at lower ilvls without the overwhelming urgency of a +15. Torghast in it’s current state can be a lot of fun with the Box of Knowledge etc.
But still, I actually somewhat agree with you on the lack of meaningful content. I don’t agree necessarily that this is a new thing, because Vanilla WoW, BC and WotLK had the same stuff, in fact their quests were much more boring fetch quests and not really a narrative.
Anyway, for me the whole transmog and mount hunting is such insanity that I can’t consider it meaningful content, despite it being the “main activity for casuals”. Just running around 1 shotting everything in your path isn’t engaging to me. What’s engaging about running faceroll content for that 1/1000 drop mount? If Asmongold wasn’t making content, would he have tried 500+ times for a sword transmog that he didn’t even use more than a day? Professions are just clickity clicks with zero depth (except archeology - those artifacts and the lore behind them were great) Fishing is stupid af. Click rod - wait like an imbecile whike wasting your precious life away second by second - click bobber - repeat.
Hopefully the 9.2 Glyph stuff will be engaging and fun.
To be honest, 300% sounds a little too much. It’s hard to believe that originally it was THAT much lower. That would mean that you could burst down Raest in the very first phase when he’s vulnerable, trivializing the fight.
I’d say a 20-30% nerf to all the boss and add HP’s would be just about right.