Timewalking Mage Tower scaling ruined

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As the title suggests, the 9.1.5 Mage Tower is completely undoable on almost any spec that I tried ever since the TWW pre-patch dropped. I tried these fights at level 80 as well, thinking that maybe they adjusted the fights with the new Hero Specs in mind, since we get to keep those within the Mage Tower, a power bonus we did not have in Shadowlands or Dragonflight.

Some bosses and mobs have up to 10x the amount of HP and damage they had before, while our character stats, gear, gems, enchants, consumables, talents and abilities remain around the same power level, sometimes getting buffed by about 15-25%.

For example, for a Havoc DH fighting Xylem, the boss now has 689K HP, up from the 126k he used to have before the pre-patch. You used to be able to tank 1 of his Comet Storms + 3-4 Frost Bolts before dying, that’s been reduced to 1 Comet Storm and 1-2 Frost Bolts, depending on whether you preemptively Blur or not.

The damage you do due to the new scaling for gear and character stats (because those got changed in the pre-patch), enchants, gems, trinkets and Hero Talents seems to be about 15-25% higher, depending on the spec and setup. I went from doing about 4.5k overall on my Havoc DH to doing about 5.5-6k. This kind of scaling is making fights ridiculously hard to execute and most times actually mathematically impossible, even if you’re a god gamer.

For context, I am someone who has completed 15/36 challenges in the Timewalking Mage Tower, I do have the Soaring Spelltome, and I’m trying to go for 36/36 because I really enjoy the Mage Tower, like many people. I know every Mage Tower fight inside and out, as I’ve completed them tens of times.

As for gear, I have the absolute best gear you can have in this game mode on every character I tried to do this with. Before the pre-patch, you could complete most of the challenges with levelling green gear and no trinkets, no enchants, no consumables, no gems, you just mostly had to have drums and the right talents for each fight, as certain mechanics forced you to run certain talents, but most specs were very well equipped to deal with them, except for Holy Priest which was a nightmare.

Now I have a full set of TBC dungeon armor pieces with the most sockets possible, MoP rings and neck (as they give main stat as compared to items after MoP and also can proc sockets, which mine have), Garrosh Heirloom weapons (as they have 4 sockets total for a dual wielder + the highest main stat socket bonus available), so I have about 18-22 sockets on each character, socketed with Queen’s Garnets and the unique equippable BFA and Legion main stat gems (which should be an overkill level of min-maxing) and as far as the trinkets go I’ve tried literally every single raid and dungeon trinket and most levelling/quest trinkets from TBC all the way to Dragonflight and I’m currently testing out the levelling TWW trinkets.

And yes, for those wondering, that includes former super overpowerered trinkets such as the “summoning a guardian to fight for you” type of trinkets that used to deal 40-50 to sometimes even 90% of your overall damage, melting bosses in a matter of seconds, but now those just seem completely disabled as the guardians do 0 to 1 damage per hit and obviously that’s not very useful when bosses have close to 1 million HP (Captain Zvezdan’s Lost Leg, Crate of Kidnapped Puppies, Ghost Iron Dragonling, etc.) .

For those that are curious as to how and why, I’ve basically kept almost every single trinket I got from anywhere across 30 alts since 9.1.5, specifically to test them out in the Mage Tower. For enchants and consumables, since the ilvl of the gear and enchants you’re using went up (before being scaled down by entering the tower) you can now use almost any enchant from any expansion on any piece of gear. I have enchanted every piece of gear I have and I’ve tried every weapon enchant in the game for DPS, tanks and healers.

As you can see, I’m very committed to this grind and I’ve lost my sanity and hundreds of hours being a Mage Tower mad scientist.

I’m just very upset that I’ve gathered all of this knowledge, spent millions of gold (prior to the region-wide auction house crashing prices on enchants and gems) and saved hundreds of weapons and trinkets in my banks over 3 years to be able to have fun with them and complete “Tower Overwhelming” just to never be able to use them due to me jumping back into the Mage Tower at a time when the scaling is ruined, because I thought I have time and I don’t have to rush, due to the team giving us the feeling that the Mage Tower is not changing or going anywhere anytime soon.

