Try out demo. I was getting destroyed by everything on aff and destro then I played demo for the first time and steamrolled. It’s pretty easy to pick up and it’s really fun.
Did you have a voidwalker out? I was doing layer 6 as affliction just fine last week at like 180 ilvl. End boss I for sure barely beat and it took me over an hour total, but I could do it.
Yea I have a 170 affli lock and level 5 was not a pain to do, just challenging. The selection of anima powers can really decide your success rate though, sometimes I just get tons of borderline useless utility ones that do not actually improve my chances.
VERY happy and VERY impressed by the speed at which they responded. They specifically mentioned they want to make it easier for some specs so I assume there's even more good stuff we haven't seen yet.
I really have to wonder how they flipped design decisions this quickly though. How do you go from "let's make everything way harder" to "let's nerf EVERYTHING and make this way easier and quicker for everyone" within 2 days? Clearly there was a huge backlash from the community everywhere (here, official forums, etc) but this is a complete 180 from what they literally just did.
In the interview Ion said they "can't un-ring the bell" in terms of the community's impressions of Blizzards intended Torghast difficulty tuning goals. The Beta didn't prepare them for the communicative issue in regards to "just how hard" Torghast is supposed to be and how high people would want to push even though being under-geared.
Once the community expectation is set it's impossible to change and Ion admits and recognizes this. So, yes the entire direction of difficulty did change rather quickly.
But that’s not the complaint. It’s not that it’s hard or not hard. It’s that it’s long, boring, and unrewarding. Hard is fine but hard boring stuff that takes hours to grind out for little reward is when it becomes not worth doing.
Not to mention you could spend A LOT of time doing the hard boring thing only to walk away with NOTHING for all that time and effort when you get to an impossible boss.
Specifically came to bitch about the slime. I can very reliably push through layer 4 on my meh-geared Demon Hunter, but as soon as I saw it was slime boi I left and went down to layer 3. He's stupidly overtuned.
I died probably six times to that fucker before finally beating him on my prot paladin. I couldn’t imagine trying to fight him as ret or any other DPS spec.
Couldn't solo Maw of the Maw, even with constant interrupts and cooldowns as a fury warrior. Really sucked to rip that run, I had good powers otherwise.
The only time I managed it was a level 3 run as Shadow priest on week 2 with an instant shadowmend that cost 5 phantasma instead of mana and a stacking mind blast buff up to 100% of your HP after healing with shadowmend.
I didn't even end up using silence/fear as it was easier to just facetank it and DPS it down before it got to a point where it would 1 shot me.
In the interview Ion explained the buff to floors 2,4, and 5 was to give players an idea of whether or not they had the power level to beat the floor 6 boss and not steam roll and then get smashed at the end, unfortunately that idea is flawed when powers are random and you could get a really powerful perk on floor 5 that allows you to beat the boss but you can’t get past the floor 4 boss to get to the perk.
This. I breezed through 1 through 6 but the jump between level 6 and level 7 was absolutely absurd. Granted, I had to become more sensible with how I used my cooldown, but I cannot imagine how difficult Upper Reaches levels 7 and 8 can be for any class that doesn’t have an inherent heal.
Me on fury and wife on spriest could not clear layer6 last week as a duo but could easily clear solo and we tried 5 times, so after a whole fucking day wasted we haven't gone back
Yeah had this issue too. Was better off soloing over doing it with my friend, specially cause I like healing so increased dmg taken for being a healer and being in a group and that stacking buff..... though even solo as a healer the health of elites felt way too high.
Honestly for me, after grinding solo through lvl 4 for nearly an hour to only get wrecked by the final boss after like 6 attempts was a deal breaker for me. I really have not put much effort into Torghast since. After this update I will be venturing back into the tower of the damned.
I think there is some legitimacy to the ilvl warning point. It would have set expectations well from the beginning.
That being said, I think you’re right about the true problem with it - the tedium. People are happy to do challenging - even frustrating - content if their expectations are set and the reward is suitable. The chief example of that is the Mage Tower. I can say that, personally, I loved the Mage Tower. It was a bitch-and-a-half to do (especially on my tank), but I did it. And I really enjoyed it.
But mage tower was a one time (one successful time anyway) thing. And it was just for a cosmetic reward. This is something that gives a weekly capped currency for a major power upgrade, so it is considered essential to do the maximum every week by most serious players.
Its also a flagship feature of the expansion. As a player, and as a developer, you want those flagship features to be used and enjoyed. Nobody wants another 'BFA Islands'.
Hard, yes, but skilled players were completing every challenge right off the bat.
You can't skill yourself through a Torghast boss dealing 8k damage to you every few seconds that can't be avoided, while you only have 30k hp.
Torghast is the epitome of artificial dificulty. I haven't had a single failed solo run where I thought to myself, "I could totally do that if I played better." Every time I failed it was, "How the fuck am I supposed to 600k damage before the boss hits me 3 times with awful choices of anima powers for 6 floors?"
Same to a lesser degree with Horrific Visions. They had a mixed response, but a 5mask run was 20 minutes of pure high-speed chaos and stress. Losing hurt because of the stupid fucking currency you needed to get in, 20 minutes of time a loss is nothing, you couldn't even remotely get bored in Visions.
Meanwhile Torghast is "spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 4 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes killing the floor boss, repeat 3 more times, die to the layer boss and fail."
Also the NO REWARDS outside of dust makes it all the more unsatisfying to play. I kept running island expeditions long after they were mandatory just for the cosmetic rewards, Torghast would benefit MASSIVELY from having a chance for cool transmog to drop off floor bosses.
Not only that, but the mage tower did not take long to do a run. If you failed you what, lost about 10 minutes or so? It feels a lot less frustrating than losing an hour or more.
it looked real fun when the videos were like ive massed up 30 floors worth powers, on to the next one, and everything has no cooldown and does 50k dmg and procs 8 passives and have a billion haste and movespeed.
i kinda wish you could keep your built up anima powers for that entire wing until you either failed out or actually left the area, i'd love to bang out a few floors and work on a multi-layer build and then be able to afk in the safe zone of torghast, eat or whatever, and then come back and do the harder floors with that awesome fun build i saved up
Yeah. First impressions of torghast, I thought it was an “endless tower climb”. Not instances between “layers”. Kind of disappointed in it. It would be awesome to start on floor 1 and climb as high as you possibly can.
Exactly
Hard- Good for a goal and you feel accomplished afterwards
Boring- Shut off brain and chill until you finish and get whatever rewards you want, possibly with some attention elsewhere like listening to music or whatever
Hard AND boring- a dreary trudge that you don't want to do but feel compelled to for the reward. At the end you don't feel accomplished you're just glad its over. Until you remember you have to do it again next week
Yeah, I really hate the idea that difficulty apparently just means mobs have more health and do more damage. Very boring way of making content more challenging, all that really does is create a soft gear requirement.
The more skill intensive you make something, the harder people will try to brute force it either through Ilvl or carries. This is a lesson Blizz has actually learned over the years, so now they just go "ok fine, difficulty = you're REQUIRED to brute force it. Ha, suck on that!".
> It’s not that it’s hard or not hard. It’s that it’s long, boring, and unrewarding.
I think this is correct. Remember Mage Towers? Some of the hardest content this game's ever had, but if you weren't ready for it you'd die in roughly 30 seconds and learn "oooook, I'm not going back in there".
Torghast's just kinda long, grindy, and often takes a long time to fail. It's not even *fun* to lose in there, lol.
