I admit I returned to retail as soon as I saw that the mage tower will be returning in 9.1.5. I absolutely loved this aspect of the game back in legion and it motivated me to get good at my class and to try out different classes and specs.
This time, however, we’ll have a timewalking version of the same challenges. What do you think this means? I bet we’ll have to max level to activate this feature since you have to talk to some NPC in Oribos, but what about gear?
I never did much timewalking dungeons or raids recently so I don’t really know if current high lvl gear will scale well or that it’s advised to use bis gear from legion instead. I’ve read on other sites that the Heart of Azeroth is extremely OP in timewalking. Anyone know?
Reason of my asking is that I intent to level up a bunch of chars to 60 and gear them a bit but I CBA to go through the entire treadmill of SL’s systems (one of the reasons I quit a while back).
It is just unknown at this time and will probably stay that way until the mage tower comes to the PTR.
With the addition of the legion timewalking in 9.1.5 there will be 2 forms of timewalking:
Regular timewalking (your level is scaled down): all your gear will be set to a certain level. There are some old items that are better than just using your regular level 60 gear (heart of azeroth, legendaries, artifact weapons) and some items are just outright bugged and do their full level 60 damage, making timewalking dungeons a breeze.
Timewalking M+ (from the PTR, so might be subject to change): You’re staying on lvl 60 and the dungeon is scaled up to 60 instead. This will make old gear pretty much worthless and in the last PTR build the heart of azeroth was disabled completly in this.
Speculation
Because of the flaws with regular timewalking (bugged items, bis gear from old expansions), I assume the new mage tower will be scaled up to 60 and you use your regular gear. This has however not been confirmed, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Yeah that’s possible, though the blue post stated: “Player power will be normalized so that it will provide a meaningful level of difficulty to current players.” so I’m not sure what that means.
Player ilvl will be set to a specific ilvl so everyone gets the same difficulty
Or:
It’s just to clarify that it will not just the old mage tower opening again just like it was in legion (like a legacy raid you just run through and grab transmog)
My bet, it will be mega over tuned for the first week. Really push them engagement metrics. Will be a flood of tears of people not able to do it. 2nd week will be nerfed hard. They can’t make it too hard if it’s only up twice a year.
A recent hotfix confirmed that the BFA essences & azerite gear will not work in the mage tower so I assume it’ll work just like the usual timewalking experience but without BFA systems.
Hmm maybe for the best since I don’t wanna go back to BfA on alts and grind out the best sets there.
It might be 100% worth it getting at least a SL legendary for the effect + your covenant ability might help too, or at least make up for the loss of your artifact back in legion.
Oh yeah definitely. It was already bad enough back in BFA, I doubt anyone who skipped it plan to do a 5 weeks rep grind just so they could unlock the best rank 3 essences (and believe me they are strong, one gives a baseline +70% crit for a few sec every so often, another a +30% crit dmg and +25% crit chance every 90 sec as an active etc)
Yes, altho the ilvl is irrelevant the effect itself is worth having.
Same for BFA/SL/Legion gear with enchants and gem sockets, as well as certain trinkets or unique items. BFA had a ton of “kiss/curse” items back in 8.1.5 (raid gear so the effect may still work) which were very powerful albeit at the cost of some side effects.
This may be worth farming once BFA legacy loot is available.