All that said, in my opinion, the Mage Tower should go in either 1 of 2 directions:

  1. be completely gear agnostic, meaning no gear stats matter because everyone gets scaled to a certain percentage of stats regardless of gear (for example everyone has 20% haste, 20% crit, 20% everything) and everything else is disabled (trinkets, consumables, sockets, weapon and armor effects, etc.)
  2. everything works like it did in Shadowlands where most things work, but the super overpowered things like tier sets, legendaries, some trinkets and some weapon enchants are disabled or nerfed and we get scaled accordingly, accounting for the fact that we now have Hero Talents (or just disable those as well and then you don’t need to do any fixing)

I hope this reaches a developer at some point. I know they’ve got their hands full with the 1 million new bugs and issues the new expac brought as it’s a very ambitious and large expac full of new systems, but a lot of people enjoy Timewalking and especially the Mage Tower and I think that in an RPG it’s very cool to be able to play mad scientist with all the items that have been introduced over 20 years of a game’s lifespan instead of all your toys and fun items and effects you got used to for 2 years at a time being worth nothing more than nostalgia and filling up your void storage with no purpose, because you can never use them in relevant content ever again. I personally had lots of fun defeating Xylem with my Arms Warrior with about 10 different sets of trinkets and weapons. It made a great and fun challenge replayable and enjoyable for me. Sorry for the long rant.

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Could you edit your post into a more readable form?
Right now it is a wall of text with no format of any kind.

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Yeah, you’re right and I’ll do that, thank you for the feedback!

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Ok, where to start.

Like the other poster: Please format your text. If you want to reach a developer, don’t crit them with your wall of text. Yes, you want to get it off your chest but please make it readable.

Anyway, I did read it.

  1. Yes, Blizz changed something in the spaghetti code (Scenarios? Delves?) and MT was affected. It’s unlikely that they deliberately went and changed MT, only to leave half of it broken.
    How do we know it’s broken?
    In the past, it was a level 45 challenge with level 40 gear. Now it is a level 45 challenge with level 27 gear - because the cap in MT is still 120 while all other ilvls were shifted up. It should be around 200.

  2. Yes, we have hero talents but those don’t compensate enough for the loss of stats. That doesn’t mean you can’t beat some challenges. People will then use that as a backwards claim for the buffs to be intentional to compensate for the increase of player power. (Maybe it is intentional but then there is no blue post about it.)

  3. You say you have the best possible gear for this content and then you list gear that is clearly not (Garrosh heirlooms). Some of the pieces (main stat jewellery) hint that you may not have the full picture of the items and stats. Some of the TBC items can be good but it seems you went for the socket route, which misses better items.
    Mind sharing your DH?

  4. If you feel like it, join the Timewalking discord. We also cover MT and are happy to help with gear questions and advice.

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Sorry for the formatting, it was late when I wrote the post and I was just ranting, I didn’t take a look to analyze what the wall of text might look like. I appreciate the feedback and I’m very open to suggestions on how to improve both in terms of gear, as well as talent setups, so if you can, please do share the discord link.

As I’ve said, I’ve personally tested out tons of gear in every single slot, ranging from rings and necks with no main stat but random effects, as well as weapons with the same criteria and a ridiculous amount of trinkets.

The ones I ended up choosing were the best performing for me and that could just be that I played better in a few consecutive pulls or that my playstyle works with them but obviously it’s anecdotal info, as no 2 players play the same.

Here’s my DH: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/character/eu/quelthalas/hotthot
Here’s my Rogue: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/character/eu/quelthalas/ærebus (not sure if the page has updated and it shows my mage tower gear yet)

I tried the challenge on the DH at Level 70, I am currently levelling it to 80 and will try both Hero Specs with different gear as well, but the problem here isn’t really damage, it’s survivability. Even with a 30% damage increase you still die instantly with no blur, dark, nether or defensive trinket.

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All good. Like I said, understandable.

TW discord is here: ZxrJNwuQ77

Testing gear is always useful but often goes too far into feelycrafting. Yes, the stuff has sockets, but does that mean an item is therefore good? And in comparison to what?

I made screenshots of that gear. Do you have your TBC gear as well? This is pretty much socketed SoO gear.

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I do, but the set is objectively worse now due to the socket bonus values going up on the SoO pieces. For example a TBC dungeon chest would have something like 1 secondary stat instead of the 2 that an SoO piece would have, the same amount of sockets (3 in this case) and +1 vers/dodge/attack power/spell power socket bonus compared to +5 or +7 main stat.

After seeing the gear sets on the 2 characters, do you have any suggestions on anything I could change about them? This could be anything from different gems to enchants to different gear pieces.

P.S. : I just checked out the discord and all the pinned information is outdated since they were last updated on the 21st of January, back when everything was fine. Since then, literally everything about timewalking changed. However, at least I had a bit of a laugh at people memeing how broken the Mage Tower is right now, I don’t seem to be the only one thinking it’s impossible on certain specs, but I can say that I managed to do it on Sub and Feral just 30 minutes ago after a lot of tinkering around with gear and enchants, so it’s not doomed for every single spec at least.