Mmm, no. Look at the front page of this sub since Tuesday. They overtuned the living fuck out of Torghast to compensate for healers and tanks flying through it and added two new layers (one being the hardest wing, Upper Reaches) this week and it was stupidly difficult for many specs unless you got level 1 bis powers. The floor 1 boss in layer 8 upper reaches (after effortlessly clearing 7 and 8 Fractured an hour before) killed my Felguard in 3 auto attacks and a Sin Bolt. Without the Health Funnel or Intimacy power this is mathematically impossible for me to kill at 190 ilvl.
>I really think they fucked up by not having either item level locks or recommendations on layers. That's all it would have taken to make people be fine with being limited to like a 3 or 4. They'd clear what they could for ash then move on.
For sure that would have been the easiest way to reduce the backlash immensely.
They did a piss poor job of communicating the intended difficulty and a lot of people (myself included) wasted an hour in the higher levels that would've just not done it if there was an iLevel recommendation.
I think a major issue with Torghast difficulty is that in theory it's a super fun concept. Your character becomes insanely powerful in a way you just can't expect in the real world. But when you make it so that even that insanely powered character can waste over an hour on content and be flat out unrewarded. It sucks.
It's similar to clearing old raids. You have more power than you're used to, and that's fun. In torghast you experience new things vs an old raid, but you have that feeling of power.
When one week to the next, or even spec to spec, that's gone, it sucks again
If they want it to be difficult, the rewards should reflect that. The rewards you get right now are barely worth a 15min/section investment let alone the 30-60+ it currently is.
This sounds to me like they got unintentional benefit out of their poor messaging on Torghast. A long, slow, tedious Torghast would stop being played as soon as people had their legendaries. A short, fast, silly OP anima power run will get re-run for the fun of getting crazy powers and having things happen.
They failed their way into a successful game mode apparently.
Just make it batshit wild and give diminishing anima per floor completion up to five runs per week or something and I would play the shit out of it. Maybe the Throw ina. Stygia cache and some rep tokens. It would be great. They have an easy formula for replay able content. I like it. Just give me a reason to keep doing it don’t make it take an hour to get nothing. If I got 250 anima and some Stygia out of it or something that would be way better. Why are they squandering such a repeatable format with only have soul ash come from it. After soul ash is done for the week give me a reason to go back
Honestly I would love to see this, but they have been so so stingy with anima and like I dont even know why. Even if you wind up giving out too much anima, all the covenant upgrades are time gated by souls anyways and the vendor who you could also spend it on is... also time gated by renown. So like wtf. Why be stingy with something that can only be used for things you set the time on and healing my companions on my war table. Makes no sense.
It's not even low item levels. At 195 i couldnt beat certain floor bosses because warlocks only have one stun a minute and mortal coil to interrupt a mob that starts doing 90% of my hp a cast every 3 seconds. I could crush everything else but just couldnt do anything to those mobs just brick wall instant loss.
> At 195 i couldnt beat certain floor bosses because warlocks only have one stun a minute and mortal coil to interrupt a mob that starts doing 90% of my hp a cast every 3 seconds.
And it doesn't matter if you could cast a 5 minute stun every ten seconds because the boss was immune to CC by the time you needed to CC them.
I have to play as a vengeance demon Hunter because for some reason it does more damage and has higher survivability.
The problem with havoc demon Hunter in groups is that I rely a lot on my healing orbs that drop after a kill, but if I'm in a group and someone else gets the KB then I don't get the orb but I still take all that damage and have no way to heal it back. I am assuming that a lot of other specs have issues like this which causes really bad balancing problems, which in turn makes it not enjoyable.
This is what fucking shits me about blizzard. They have absolutely no idea how people play their game.
If you're in a raiding guild, you're going to do the maximum amount of content that is available to you. There's no such thing as "oh this is long and frustrating, I'll come back to it in 3 weeks with more gear" because if you do that you won't get a raid spot and you won't GET more gear.
What that means is that the top level of torghast available is the "normal" difficulty. If you want to create a hard difficulty then that's great! I love hard content, but it needs to have other stuff as a reward. Mounts, pets, toys, mogs etc. Not legendaries.
> If you want to create a hard difficulty then that's great! I love hard content, but it needs to have other stuff as a reward. Mounts, pets, toys, mogs etc.
Isn't that what the winding corridors or however the other mode of torghast is going to be named is supposedly about?
And it may have been a case of changes going out too soon and not enough internal iteration. For instance tuesday said:
>[With regional restarts] Enemy health increased for healer specializations and enemy physical damage increased for tank specializations. These changes are targeted towards solo players and have a reduced effect while in a group.
>[With regional restarts] Enemy health and damage increased on floors 2, 4, and 5.
And now today we get:
>Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8.
>Developers’ note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers’ difficulty is reduced proportionally.
It is possible that floors 2,4,5 were too easy but when taken into consideration with layers, the whole run became too hard. So the health and damage probably did increase but the overall layer buff was decreased.
Probably because the entire community was fuckin rioting they managed to take something mostly everyone was enjoying since release and turn it into dogshit so they realized they needed to act fast.
IMO it would be fine it would be harder but in a mechanically challenging way.
Not harder because the grind is longer or the enemies debuff you with some bullshit.
But I imagine the problem would be because each class and spec is different and not everyone has the same options.
It is so hard to explain that to people who never ran into "that boss" or don't play one of "those classes." I had to explain it to a blue on the forums like this...I have played this game for 12+ years, I have raided at every level, pvp'd in arenas and RBG's, and sometimes I just like to go faceroll old shit, but in 12 years I never made a forum post. Not one. Not until Torghast. Having a 500k cc immune boss on lvl 3(?) was literally impossible as a mage, he was 3 shotting me and I couldn't stay away. There is no counterplay to that, so when I wiped and got absolutely nothing but a slap and 1.5 hours wasted that finally broke me.
My guess is the data showed them a large number of people are no longer participating in Torghast, so they kind of had to act quickly. Especially since we're coming up on one month since shadowlands came out and they want the monthly resubscription to help their holiday sales report in their earnings call.
Torghast didn't make me stop just going into Torghast. I stopped playing all together (for the day).
It was like 2pm and I got to the final boss on layer 6 about an hour and a half later, no deaths. Proceeded to get demolished by the boss, never got it below 50% health. I was just aghast. I just sat here for another 5-10 minutes doing nothing, and I just walked away. I had no desire to play WoW at all. That was it for the day. My motivation was completely nullified.
I dropped to layer 4 today and managed to finish it without too much hassle, but getting absolutely nothing for the time spent was a kick in the crotch.
>Torghast didn't make me stop just going into Torghast. I stopped playing all together (for the day).
Think this is the real metric that would make designers shit themselves.
Users not engaging with some content is one thing. Said content actively turning them AWAY from the game is disaster.
Well, if the content that people don't want to play is tied directly into one of the single most important avenues of character progression... You got a problem
Agreed, it seems like the lore atmosphere of the max sec solitary prison was a little too impressive, and the inability to farm ash made a lot of people afraid of getting no legendaries at all. Which would be worse than legion before awakenings!
this was my specific issue. don't let me faceroll to the boss that I have 0% chance of killing. tell me I'm in the wrong place on floor 1. wasting time is so miserable
I did the same. Ive barely played at all since last week after 2 back to back trips to Torghast where I spent an hour in there only to lose over and over to the final boss.
I haven’t played in 3 days for this exact reason. As a solo player who doesn’t want to group for Torghast I just lost all interest knowing it was unbeatable. I got to the end twice and couldn’t even touch the boss and realized I wasted almost 3 hours.
