The straw that broke the camel’s back (Wizard Tower)

The straw that broke the camel’s back (Mage tower)

Let me start by telling you a little about my journey and who I am.
As a child I was always mesmerized by the idea of playing games where the character leveled up and gained power over time and so I was always drawn to RPG games. I played Final fantasy, FF Tactics and many other rpg games like it, but I had never played a MMORPG before. My older cousins played Everquest but I was always told by them that it was way to late for me to get into that game as the game was dying.

I was 18 years old when I first got introduced to world of warcraft and it was love at first sight, I would easily play the game 12h a day and I even decided to delay going to Uni just so I could play more wow. I never act took a break from this game except for a short period of time during the final semester of Uni (6 months break) to focus on my finals. All my friends who I initially started playing the game with have long ago left the game and moved on to other games or quit gaming, but I stayed because I never lost my love for the MMORPG genre nor for world of warcraft.

Today I am a 36-year-old doctor that holds down a fulltime job, has a fiancé and works out 2h a day 5 days a week. Needless to say, I don’t have anything near 12h a day to play this game but still my love for it has not diminished (even though some expansions have not been my cup of tea, this being mainly non-alt friendly expansion such as SL). I have never had an issue with Blizzard’s store mounts, transmogs, tokens, char boost or any other thing considered “Pay to win” but after 17 years of playing I finally object!

And the reason for my objection?? The Mage tower!! I believe this is the most elaborate scheme Blizzard has ever devised to rob its costumers of their hard-earned money and their time and let me tell you why and how I got to that conclusion.

As any other casual player, I woke up on the 7th with a feeling of great excitement, I was going to do the “Mage tower”, I log on to my rogue Ilvl 243 and I put some shadowcore oil on my daggers (I’m playing sub) and pop a flask. I then proceed to speak to the NPC outside the tower and it phases me into the scenario “Ahhh Xylem!!” I recognize it, it is the same as before, easy peasy lemon squeezy im thinking. The encounter starts and I hit Xylem a few times, he blinks away, and I’m surrounded by a wall of ice! “I remember this, I used to dps my way out of this following a straight path”, I have barely had time to finish my thought and my rogue dies… What happened? I don’t remember this… Maybe I accidentally moved before one of the ice shards was 0% HP and took dmg, let’s try it again. I restart the encounter and the wall of ice surrounds me I break the first shard blocking my path and I die…. “what the hell is going on?” Ok maybe they want us to outsmart the encounter I must be missing something, “Ahhh yes shadowstep! you sneaky devil Blizzard”. Next time as the wall of ice surrounds me I quickly shadowstep behind the outer most shard of ice and I get out of it. “It is done, it is in the bag!!” I’m thinking. I proceed to chase Xylem around like a mad man doing minimal dmg to him (650 dps even though I’m spamming my buttons so hard my fingers are cramping) but I’m pulling my weight with timed interrupts and stuns. Xylem disappears and I’m surrounded with images of him “I remember this, I had to find him, and he used to glitter….” My rogue dies… “what the hell” I restart the encounter and get to this point again I kill one of the casters (mini bosses) in the bubble after he has managed to push me out twice as I thought I would not use any shadowdance charges on him to conserve some CDs. I proceed to die at this stage of the encounter another 5 times until I get a hang of it, you must unload on these images or you either get kicked out of their bubble 50 times or by the time you reach Xylem its to late and you die.

Long story short I finally phase him to the second phase of the fight. “I remember this you had to pop BL in the end when he enrages, or he kills you before you kill him” well I don’t have drums but at least I got here and from what I remember this was not that hard… I fight him for a few seconds, and he does the beam. Even though I’m old and have the memory of a goldfish (don’t ask me how I managed medical school) I remember that I had to run away with it because it spawned ads that I had to kill. I do exactly that, I run as far away as I can from him and this time, I’m ready, I’m not going to hold back on these ads, I’m not doing the same mistake I did on the images, I’m going to unload on them! I pop dance and symbols and I go ham, I spread crippling on them to slow them and I hit the first one with shadowstrike, then I hit him again with shdaowstrike and I follow it up with a 6 Combo point evis… It’s still alive and my first charge of shadowdance is almost gone. I finish him of stun the other and at this time dance is gone and I have to pop my second dance. I stun the third ad and go nuts on the second one. After 3 shadowstrikes and a 6cp evis his down. The third ad is now on stun dr and I have no dance, he is also very close to the boss and the black stuff on the floor. I proceed to frantically stab my dagger into its back as if it was the purge and my mother-in-law had come to visit, but to no avail… it reaches the boss. The boss heals up and by the time the next pack of ads spawn I’m out of luck and I have no CDs as this time 2 ads make it to the boss, and he is now full HP. This continues for another 5h until I give up and decided to watch YouTube to see how some other rogues have done it.

And this is where things get fishy, first of why are these rogues doing 850 dps with ease and here I am breaking my fingers for a measly 650 dps? What are the electrical beams flying out of the rogues and hitting the boss and what is that red stuff that periodically hits the boss? I start doing my research, ok so these PTR players all new the “tricks of the trade” and prepared in advance they have old enchants (mark of the hidden satyr, agi enchants) old chromie gear (trinkets ect) and old weapons with old weapon enchants and gear with multiple gem slots for old 4 agi gems.

