tl;dr: FIX. IT.
And yes, the story is as usual - I did the Mage Tower “back then”, when it was a “current content” (Disc Priest even without proper legendaries was simply laughable, I still remember having over 30 or 40% of haste, Unholy DK was extremely strong as well back then, the only problem I had was with the Protection Paladin, where the encounter was quite hard knowing that their wheelchair ability could only be used once every 45 seconds, but also as a Vengeance Demon Hunter, which was in the air a lot more than on the ground, and in both cases it was still doable).
Long story short:
- I never played a Guardian Druid,
- when the opportunity presented itself, I leveled up one, tried a few delves to see how it all works, and then, finally, tried the Mage Tower
- after countless tries it’s just too chaotic for what the encounter is supposed to be and what it was back then, because it’s mostly just punishment that requires quick reaction times, while it’s long, boring, tiring and mentally draining because you’re repeating things over and over again just to see the same result as before, so pure chaos
- it didn’t look like that back in Legion, it was actually “fun”, so something we are not allowed to feel, knowing blizzard’s current intentions.
Let’s add to this that the challenge is full of scaling issues, and a lot of them make it far more difficult - possibly twice as difficult or more - than it previously was, during the Legion.
Problems like:
- inaccurate scaling of both stamina and damage is resulting in an unbalanced encounter where Guardian Druids can’t do what they are supposed to do - get rid of the eyes per hit, because you need to use the Moonfire 3-5 times to actually destroy the eyes, and in general the encounter shows that they’re simply suffering from low damage output, because of the lack of talents such as Balance Affinity, leaving only a kitty cat that does something, but in reality just lowers your own stamina and does not much either
- the arena we are fighting on is being filled with a lot of trash, or infernals, that - despite having as much health as Variss - die too quickly (yes, I’m aware that their mechanic is to gradually lose their HP), adding to the chaos even more and making it even more difficult to control the flow of the fight
- we are not even capable of using the same legendaries that we used back in Legion, because of the disabled effect, so to actually do this challenge correctly, we need to hunt for items that are just scaling improperly with timewalking and put gems, that also seem to be broken
In general, the encounter IS disorganised in comparison to what it was before, the scaling - simply - sucks, leaving players unsure of what even is this thing anymore. Is it a DPS check, a self-healing test, or something else? Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t the same as it was before and definitely it isn’t a traditional tanking challenge.
The focus seems to be on juggling multiple tasks rather than demonstrating tanking prowess, with no clear emphasis on defensive mechanics. If blizzard’s intention was for tanks to solo or duo encounters - with the healer taking regular naps every minute and waking up only to cast a healing spell - then the challenge needs to be either fixed or even reworked to better reflect the actual responsibilities of a tank. Unless the tank role is - according to blizzard - just doing everything at once and moving around, blindly and helplessly begging Velen to do something more than just spawn that globe a bit faster and heal occasionally for 1/1000 of my HP.