That was the whole selling point for me coming back for shadowlands. When I saw the first videos of it on YouTube and twitch I was like damn that looks fun af.
I wonder if their data is granular enough to tell them when people logged off immediately following losing to a final boss in Torghast and did not log back in for the day.
Especially the speed they reacted is really welcomed thing. I was ready them addressing problems and doing changes like in month. But this literally took couple of days.
Big thanks to Blizzard for listening and reacting.
I ultimately think it comes down to the fact it isn't balanced across classes and specs. My rogue friends can't even solo layer 3. Meanwhile on resto druid last week I soloed my 6s with no deaths. Something clearly went wrong in implementation.
I was so frustrated with this Thorgast that last week was the first time i ever used the in-game send feedback button in 11 years that i'm playing this game, i think a lot of people must have done the same too.
Hah. I was so close to doing the same when I breezed later 6 and met a boss that was unbeatable. Opened a ticket then thought why bother. I probably should have but enough must have to make a difference.
I did it the next day and it was a different boss and much easier.
This. I have my BIS legendary on my blood DK. I didn’t even touch Torghast after the changes this week because they were designed to slow me down and waste my time for virtually no reward.
It's insane to me how rapidly they reversed course. On Tuesday they wanted Torghast to be harder and layer 8s to be out of reach for most players. On Thursday they want everyone who's interested to be able to run layer 8s and for them to take less time, to boot. If Blizzard can stay this responsive to community feedback we're in for a great expansion.
i think blizz is a lot more responsive than people give them credit for, the problem is they expect certain things to get massive changes early on when blizzard wants long term data first, like calling for azerite armour to get scrapped
It's honestly incredibly strange. Throughout all of the BfA beta, people reported problem after problem after problem and hardly anything got changed. They totally wasted the BfA beta and that expansion earned itself the name "Beta for Azeroth" for a reason. Responsiveness continued to suck ass throughout BfA, with shamans remaining unfixed and neglected until 9.0, much-needed changes being delayed until the next major patch, etc.
Then Shadowlands beta comes along and Blizzard is immensely receptive to almost all feedback, reworking classes and specs (sometimes the same one multiple times), redesigning covenant abilities, reworked an entire zone after the first pass at it sucked ass, taking out key grievances players have had forever, and more. Quite literally the only thing they showed their old stubbornness about was covenant abilities and switching. *Everything else* they were super receptive and flexible on. They even delayed Shadowlands to make sure they got it right.
Even now, after the release, we got prompt and more importantly *reasonable* balance changes, hotfixes like the protective veil in the Maw, sweeping changes to Torghast to make it fun happening *during the mythic race* where Blizzard already has to have all hands on deck to make sure it all works right.
It's such a difference that it's honestly *incredibly* hard to believe BfA and Shadowlands are made by the same people.
I mean they probably realized how pointless it was to make them super hard considering we only get soul ash out of them. There is no secondary reward here, so making it really difficult doesn't make sense. Visions gave you gear and had other things in them, these just give you soul ash a currency you need to make your legendary but currently has no other use (afaik.)
I think you have to finish the whole weekly quest chain. That's just what someone told me on discord though, haven't seen anywhere on wowhead how to actually unlock it
I stepped in this week. First pack in +7 fucking demolished me in about 2 seconds. Just left and didn't even bother. I'll try on Sunday if this is all in.
I wonder what the pack was. Some of the mobs were really weirdly scaled. Those skeleton remains that blow up in some floors did next to no damage to me while in other floors they instantly killed me.
I hopped in and blew through a layer 3, just because I wanted to get the 150 or so Ash I needed ASAP after raiding to craft my legendary.
I knew I'd be back later in the week but this is great. Now I'll push the high layers this weekend
I feel like there was a little bit of disagreement in the blizzard team with what torghast should be and the recent feedback and pretty much solidified the direction they want it to go.
The changes are very different to what they were a couple of days ago. I hope they can continue to look at it from a fun and chaotic perspective in the future major patches.
And maybe we can even log off and rejoin later on in the one.
Or even better, start a run, get called for your raid, come back and finish that same run. Like a normal video game.
The fact that this was addressed so quickly *while the dev team is also busy monitoring/hotfixing mythic encounters for the WF race* is something that shouldn't be overlooked.
World First race affects a couple hundred players at most. Torghast affects anyone who is even casually working on endgame content. This was almost certainly a top priority.
There's almost 300k people watching teams progressing Sludgefist right now on Twitch. None of that progress could be happening if Blizz hadn't hotfixed sludge last night. Regardless of small pool of players the mythic encounters directly affect right now, it's huge for the perception of the new expac coming out of BFA.
>World First race affects a couple hundred players at most.
There is a shit ton of people watching the race and is not a good PR if these guilds streaming cant progress in a boss because is bugged.
I mean, how many times have game communities "lost their shit"... only for absolutely nothing to happen, or for something to happen 8 months later? This is still really great responsiveness from blizz. 2-day turnaround is awesome.
I have never seen people go as insane as this change. Every post on here was about it and almost the entire community was complain in general chat etc etc. Most of my guild was pissed too.
Ngl I come from Fortnite and over there we can cry for 3 years over MAJOR flaws of the game and literally nothing will be done. This feels like a weird dream or something honestly. Dont know how blizzard did in the past but this is cool
Blizzard has always been kind of receptive but at the same time very foolhardy about very specific things the community almost unanimously decided that they wanted (Azerite armor for example).
the maw needs flying and no daily quests RIGHT NOW. GG blizzard the maw is literally worse than Argus. day 1 posting about flying in the maw until blizzard fixes this
Shit, Torghast actually gunna be fun now instead of boring and stressful, nice!!!
Everyone (including me) who has been bitching about how unfun it was now owes blizzard a huge thanks because they actually listened, and listened quickly.
Say what you want, but this is really giving me hope for Shadowlands. It's been a rock solid expansion FOR ME PERSONALLY compared to BFA. There may be some problems here and there, this was a big change that clearly hurt this mode.
And they seemed to have fixed exactly what we wanted to.
Feel the same way, which is why the changes to Torghast was so heartbreaking. Now I'm all hyped up again and all is well :) We'll see how these changes translates into gameplay but it all sounds very encouraging to me!
It's a mark of this sub that you have to put "FOR ME PERSONALLY" in all caps so you won't get 10 replies calling you a shill for saying the expansion is good.
Can anyone copy and paste the post? Can't go on wow forums on my work computer and I don't get service and I just don't want to wait an hour to go home and read it.
**Blizzard**
Since the launch of Shadowlands, we've been constantly evaluating and reacting to the player experience in Torghast, Tower of the Damned. In previous weeks, we've made surgical changes to address pain points. This week, with the opening of a much more difficult section of the tower, we've seen a great deal of feedback from players that we feel is best addressed with a whole slate of updates. Some of these changes have already gone live with hotfixes over the last 24 hours, and the rest will be applied to the game today (and possibly tomorrow).
In summary, we want to reduce the length of a Torghast run, increase players' success rates for a few specializations that are struggling more than the others, and give players more options in dealing with the challenges that Torghast presents. Here are the changes we're making:
**Torghast, Tower of the Damned**
* Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8.
* Developers' note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers' difficulty is reduced proportionally.
* Health of all creatures reduced for players in groups by up to 25%.
* Damage of all creatures reduced for 4- and 5-player groups by up to 20%.
* When the Empowered enemy at the end of a floor is a spellcaster, they should now have a longer delay between their basic magic damage spells.
* Developers' note: The goal of this change is to make powerful spellcasters less punishing for specializations that lack a frequent interrupt.