Okey no problem I will buy them to I’m thinking I first go to siege of orgrimmar and spend 3h grinding the gear running through mythic, heroic and normal mode. I luck out and I get almost a full rogue set. I go to the first AH vendor I can find and click on gems… 9000g for one 4agi gem… ok I need 14 of them with my old heirloom weapons holding 2 each. 126k gold gone, ok well the enchants can’t be that bad right… Bam another 60-70k gone. At this point I have no gold left to buy the runes, flasks, pots, drums, sharpening stones these boys are using. Okey to hell with it I will buy a Token. I buy a token and I go back to the AH vendor to buy all the consumables to be able to do it, well by this time the prices have pumped insanely out of proportion (would not be surprised if some of these auctions are from Blizzards own accounts to reduce circulating currency and increase token purchases but that’s just a theory I have). Nevertheless, knowing that this won’t be easy and deciding that I was going to do the tower as outlaw as I only had heirloom swords and not daggers, I stocked up on these and another 100k was gone.

I go back and I phase in, I spend 2 days fighting the outlaw challenge (mind you as a responsible adult with my obligations and a job 2 days I about 8h of play time). Now this is where I notice something very strange, on some attempts an electrical beam seems shoot out from me and hit the boss making her lose a small portion of health, but I have no idea what this is, and it only happens on some tries (maybe Blizzard is starting to take pity on me because it knows I’m up over 50 attempts). I’m finally starting to push the boss to low HP when I run out of consumables. “well hell I can’t stop now I’m almost there” I go to buy new consumables and one flask of currents is now almost 8k gold… bam another 150k gold gone on consumables and another token bought from the blizz store. I go back in and finally slay the boss…

But something doesn’t feel right, I don’t feel happy, nor do I feel like I have achieved anything. There is one feeling however that I do feel and that is an overwhelming feeling that I just got hustled, bamboozled out of my hard-earned cash by blizz. The old mage tower I knew was not about buying expensive mats or farming random pieces of gear because the bosses were so overturned that you could barely kill them. It was about skill and being good at your class and that was enough. Sure, a flask and some drums did get you far, but you didn’t have to buy steroids in AH to be able to kill the boss.

Over the coming days I felt reluctant to play the game as what had just happened left a bitter taste in my mouth. A in game friend of mine asked why I’m not logging on and I told him about it, and he told me about something else even more bizarre. Apparently, he was trying to do it on his alliance mage and his horde mage, the horde mage having an ilvl of 254 and the alliance mage having 243 ilvl. He told me his horde mage (ilvl 254) would crit for 1500 dmg but his alliance mage (ilvl 243) would only crit for 1000 dmg indicating that some sort of scaling issue was in place. So, I decided to look up some of these famous rogues that posted their success videos after one day of the tower being out, and I noticed one guy who did the outlaw challenge in “normal shadowlands gear” but with no trinkets was doing around 850 dmg what I also noticed was his “Normal gear” was full SoD mythic gear. 850 dps with no trinkets?

Needless to say, this leads me to believe one of two things, either the gear scales terribly and high ilvl players have an advantage that blizz knew about or blizz went in after a few hours of release and stealth nerfed a bunch of trinkets and enchants because with a perfect rotation and 2 trinkets I can hold a steady dps of 750-800 dps if I’m lucky with my “Roll the dice” rolls.

Now from what I gather from top players channels on YouTube, a lot of trinkets got nerfed and probably enchants too, so my question to you Blizzard is this.

Why nerf trinkets and enchants when we have already paid hundreds of thousands gold for them, while knowing that some of the encounters are greatly over tuned?

Why not nerf it before release so that everyone gets a fair chance and not only the players who had the unfair advantage of knowing what gear to use on release day?

Why not fix the gear scaling issue that is clearly present, is it to give of the illusion that the towers are easy, and the rest of the player base is doing something wrong?

Or why not nullify the advantage gained from old gear and enchants completely so we could just do it without any changes to our gear and on any class we wanted?

Unfortunately looking that this companies track record I can only draw one conclusion…

Greed, you did it on purpose and out of greed! To make it harder so that the player base would be forced to buy the overpriced mats on AH forcing them to pump more money into your machinery by buying Tokens. And if I was not sold on this idea completely, I was convinced when after the first week, instead of tuning the encounters you decided to prolong the event for 3 more weeks ensuring a steady flow of income from your poor player base!

This to me was really the straw that broke the camels back and all I can say is shame on you blizzard. Oh, how you have fallen from grace. This is what you have been reduced to, thievery through stealth patches and silent nerfs. I have never felt any form of animosity or anger towards this company until today, but I see you for what you are now, simple thieves nothing else. It truly saddens me to write these words about a game that I grew up with and that formed my childhood, but you have robbed it of all its charm and grace. The game is a shadow of what it used to be and so I find the name of this expansion very fitting.

I hope it will change but I doubt it will, and so I like many other players before me I now stand at a crossroad, do I quit gaming and find another passion or look for a new MMORPG and start from scratch. I don’t know yet what I will be, but I hope for the sake of the rest of your customers you make some changes in this once great company. In the end “I am but one ripple in the eternal ebb and flow” but more players will eventually catch on.

Yours truly

Paniq the rogue.

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