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Yes, the first thing you need to do is to compare items in the entirety of stats and not just sockets or socket bonuses because that makes you compare on a wrong scale.
Think about it: Would you take an item with pure 100 base stat and no socket over one without stats but with a socket?
A socket is only ever as good as the gem you can put into it.

Stuff on the discord is “outdated” for TWW (and technically 10.2.6 when enchants were fixed). Only TWW really required changes but then it’s also just broken. So updates are planned for when the dust settles.
The base ideas are still valid (beating MT, evaluating items, etc.) as is the majority of the BiS items from the sheets (if you want to go for those, but you shouldn’t need it as MT isn’t designed to require it).

Anyway, on to your gear:

So for example your Chestguard of Coruscating Blades scaled to 120 (add &ilvl=120 to the wowhead URL) has:
1 agility
3 crit
3 haste
3 sockets
7 agility bonus
Now you need a way to easily compare items. What works in general is using a pseudo number with 1:2 for mainstat and 1:1 for secondaries.
So your chest ends up with 70 points (2+3+3+48+14).
Let’s look at the current BiS chest from the sheets: Moonglade Robe
10 agility
7 crit
12 vers
3 sockets
2 crit bonus
For a total of 89 (20+7+12+48+2), which makes it 19 points better.

As you mentioned your weapons, let’s check those. Yes, they have sockets - but they have almost no stats when scaled to MT levels.
Hellscream’s Cleaver:
-1 agility
1 crit
1 mastery
2 sockets
4 agility bonus
for 40 (-2+1+1+32+8)
Compare that to a Claw of the Watcher:
5 agility
7 crit
2 sockets
1 crit bonus
for 50 (10+7+32+1) for 50.
(Not to mention Sophic Devotion being worse than Force Multiplier as enchant.)

Your rings are main stat rings which are worse than secondary stat rings. They add up to 29 (6+3+2+16+2) whereas my random blue with a socket proc from DF is 45 (11+18+16)
Speaking of rings, your enchants give only 19 secondaries. Accord gives you 28.

Neck is too high for enchant, you would want a crafted 319 with 3 sockets and enchant. The embellishment gives next to nothing.

Your cloak (30) is worse than a socketed green from the AH (40) and the enchant can be replaced with Minor Power (+8 main stat).

Belt gets another socket from any belt buckle.

Leg enchant can now be Fierce Armor Kit.

Gloves (51) and boots (39) are beaten by Fel Leather (65 both).

Trinkets have been nerfed with TWW as well and considering the current lack of stats at MT scaling, Ghost Iron Dragonling with proper cogwheels is a big stat stick.

Continuing on from the 2:1 formula, you can also swap gems to secondary +23 gems as they are better than main stat gems.

I hope that’s enough food for thought in the beginning and yeah, check the sheets even though they haven’t been updated for TWW or enchants. But that is because people farming that gear are wasting time overkilling the challenges when a few more pulls or the budget gear is enough in most cases.

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I agree with and appreciate all feedback. I did my research now and I can see you’re right on almost all of these points. I have 3 comments however:

  1. Ghost Iron Dragonling as a stat stick (since the summon was made to do 1 dmg per hit) gives you about 0.8-1% of the 3 cogwheel stats for most characters (obv character dependent so sims can vary, but they stay like that for the most part) which is worse than something like Dragonspine Trophy

  2. Sophic Devotion r1 gives 103 main stat and has a general uptime of about 40-60% whereas r3 gives 123 main stat. Force multiplier gives 35 main stat plus some negligible secondaries (less than 1% increases) with an uptime of about 50% (the uptime part ofc depends on the fight, ppm of the class, etc.)

  3. I also tried out the secondary gems strat, swapped my neck and rings with dragonflight items with sockets (diurna rings and elemental lariat), and the trinkets with the chipped soul prism and unstable arcanocrystal and that netted me about 25% mastery, 5% haste, 4% vers and 8% crit. While these stats are nothing to scoff at, I’d much rather have about 180 more main stat, as that’s way more powerful. Secondary stat scaling in the mage tower is very underwhelming compared to other forms of content.

Thank you very much for the feedback on some of the gear pieces and enchants, I will apply them and hopefully the small boost of power they give helps a bit.

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  1. How is 3x 31 stats (93) worse than perfect uptime DST (86 = 20 (str) + 132*(10/20))?
    It can feel better because you get more for a bit when it procs and then less when it’s down. But overall it’s less stats.
  2. Do you have logs for Sophic with 50% uptime? Or was that DW? Numbers I could find were 25% for Sophic and 60-70% for FM. I don’t know current values for TWW and they may have changed but it’s unlikely for Sophic to pull that far ahead. (Sophic is 1 ppm with 15s duration while FM is 3 ppm with 15s which matches 25% and 70% uptime.)
  3. Are you using updated CSP and UAC? DF bricked previous versions and ilvl 50 is obviously bad. You have to refarm them to be worth it.
    On the topic of 180 main stat being better or not, that depends on what the actual ratio between values is. If you compare 360 secondaries to 180 they should be about the same on a 1 to 2 conversion.
    The scaling in MT is the same just that we get way less from gear.