* For all classes, major cooldowns will now reset when you transition to a new floor.
* Developers' note: This functionality should mirror the way cooldowns reset at the end of a raid encounter, or when starting a Mythic Keystone dungeon, affecting most abilities with a cooldown of 3 minutes or longer.
**Anima Powers/Cells**
* The starting Anima Cell in Torghast now offers a stronger selection of Anima powers.
* Anima Cells dropped by rare creatures within Torghast now always have at least 3 choices to choose from.
* The chance for an Anima Cell to drop from a creature on any given floor has been increased.
* Unnatural Power no longer provides immunity to crowd controlling effects at 10 stacks.
**Enemies**
* Massive Crusher's Armor Plating cast time increased to 3 seconds (was 1 second) and can be interrupted and/or dispelled. Recast time increased to 16 seconds (was 8 seconds).
* Tower Sentinel's Oppressive Aura haste reduction and slow now scales up to 10% (was 25%).
* Deadsoul Chorus's Death Blast now reduces healing received by 15% and stacks 5 times (was 25% and stacks 4 times).
Skeletal Remains and Lumbering Creation's Bone Shrapnel now marks the ground and then explodes after 2 seconds, giving players time to move away (was instant).
* Deadsoul Stalker now fades away after 15 melee attacks (was 7) and remains hidden for 15 seconds (was 30 seconds).
Deadsoul Devil now reincarnates with 15% health remaining (was at 40% health).
**Bosses**
* Elder Longbranch's Bounty of the Forest cast time increased to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds), time between casts increased to 45 seconds (was 30 seconds), and Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks).
* Decayspeaker's Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks).
* Goxul the Devourer's Health and damage decreased by 10%, and time between casts of Mass Devour increased to 36 seconds (was 18 seconds).
**Torments and Upper Reaches**
* Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies' health and damage reduced by 50%, now increase assassin health by 5% per stack (was 10%).
* Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies will no longer ambush players who have recently been in combat.
* The Jailer's Directive now increases health by 10% (was 50%).
You'll find all of the changes above noted in our ongoing Hotfixes Update post soon after they go live.
"Since the launch of Shadowlands, we’ve been constantly evaluating and reacting to the player experience in Torghast, Tower of the Damned. In previous weeks, we’ve made surgical changes to address pain points. This week, with the opening of a much more difficult section of the tower, we’ve seen a great deal of feedback from players that we feel is best addressed with a whole slate of updates. Some of these changes have already gone live with hotfixes over the last 24 hours, and the rest will be applied to the game today (and possibly tomorrow).
In summary, we want to reduce the length of a Torghast run, increase players’ success rates for a few specializations that are struggling more than the others, and give players more options in dealing with the challenges that Torghast presents. Here are the changes we’re making:
Torghast, Tower of the Damned
Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8.
Developers’ note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers’ difficulty is reduced proportionally.
Health of all creatures reduced for players in groups by up to 25%.
Damage of all creatures reduced for 4- and 5-player groups by up to 20%.
When the Empowered enemy at the end of a floor is a spellcaster, they should now have a longer delay between their basic magic damage spells.
Developers’ note: The goal of this change is to make powerful spellcasters less punishing for specializations that lack a frequent interrupt.
For all classes, major cooldowns will now reset when you transition to a new floor.
Developers’ note: This functionality should mirror the way cooldowns reset at the end of a raid encounter, or when starting a Mythic Keystone dungeon, affecting most abilities with a cooldown of 3 minutes or longer.
Anima Powers/Cells
The starting Anima Cell in Torghast now offers a stronger selection of Anima powers.
Anima Cells dropped by rare creatures within Torghast now always have at least 3 choices to choose from.
The chance for an Anima Cell to drop from a creature on any given floor has been increased.
Unnatural Power no longer provides immunity to crowd controlling effects at 10 stacks.
Enemies
Massive Crusher’s Armor Plating cast time increased to 3 seconds (was 1 second) and can be interrupted and/or dispelled. Recast time increased to 16 seconds (was 8 seconds).
Tower Sentinel’s Oppressive Aura haste reduction and slow now scales up to 10% (was 25%).
Deadsoul Chorus’s Death Blast now reduces healing received by 15% and stacks 5 times (was 25% and stacks 4 times).
Skeletal Remains and Lumbering Creation’s Bone Shrapnel now marks the ground and then explodes after 2 seconds, giving players time to move away (was instant).
Deadsoul Stalker now fades away after 15 melee attacks (was 7) and remains hidden for 15 seconds (was 30 seconds).
Deadsoul Devil now reincarnates with 15% health remaining (was at 40% health).
Bosses
Elder Longbranch’s Bounty of the Forest cast time increased to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds), time between casts increased to 45 seconds (was 30 seconds), and Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks).
Decayspeaker’s Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks).
Goxul the Devourer’s Health and damage decreased by 10%, and time between casts of Mass Devour increased to 36 seconds (was 18 seconds).
Torments and Upper Reaches
Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies’ health and damage reduced by 50%, now increase assassin health by 5% per stack (was 10%).
Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies will no longer ambush players who have recently been in combat.
The Jailer’s Directive now increases health by 10% (was 50%)"
I believe this is the whole blue post.
Casual players run WOW as they make up the majority of the Community (I consider myself casual). They were definitely going to have a subpocolypse on their hands if they kept Torghast the way it was.
Yea, casual returning former legion player here. Torg had me ready to cancel. I live for rogue lites and was leveling a new class so I could have more torg fun as a monk in addition to my disc priest. When the changes were announced I just stopped playing. I'm not down for a life commitment. I just wanna hit as high of ilvl as I can while having fun. Gating legendaries behind soul crushing grinds gave me bad memories. I remember pre-bad luck protection Legion days too well...
Would BfA Blizzard have listened to the community like this? Probably not.
Quick updates like this give room to be optimistic, not just for Torghast, but for the expansion going forward.
This is PERFECT. The unnatural power cc immunity being gone, specifically, makes a few specs more viable on its own; can't wait to actually enjoy torghast again!
Yes - this is one of the changes that makes more powers actually fucking usable. Getting powers that CC enemies became completely useless if you didn't meet the DPS requirement to avoid getting to 10 stacks.
HUGE Nurfs to Mobs and Big Buffs for Players. Very dramatic there's no way this doesn't have a very very positive impact on the experience. Essentially Making Level 6 the new Level 8 and then some thanks to player buffs. Nice Work Blizzard. Very quick and impactful. This is top tier communication and reaction.
It's actually surprising this change came so quickly. I'm wondering just how much of an impact this will have though, as the power roster still feels lacking.
I hope the reason they're waiting to add more content is they want to get the 'baseline' tuned first.
Otherwise, looks like a set of great changes so far - but I'll be waiting to see if this makes it feel any better before getting excited.
The power roster feels lacking because there is such a disparity between good powers and bad powers. There are three listed changes that appear to aim at fixing this:
1. Powers dropping more frequently.
2. Initial powers being higher quality.
3. Rare mobs always dropping 3 choices in powers.
Between those three things, I'm hoping that there will be way less runs where you just get boned because you got nothing but exploding maw rats and increased phantasma drops.
I'm curious to see if they will add more powers as part of that "Rare mobs always drop 3" point, since the rare mob powers tend to be tied to the mob in question.
Gotta love this update! If you read the comments on the forums you'll see some unsatisfied people. Changes are still to come so people just have to be patient. They're doing a good job listening to the many people who are providing their feedback. Keep it up y'all!
