Back in Legion, Mage Tower was part of the main content in the expansion, being designed for Legion class and specs around legendaries and artifact weapons. Mage Tower rewarded most of the best weapon skins ever made that pretended to bo unobtainable once expansion ends. In the end, we had a main content challenge with really big rewards. And in that moment, was passively nerfed as better gear was available.Now we had Mage Tower again as part as one of the biggest casual content in the game. Timewalking gives low rewards (being Normal gear the biggest one) mainly for casual players that cannot go Normal or Heroic mode. Timewalking are also the place to start to play your new character, to get decent gear to start with. Where you learn the basics of your new class/spec. And then, we have Mage Tower in its most tryhard design with just a recolor reward.The question is, why?Mage Tower, in TW mode, should be perfect for alts. A place to go to practice with your new char while getting some rewards. So why disable all the Shadowlands stuff? It's not like a difficult challenge, just a naked one. You go there being weaker than usual, not to confront a bigger challenge.You can also have another approach: revisit Legion in the Legion way. That means letting you use Legion legendaries and artifact weapons. Do you want me to revisit that like it was back in Legion? Give me a Legion character with templates. Don't give me a naked Shadowlands one.In any case, casual rewards deserve casual content. And Mage Tower gives casual rewards. If you want a real challenge, give us something new, something designed to be a challenge with actual class/spec design in mind.
The mage tower needs fixed gear sets and free consumables that only work inside the challenge, that's it. Problem solved.
I really dont think it should've been nerfed at all, like I just did all 7 without any optimisation, only shadowlands gear. And i got soooo happy when i beat everything, the feeling of succeding in something really hard is amazing and im sure everyone can agree on that, and if you can outgear it then thats the way for the less skilled players to get that feeling aswell, it cant just be a walk in the park and you get your reward. To much crying about nerfs imo. Go earn it.
I found the Warrior one harder now than it was in Legion, although still enjoyed it. It's a hell of a challenge, and it was tight near the end.Just a shame it only gives a recolour of the Tomb tier set, and not a nice recolour in my opinion.I did it twice, once with SL only gear, and second with an old ilevel 50 Typhoon sword with the Crusader enchant on - wearing Prydaz with Mark of the Satyr, and the BFA cloak.The phase with Xylem was completely trivialised by the crusader enchant, it proc'd so much ( despite being nerfed ) I never feared for my life in the RazerIce. Bladestorm made it proc loads.It would likely have been even easier with lots of sockets, and gems, and the vanilla sword Sul'thraze the Lasher works well also. Although being ilevel 58 means no Crusader enchant, and that enchant makes a rather big difference.
The whole problem i found with the Mage tower, is that the scaling the use for it, it have 0 relationship with timewalking scaling. Right now is totally advitrary to the class and whatever blizzard deside. I AGREE that the mage tower should be a challenge to do, but it should be base on player skill on how they play their class. Right now is base on how much time u have to grind old content to get items to trivialize this. Since the scaling is so badly tunne that u can easy make this a cake walk with specific gear. I find stupid that the current top pve gear is bad compared to older items. What type of design is that!Is already a challenge to be a good player of 3 different classes to get the mount, but i see ppl getting frustrate on their main just for the new look. I think the balance on this was done in a hurry and really badly done. And worst is that, ok now is unbalance but let's imagine next patch or next expansion maybe the gear we get them will make this a easy challenge.I think really this whole design of reusing something that was design with a barrow power back on Legion show the real problem blizzard have with each expansion and systems they introduce and them remove.
I hate the scaling system that puts value on old gear, but I love the challenge these have brought. They're not impossible, but definitely difficult. I've enjoyed working through the encounters, learning new classes and progressing. 2 left to complete for the mount! My favorite so far has been resto shaman with arms warrior a close second.
For me, the issue with this content is the reward to effort ratio is way off, kind of like it has been in SL as a whole. The individual rewards for doing it on one class suck, the tmog my current main would get is awful, and I have no interest whatsoever in leveling and gearing a half a dozen alts to get the only worthwhile reward from it.
My problem with mage tower is it's just not fun. I've tried shadow priest and holy priest. The challenges are completely counter to how the specs play. Shadow priest is terrible at kiting, yet the entire challenge is 100% kiting. It's awful, no matter how tuned or easy it might be. Same thing for holy priest - the challenge requires so much cc and other nonsense that it's ridiculous.I'm by no means a top tier player, but I earned KSM and have a few mythic bosses down. I like challenging content that pushes me to improve. But mage tower is just plain not fun. Getting better at mage tower doesn't necessarily make you better at your spec/class/role. All it does it make you better at mage tower.
The only thing that really tires me is that people that did the content before, in all forms, say: this is much harder than before, you don't have as many options, no legendaries, no artifact power, your consumables are nerfed. Here's the numbers, here's the proof, here's actual frigging videos. And every time someone with a holier-than-thou attitude crawls out of the woodwork: "LoL U jUsT cAn'T PlaY GiD GuD!" while disregarding every bit of proof delivered.
The only nerfs needed are HP nerfs, not mechanics nerfs. All of the bosses are absolute slogs and that is its own difficulty in a way, but when your own HP is a timer and some specs have few ways of "fixing" mistakes regarding how much damage they can take, the challenge completely changes from an entirely skill based one, to an endurance test....
A 13-14 minute Disc Priest challenge where you need to be hyper vigilant at all times, and any mistake near the end results in a wipe is clearly a well balanced challenge :))
They should have just gone the route they did with Legion M+. Upgrade it to max level. That way you could do the same as you did in Legion: Outgear the challenge with the next content patch. This way you have this backwards logic of "Older gear is better", which really shouldn't be a thing at all to start with.The general damage output seems far less than in Legion as well. I didn't really try the Mage Tower with the very first iteration, but just with higher gear, so that might just be me. But seeing how little damage I do to the enemy, knowing that I am in a 15+ minute fight, and one single error deletes 10 minutes of progress... I am not really in the mood for that kind of stuff. When the main reason for failing is "You didn't look at 5 different things for 15 minutes straight and missed that 1 second cast, so you get to start over"... it just feels so dumb to me.Sure, you could say "In that case, you aren't the target audience for it", just the problem is... The Mage Tower is one of the two big things they added. The other being Legion M+, which arguably is overtuned as well, as a lot of people say, that you have to add about 3 levels on the Legion Key to compare it to a Shadowlands one.
i did magetower with heroic tomb of sargeras gear back in the day it was fun. doing them in nighthold gear was not. and it's what we are doing now. its really good for highend players but for average players it's torture. some chalenges are bunkers really hard ( Healer+ Tank+ Xylem) . some are brainlessly easy like ww monk and fury warrior and frost mage. and that is not fair. its way way way too overtuned.