The best advice is probably to just wait until Blizz untangles their spaghetti and fixes the ilvl cap (maybe in three weeks when people will get slapped in BT timewalking! - people will have level 19 gear…) or like you and others in the past have suggested to make MT gear agnostic and just skill dependent.

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  1. DST gives you about 4-6% haste (char dependent ofc) when it procs, which is better than 0.5-1% of 3 stats permanently. Not every stat matters for every character, for example mastery is terrible on some specs, 0.5% vers is nice but nothing special and 1% or less crit chance is a joke, whereas 4-6% haste is something you actually feel when it procs and it procs quite often

  2. I only have what I’ve been able to see in my details buff uptime section. Ofc it’s again char, class, spec dependent but on my havoc DH with the setup I had it was up for more than 40% of the time and 102 main stat is no joke with that kind of uptime

  3. Yes, since I only got them after the pre-patch on most of the chars I tried the MT with. They are the best stat sticks I could find and outside of the 2 trophies I’ve used them on melees and UGoS as 1 of the options on ranged chars

  4. For 1 example I’ll refer to an instance I got from my testing, with the right gear and full +23 bfa gems you get about 900-1000 secondary stat value which equates to about 29-33% of any stat that’s not mastery (ofc that scales differently depending on the spec). That is a very nice amount of a secondary stat to have, but again it heavily depends on what kind of spec you are playing. There are many specs for which secondaries are bad in comparison to main stat, such as havoc and sub, the 2 specs we were talking about. Now, I’ve tried all 4 secondary gems in all slots for each of these 2 specs. The versatility felt good in terms of being a bit more durable on Xylem, where it really matters, but it was still a big damage loss and while p1 became possible, p2 was still a mess because that’s a dps race.

  5. I also did some farming and got the recommended gear for a few specs, following the sheets in the timewalking discord very closely and I can say it did make a bit of a difference here and there. Not a sizable one, rather about 15-20% throughput and a bit more stamina, so if anyone struggling with the challenges is reading this, the drop rates on most of those items and the fact that they drop from the end bosses of their respective dungeons makes them not worth the effort in the mage tower, at least. The scaling is still ridiculously outdoing BiS gear + BiS gems & enchants setups.

What DID actually help me overcome the scaling and make it somewhat close to how difficult the challenges were before the scaling got ruined (funnily enough even with a ridiculously optimized setup the challenges are still harder than they were before the TWW pre-patch) was the combination of sophic devotion r3, the new feast from this xpac, the feast of midnight masquerade and the greater flasks from bfa (this combo gives about 600 main stat when devotion procs) . Together with the main stat gems socketed into TBC dungeon gear, they really do help massively with your throughput, however, most of these challenges are really not about throughput, but rather surviving 1shot mechanics that are heavily overtuned and that need you to have defensives or CC every time they happen. I just managed to get “Tower Overwhelming” an hour ago thanks to all of this min-maxing kind of balancing some of the challenges out, so I can say now that the achievement became doable due to it, so for anyone as impatient as me looking for a “fix” , this is the best we have until they fix the MT.

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  1. If you are able to stack it with CDs and spec depended and all that, maybe you gain more from it. But purely from a stat perspective it is less.
    The “you can actually feel it” is exactly the misleading feelycrafting. Yes, you notice the increase from lower to higher and not the constant increase but it’s just not an accurate measure. “1% crit is a joke”, well how else do you increase crit if not in small margins at these levels?
    The entire point of theorycrafting is looking at what values do what and not just big procs.
  2. Same for the enchants: 40% uptime could be variance or maybe from DW. The proc rate is 1 ppm with 15s duration, so you expect a 25% uptime. 25% on 102 main stat means 25.5 baseline. 75% uptime on FM is 38.25 main stat plus the secondaries.
    Again, you will feel it less because it’s constant but in the end it is more.
  3. As long as it’s not the low ilvl stuff.
  4. and 5. The issue is that you are doing/did it during the patch that screwed up the scaling. The sheets are BiS for the pure sake of calculating BiS.
    We have never recommended farming it as MT has never been a gear challenge. A few items provided a sizeable chunk of additional power that got people through after learning mechanics during DF. People even did some challenges on class trial toons.

Who knows when the intern gets around to changing the one number for the ilvl cap to 200…