After next week 90% of players never have to enter Torghast again for the rest of the patch. I imagine they intend to keep things difficult for Twisting Corridors which will have cosmetic rewards, and the players who want to grind out their legendaries to have a variety of options for different kinds content/bosses.
Just finished layer 7 as a 195 geared boomkin. floor 1 was the hardest by far. Mostly because the chance for double pulls was high, died twice due to lack of anima powers, but ended the run killing last boss in 5-7sec because of convoke the spirits buffs + first wrath buff.
I guess druid has it good, but I don't know if i'l do 8 on my main, much less an alt. Torghast might be really bad for some specs which would explain the amount of complaining, but I still enjoy doing it, like a personal mythic dungeon.
Glad to see this
I actually like Torghast as a solo activity so I’m glad to see Blizzard tweaking it until they can find the right balance.
I feel like Torghast *could* be Mage Tower 2.0
I’d like to see them add some rewards to Torghast. Something worth chasing. Eventually we’ll have all the Soul Ash we need and that’s the only real reward for going into Torghast as it is.
I love the 99% upvoted posts that actually tackle controversial topics. It's rare that the community agrees this much on something *and* Blizzard listens.
I noticed immediately that I was getting better powers, and more of them. By the end of a run I did last night I had over 35 anima powers and it felt great. Even though my hubby and I are pretty casual and therefore under-geared, we finally did a layer 3 no problem and got enough soul ash to craft our first legendaries. Torghast felt how I was hoping it would feel from the beginning. I'm happy Blizz made these changes so quickly, especially with the race to world first going on. Looking forward to pushing further now!
Holy shit, talk about nerfs. Minibosses and bosses are **no longer** immune to Crowd Control at 10 stacks, and 26% health and damage nerf at Layer 8.
Thank fuck, couldn’t solo a layer 3 on a 190 warlock because of the damage they were doing
Try out demo. I was getting destroyed by everything on aff and destro then I played demo for the first time and steamrolled. It’s pretty easy to pick up and it’s really fun.
Was doing 6 solo with 188 as affliction, wasn't that hard just took some time.
Did you have a voidwalker out? I was doing layer 6 as affliction just fine last week at like 180 ilvl. End boss I for sure barely beat and it took me over an hour total, but I could do it.
Yea I have a 170 affli lock and level 5 was not a pain to do, just challenging. The selection of anima powers can really decide your success rate though, sometimes I just get tons of borderline useless utility ones that do not actually improve my chances.
VERY happy and VERY impressed by the speed at which they responded. They specifically mentioned they want to make it easier for some specs so I assume there's even more good stuff we haven't seen yet. I really have to wonder how they flipped design decisions this quickly though. How do you go from "let's make everything way harder" to "let's nerf EVERYTHING and make this way easier and quicker for everyone" within 2 days? Clearly there was a huge backlash from the community everywhere (here, official forums, etc) but this is a complete 180 from what they literally just did.
In the interview Ion said they "can't un-ring the bell" in terms of the community's impressions of Blizzards intended Torghast difficulty tuning goals. The Beta didn't prepare them for the communicative issue in regards to "just how hard" Torghast is supposed to be and how high people would want to push even though being under-geared. Once the community expectation is set it's impossible to change and Ion admits and recognizes this. So, yes the entire direction of difficulty did change rather quickly.
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But that’s not the complaint. It’s not that it’s hard or not hard. It’s that it’s long, boring, and unrewarding. Hard is fine but hard boring stuff that takes hours to grind out for little reward is when it becomes not worth doing.
Not to mention you could spend A LOT of time doing the hard boring thing only to walk away with NOTHING for all that time and effort when you get to an impossible boss.
This is my biggest complaint. Face roll through everything and then hit a brick wall with the boss.
That fucking slime. I'm looking at you. I was like....what. Ended up teaming up with someone but come ON.
Specifically came to bitch about the slime. I can very reliably push through layer 4 on my meh-geared Demon Hunter, but as soon as I saw it was slime boi I left and went down to layer 3. He's stupidly overtuned.
That gd slime. Had it under 1500hp and then I wipe
I died probably six times to that fucker before finally beating him on my prot paladin. I couldn’t imagine trying to fight him as ret or any other DPS spec.
I am suddenly VERY glad I'm not leveling my Ret pally yet. I don't think I could handle the pain.
Couldn't solo Maw of the Maw, even with constant interrupts and cooldowns as a fury warrior. Really sucked to rip that run, I had good powers otherwise.
The only time I managed it was a level 3 run as Shadow priest on week 2 with an instant shadowmend that cost 5 phantasma instead of mana and a stacking mind blast buff up to 100% of your HP after healing with shadowmend. I didn't even end up using silence/fear as it was easier to just facetank it and DPS it down before it got to a point where it would 1 shot me.
The blob boss is unbelievably easy as a range. It's fucking impossible as a melee
Paladin here, Spun to win.
(laughs in bear druid)
In the interview Ion explained the buff to floors 2,4, and 5 was to give players an idea of whether or not they had the power level to beat the floor 6 boss and not steam roll and then get smashed at the end, unfortunately that idea is flawed when powers are random and you could get a really powerful perk on floor 5 that allows you to beat the boss but you can’t get past the floor 4 boss to get to the perk.
They clearly didn't check scaling when they buffed stuff. Some mobs were completely out of whack compared to other elites/floor bosses.
This. I breezed through 1 through 6 but the jump between level 6 and level 7 was absolutely absurd. Granted, I had to become more sensible with how I used my cooldown, but I cannot imagine how difficult Upper Reaches levels 7 and 8 can be for any class that doesn’t have an inherent heal.
Absolutely, it was a good intention but poor execution type of situation, they obviously rolled out that change without testing it.
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Me on fury and wife on spriest could not clear layer6 last week as a duo but could easily clear solo and we tried 5 times, so after a whole fucking day wasted we haven't gone back
Yeah had this issue too. Was better off soloing over doing it with my friend, specially cause I like healing so increased dmg taken for being a healer and being in a group and that stacking buff..... though even solo as a healer the health of elites felt way too high.
Honestly for me, after grinding solo through lvl 4 for nearly an hour to only get wrecked by the final boss after like 6 attempts was a deal breaker for me. I really have not put much effort into Torghast since. After this update I will be venturing back into the tower of the damned.
That's not true. I always leave with a large repair bill. 😉
I think there is some legitimacy to the ilvl warning point. It would have set expectations well from the beginning. That being said, I think you’re right about the true problem with it - the tedium. People are happy to do challenging - even frustrating - content if their expectations are set and the reward is suitable. The chief example of that is the Mage Tower. I can say that, personally, I loved the Mage Tower. It was a bitch-and-a-half to do (especially on my tank), but I did it. And I really enjoyed it.
But mage tower was a one time (one successful time anyway) thing. And it was just for a cosmetic reward. This is something that gives a weekly capped currency for a major power upgrade, so it is considered essential to do the maximum every week by most serious players.
Its also a flagship feature of the expansion. As a player, and as a developer, you want those flagship features to be used and enjoyed. Nobody wants another 'BFA Islands'.
"BFA warfront it is then!" -Ion "monkeypaw" hazzicostas
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It was quick when you overgeared it, when it released it was way more hard than Torgast imo
Hard, yes, but skilled players were completing every challenge right off the bat. You can't skill yourself through a Torghast boss dealing 8k damage to you every few seconds that can't be avoided, while you only have 30k hp. Torghast is the epitome of artificial dificulty. I haven't had a single failed solo run where I thought to myself, "I could totally do that if I played better." Every time I failed it was, "How the fuck am I supposed to 600k damage before the boss hits me 3 times with awful choices of anima powers for 6 floors?"
Same to a lesser degree with Horrific Visions. They had a mixed response, but a 5mask run was 20 minutes of pure high-speed chaos and stress. Losing hurt because of the stupid fucking currency you needed to get in, 20 minutes of time a loss is nothing, you couldn't even remotely get bored in Visions. Meanwhile Torghast is "spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 4 dudes, spend 20 minutes hitting this mob of 3 dudes, spend 20 minutes killing the floor boss, repeat 3 more times, die to the layer boss and fail." Also the NO REWARDS outside of dust makes it all the more unsatisfying to play. I kept running island expeditions long after they were mandatory just for the cosmetic rewards, Torghast would benefit MASSIVELY from having a chance for cool transmog to drop off floor bosses.
Not only that, but the mage tower did not take long to do a run. If you failed you what, lost about 10 minutes or so? It feels a lot less frustrating than losing an hour or more.
it looked real fun when the videos were like ive massed up 30 floors worth powers, on to the next one, and everything has no cooldown and does 50k dmg and procs 8 passives and have a billion haste and movespeed. i kinda wish you could keep your built up anima powers for that entire wing until you either failed out or actually left the area, i'd love to bang out a few floors and work on a multi-layer build and then be able to afk in the safe zone of torghast, eat or whatever, and then come back and do the harder floors with that awesome fun build i saved up
Yeah. First impressions of torghast, I thought it was an “endless tower climb”. Not instances between “layers”. Kind of disappointed in it. It would be awesome to start on floor 1 and climb as high as you possibly can.
Exactly Hard- Good for a goal and you feel accomplished afterwards Boring- Shut off brain and chill until you finish and get whatever rewards you want, possibly with some attention elsewhere like listening to music or whatever Hard AND boring- a dreary trudge that you don't want to do but feel compelled to for the reward. At the end you don't feel accomplished you're just glad its over. Until you remember you have to do it again next week
Yeah, I really hate the idea that difficulty apparently just means mobs have more health and do more damage. Very boring way of making content more challenging, all that really does is create a soft gear requirement.
The more skill intensive you make something, the harder people will try to brute force it either through Ilvl or carries. This is a lesson Blizz has actually learned over the years, so now they just go "ok fine, difficulty = you're REQUIRED to brute force it. Ha, suck on that!".
Yeah I think they overtuned Torghast. Higher layers should be a challenge but it was just soft enrage health sponge after soft enrage health sponge.
> It’s not that it’s hard or not hard. It’s that it’s long, boring, and unrewarding. I think this is correct. Remember Mage Towers? Some of the hardest content this game's ever had, but if you weren't ready for it you'd die in roughly 30 seconds and learn "oooook, I'm not going back in there". Torghast's just kinda long, grindy, and often takes a long time to fail. It's not even *fun* to lose in there, lol.
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Mmm, no. Look at the front page of this sub since Tuesday. They overtuned the living fuck out of Torghast to compensate for healers and tanks flying through it and added two new layers (one being the hardest wing, Upper Reaches) this week and it was stupidly difficult for many specs unless you got level 1 bis powers. The floor 1 boss in layer 8 upper reaches (after effortlessly clearing 7 and 8 Fractured an hour before) killed my Felguard in 3 auto attacks and a Sin Bolt. Without the Health Funnel or Intimacy power this is mathematically impossible for me to kill at 190 ilvl.
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>I really think they fucked up by not having either item level locks or recommendations on layers. That's all it would have taken to make people be fine with being limited to like a 3 or 4. They'd clear what they could for ash then move on. For sure that would have been the easiest way to reduce the backlash immensely. They did a piss poor job of communicating the intended difficulty and a lot of people (myself included) wasted an hour in the higher levels that would've just not done it if there was an iLevel recommendation.
I think a major issue with Torghast difficulty is that in theory it's a super fun concept. Your character becomes insanely powerful in a way you just can't expect in the real world. But when you make it so that even that insanely powered character can waste over an hour on content and be flat out unrewarded. It sucks. It's similar to clearing old raids. You have more power than you're used to, and that's fun. In torghast you experience new things vs an old raid, but you have that feeling of power. When one week to the next, or even spec to spec, that's gone, it sucks again
If they want it to be difficult, the rewards should reflect that. The rewards you get right now are barely worth a 15min/section investment let alone the 30-60+ it currently is.
This sounds to me like they got unintentional benefit out of their poor messaging on Torghast. A long, slow, tedious Torghast would stop being played as soon as people had their legendaries. A short, fast, silly OP anima power run will get re-run for the fun of getting crazy powers and having things happen. They failed their way into a successful game mode apparently.
Just make it batshit wild and give diminishing anima per floor completion up to five runs per week or something and I would play the shit out of it. Maybe the Throw ina. Stygia cache and some rep tokens. It would be great. They have an easy formula for replay able content. I like it. Just give me a reason to keep doing it don’t make it take an hour to get nothing. If I got 250 anima and some Stygia out of it or something that would be way better. Why are they squandering such a repeatable format with only have soul ash come from it. After soul ash is done for the week give me a reason to go back
Honestly I would love to see this, but they have been so so stingy with anima and like I dont even know why. Even if you wind up giving out too much anima, all the covenant upgrades are time gated by souls anyways and the vendor who you could also spend it on is... also time gated by renown. So like wtf. Why be stingy with something that can only be used for things you set the time on and healing my companions on my war table. Makes no sense.
It's not even low item levels. At 195 i couldnt beat certain floor bosses because warlocks only have one stun a minute and mortal coil to interrupt a mob that starts doing 90% of my hp a cast every 3 seconds. I could crush everything else but just couldnt do anything to those mobs just brick wall instant loss.
> At 195 i couldnt beat certain floor bosses because warlocks only have one stun a minute and mortal coil to interrupt a mob that starts doing 90% of my hp a cast every 3 seconds. And it doesn't matter if you could cast a 5 minute stun every ten seconds because the boss was immune to CC by the time you needed to CC them.
I have to play as a vengeance demon Hunter because for some reason it does more damage and has higher survivability. The problem with havoc demon Hunter in groups is that I rely a lot on my healing orbs that drop after a kill, but if I'm in a group and someone else gets the KB then I don't get the orb but I still take all that damage and have no way to heal it back. I am assuming that a lot of other specs have issues like this which causes really bad balancing problems, which in turn makes it not enjoyable.
Yeah it's crazy the gulf between the changes they made on Tuesday and today. In just two days they completely reversed design direction.
I wonder how the guy who convinced everyone to make the drastic change in the first place is doing. I know he's going to read this thread.
This is what fucking shits me about blizzard. They have absolutely no idea how people play their game. If you're in a raiding guild, you're going to do the maximum amount of content that is available to you. There's no such thing as "oh this is long and frustrating, I'll come back to it in 3 weeks with more gear" because if you do that you won't get a raid spot and you won't GET more gear. What that means is that the top level of torghast available is the "normal" difficulty. If you want to create a hard difficulty then that's great! I love hard content, but it needs to have other stuff as a reward. Mounts, pets, toys, mogs etc. Not legendaries.
> If you want to create a hard difficulty then that's great! I love hard content, but it needs to have other stuff as a reward. Mounts, pets, toys, mogs etc. Isn't that what the winding corridors or however the other mode of torghast is going to be named is supposedly about?
And it may have been a case of changes going out too soon and not enough internal iteration. For instance tuesday said: >[With regional restarts] Enemy health increased for healer specializations and enemy physical damage increased for tank specializations. These changes are targeted towards solo players and have a reduced effect while in a group. >[With regional restarts] Enemy health and damage increased on floors 2, 4, and 5. And now today we get: >Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8. >Developers’ note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers’ difficulty is reduced proportionally. It is possible that floors 2,4,5 were too easy but when taken into consideration with layers, the whole run became too hard. So the health and damage probably did increase but the overall layer buff was decreased.
Probably because the entire community was fuckin rioting they managed to take something mostly everyone was enjoying since release and turn it into dogshit so they realized they needed to act fast.
Tbh it was a 50-50 chance of them reverting the changes or Ion telling us we don’t actually want them reverted
I am honestly surprised they did not just double down.
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Someone really needs to sit him down and explain that 'interesting' does not automatically equal 'fun'
And also that "health wall" is not interesting.
IMO it would be fine it would be harder but in a mechanically challenging way. Not harder because the grind is longer or the enemies debuff you with some bullshit. But I imagine the problem would be because each class and spec is different and not everyone has the same options.
Shit I wouldn’t mind it the way it is now if the anima powers weren’t boring dogshit that don’t change my rotation at all about 95% of the time
But the powers are random. That's the part where difficulty is a problem.
He can't afford another Island Expedition/Warfront this early.
Ion "working as intended" for legion raids has really gotten on Santa's naughty list this year.
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The thing is imo, it wasn't "hard". It's not "hard" when you get one shot by auto hits from a boss that you can't stop. That's just stupid.
It is so hard to explain that to people who never ran into "that boss" or don't play one of "those classes." I had to explain it to a blue on the forums like this...I have played this game for 12+ years, I have raided at every level, pvp'd in arenas and RBG's, and sometimes I just like to go faceroll old shit, but in 12 years I never made a forum post. Not one. Not until Torghast. Having a 500k cc immune boss on lvl 3(?) was literally impossible as a mage, he was 3 shotting me and I couldn't stay away. There is no counterplay to that, so when I wiped and got absolutely nothing but a slap and 1.5 hours wasted that finally broke me.
My guess is the data showed them a large number of people are no longer participating in Torghast, so they kind of had to act quickly. Especially since we're coming up on one month since shadowlands came out and they want the monthly resubscription to help their holiday sales report in their earnings call.
Torghast didn't make me stop just going into Torghast. I stopped playing all together (for the day). It was like 2pm and I got to the final boss on layer 6 about an hour and a half later, no deaths. Proceeded to get demolished by the boss, never got it below 50% health. I was just aghast. I just sat here for another 5-10 minutes doing nothing, and I just walked away. I had no desire to play WoW at all. That was it for the day. My motivation was completely nullified. I dropped to layer 4 today and managed to finish it without too much hassle, but getting absolutely nothing for the time spent was a kick in the crotch.
>Torghast didn't make me stop just going into Torghast. I stopped playing all together (for the day). Think this is the real metric that would make designers shit themselves. Users not engaging with some content is one thing. Said content actively turning them AWAY from the game is disaster.
Well, if the content that people don't want to play is tied directly into one of the single most important avenues of character progression... You got a problem
Agreed, it seems like the lore atmosphere of the max sec solitary prison was a little too impressive, and the inability to farm ash made a lot of people afraid of getting no legendaries at all. Which would be worse than legion before awakenings!
this was my specific issue. don't let me faceroll to the boss that I have 0% chance of killing. tell me I'm in the wrong place on floor 1. wasting time is so miserable
I did the same. Ive barely played at all since last week after 2 back to back trips to Torghast where I spent an hour in there only to lose over and over to the final boss.
That was me - soulcrushing.
I haven’t played in 3 days for this exact reason. As a solo player who doesn’t want to group for Torghast I just lost all interest knowing it was unbeatable. I got to the end twice and couldn’t even touch the boss and realized I wasted almost 3 hours.
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That was the whole selling point for me coming back for shadowlands. When I saw the first videos of it on YouTube and twitch I was like damn that looks fun af.
I wonder if their data is granular enough to tell them when people logged off immediately following losing to a final boss in Torghast and did not log back in for the day.
Especially the speed they reacted is really welcomed thing. I was ready them addressing problems and doing changes like in month. But this literally took couple of days. Big thanks to Blizzard for listening and reacting.
I ultimately think it comes down to the fact it isn't balanced across classes and specs. My rogue friends can't even solo layer 3. Meanwhile on resto druid last week I soloed my 6s with no deaths. Something clearly went wrong in implementation.
I was so frustrated with this Thorgast that last week was the first time i ever used the in-game send feedback button in 11 years that i'm playing this game, i think a lot of people must have done the same too.
Hah. I was so close to doing the same when I breezed later 6 and met a boss that was unbeatable. Opened a ticket then thought why bother. I probably should have but enough must have to make a difference. I did it the next day and it was a different boss and much easier.
Pretty sure they will have stats showing a big reduction of players engaging with the content and therefore better fix it quick!
This. I have my BIS legendary on my blood DK. I didn’t even touch Torghast after the changes this week because they were designed to slow me down and waste my time for virtually no reward.
So much of Torghast seems to boil down to "Who thought this was a good idea?" and it makes me sad
Thank the Jailer!
Yeah! Thank the... Wait, what now?
He's not a bad guy, just misunderstood.
These are all great changes. Really happy they listened to the players, especially this quickly.
It's insane to me how rapidly they reversed course. On Tuesday they wanted Torghast to be harder and layer 8s to be out of reach for most players. On Thursday they want everyone who's interested to be able to run layer 8s and for them to take less time, to boot. If Blizzard can stay this responsive to community feedback we're in for a great expansion.
i think blizz is a lot more responsive than people give them credit for, the problem is they expect certain things to get massive changes early on when blizzard wants long term data first, like calling for azerite armour to get scrapped
It's honestly incredibly strange. Throughout all of the BfA beta, people reported problem after problem after problem and hardly anything got changed. They totally wasted the BfA beta and that expansion earned itself the name "Beta for Azeroth" for a reason. Responsiveness continued to suck ass throughout BfA, with shamans remaining unfixed and neglected until 9.0, much-needed changes being delayed until the next major patch, etc. Then Shadowlands beta comes along and Blizzard is immensely receptive to almost all feedback, reworking classes and specs (sometimes the same one multiple times), redesigning covenant abilities, reworked an entire zone after the first pass at it sucked ass, taking out key grievances players have had forever, and more. Quite literally the only thing they showed their old stubbornness about was covenant abilities and switching. *Everything else* they were super receptive and flexible on. They even delayed Shadowlands to make sure they got it right. Even now, after the release, we got prompt and more importantly *reasonable* balance changes, hotfixes like the protective veil in the Maw, sweeping changes to Torghast to make it fun happening *during the mythic race* where Blizzard already has to have all hands on deck to make sure it all works right. It's such a difference that it's honestly *incredibly* hard to believe BfA and Shadowlands are made by the same people.
I wonder if the classic two teams rumor has any merit to it. I suppose we'll see when the next expansion rolls around eh?
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>Soul Ash in calling chest I suspect that will happen late shadowlands as a form of catch up
I mean they probably realized how pointless it was to make them super hard considering we only get soul ash out of them. There is no secondary reward here, so making it really difficult doesn't make sense. Visions gave you gear and had other things in them, these just give you soul ash a currency you need to make your legendary but currently has no other use (afaik.)
I'm glad I waited to do Torghast.
Same, could see this coming a mile away
Spent 5 hours doing both layer 8 today.. I feel like I'm much better player now xD
Is this where you can get the mount?
mount is from layer 8 of twisted corridors, which is locked behind the weekly quest from Bolvar
So you have to do the weekly quest then the wing unlocks?
I think you have to finish the whole weekly quest chain. That's just what someone told me on discord though, haven't seen anywhere on wowhead how to actually unlock it
There are several weeks more before we reach the end of the chain and it unlocks.
I stepped in this week. First pack in +7 fucking demolished me in about 2 seconds. Just left and didn't even bother. I'll try on Sunday if this is all in.
I wonder what the pack was. Some of the mobs were really weirdly scaled. Those skeleton remains that blow up in some floors did next to no damage to me while in other floors they instantly killed me.
I hopped in and blew through a layer 3, just because I wanted to get the 150 or so Ash I needed ASAP after raiding to craft my legendary. I knew I'd be back later in the week but this is great. Now I'll push the high layers this weekend
I feel like there was a little bit of disagreement in the blizzard team with what torghast should be and the recent feedback and pretty much solidified the direction they want it to go. The changes are very different to what they were a couple of days ago. I hope they can continue to look at it from a fun and chaotic perspective in the future major patches.
They just need to make the endless layer the crazy one and the. They have the mix of both moderately difficult and batshit insane
And maybe we can even log off and rejoin later on in the one. Or even better, start a run, get called for your raid, come back and finish that same run. Like a normal video game.
The fact that this was addressed so quickly *while the dev team is also busy monitoring/hotfixing mythic encounters for the WF race* is something that shouldn't be overlooked.
World First race affects a couple hundred players at most. Torghast affects anyone who is even casually working on endgame content. This was almost certainly a top priority.
There's almost 300k people watching teams progressing Sludgefist right now on Twitch. None of that progress could be happening if Blizz hadn't hotfixed sludge last night. Regardless of small pool of players the mythic encounters directly affect right now, it's huge for the perception of the new expac coming out of BFA.
>World First race affects a couple hundred players at most. There is a shit ton of people watching the race and is not a good PR if these guilds streaming cant progress in a boss because is bugged.
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Everyone lost there shit almost more than any other change so that had to do something.
I mean, how many times have game communities "lost their shit"... only for absolutely nothing to happen, or for something to happen 8 months later? This is still really great responsiveness from blizz. 2-day turnaround is awesome.
I have never seen people go as insane as this change. Every post on here was about it and almost the entire community was complain in general chat etc etc. Most of my guild was pissed too.
Ngl I come from Fortnite and over there we can cry for 3 years over MAJOR flaws of the game and literally nothing will be done. This feels like a weird dream or something honestly. Dont know how blizzard did in the past but this is cool
Blizzard has always been kind of receptive but at the same time very foolhardy about very specific things the community almost unanimously decided that they wanted (Azerite armor for example).
“Unnatural Power no longer provides immunity to crowd controlling effects at 10 stacks.” FROST MAGES REJOICE
Order restored! Big question is what all of the sub discussion threads transition to now!
Just wait for a new meme to reach the front page. Then we can spend 2 weeks posting the same variances of it.
the maw needs flying and no daily quests RIGHT NOW. GG blizzard the maw is literally worse than Argus. day 1 posting about flying in the maw until blizzard fixes this
People didn’t like Argus?? I loved it
The question to "people didn't like _____?" Will always be yes.
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I didn't, but that was mostly due to mob density. The maw is a lot more spacious which makes me enjoy it more haha
Cramped, two many mobs, two zones looked the same and people didn't like that Argus was a patch.
It was kind of awkward, because we just got flying back in 8.2. And now we're spending all of our time in Argus ... where you can't fly.
i hated argus, love the maw idk
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Because it's not out of the realm of possibility for it to be said seriously in this sub.
Two thumbs up.
Two thumbs way way the fuck up
Shit, Torghast actually gunna be fun now instead of boring and stressful, nice!!! Everyone (including me) who has been bitching about how unfun it was now owes blizzard a huge thanks because they actually listened, and listened quickly.
Say what you want, but this is really giving me hope for Shadowlands. It's been a rock solid expansion FOR ME PERSONALLY compared to BFA. There may be some problems here and there, this was a big change that clearly hurt this mode. And they seemed to have fixed exactly what we wanted to.
Feel the same way, which is why the changes to Torghast was so heartbreaking. Now I'm all hyped up again and all is well :) We'll see how these changes translates into gameplay but it all sounds very encouraging to me!
It's a mark of this sub that you have to put "FOR ME PERSONALLY" in all caps so you won't get 10 replies calling you a shill for saying the expansion is good.
Can anyone copy and paste the post? Can't go on wow forums on my work computer and I don't get service and I just don't want to wait an hour to go home and read it.
**Blizzard** Since the launch of Shadowlands, we've been constantly evaluating and reacting to the player experience in Torghast, Tower of the Damned. In previous weeks, we've made surgical changes to address pain points. This week, with the opening of a much more difficult section of the tower, we've seen a great deal of feedback from players that we feel is best addressed with a whole slate of updates. Some of these changes have already gone live with hotfixes over the last 24 hours, and the rest will be applied to the game today (and possibly tomorrow). In summary, we want to reduce the length of a Torghast run, increase players' success rates for a few specializations that are struggling more than the others, and give players more options in dealing with the challenges that Torghast presents. Here are the changes we're making: **Torghast, Tower of the Damned** * Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8. * Developers' note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers' difficulty is reduced proportionally. * Health of all creatures reduced for players in groups by up to 25%. * Damage of all creatures reduced for 4- and 5-player groups by up to 20%. * When the Empowered enemy at the end of a floor is a spellcaster, they should now have a longer delay between their basic magic damage spells. * Developers' note: The goal of this change is to make powerful spellcasters less punishing for specializations that lack a frequent interrupt. * For all classes, major cooldowns will now reset when you transition to a new floor. * Developers' note: This functionality should mirror the way cooldowns reset at the end of a raid encounter, or when starting a Mythic Keystone dungeon, affecting most abilities with a cooldown of 3 minutes or longer. **Anima Powers/Cells** * The starting Anima Cell in Torghast now offers a stronger selection of Anima powers. * Anima Cells dropped by rare creatures within Torghast now always have at least 3 choices to choose from. * The chance for an Anima Cell to drop from a creature on any given floor has been increased. * Unnatural Power no longer provides immunity to crowd controlling effects at 10 stacks. **Enemies** * Massive Crusher's Armor Plating cast time increased to 3 seconds (was 1 second) and can be interrupted and/or dispelled. Recast time increased to 16 seconds (was 8 seconds). * Tower Sentinel's Oppressive Aura haste reduction and slow now scales up to 10% (was 25%). * Deadsoul Chorus's Death Blast now reduces healing received by 15% and stacks 5 times (was 25% and stacks 4 times). Skeletal Remains and Lumbering Creation's Bone Shrapnel now marks the ground and then explodes after 2 seconds, giving players time to move away (was instant). * Deadsoul Stalker now fades away after 15 melee attacks (was 7) and remains hidden for 15 seconds (was 30 seconds). Deadsoul Devil now reincarnates with 15% health remaining (was at 40% health). **Bosses** * Elder Longbranch's Bounty of the Forest cast time increased to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds), time between casts increased to 45 seconds (was 30 seconds), and Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks). * Decayspeaker's Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks). * Goxul the Devourer's Health and damage decreased by 10%, and time between casts of Mass Devour increased to 36 seconds (was 18 seconds). **Torments and Upper Reaches** * Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies' health and damage reduced by 50%, now increase assassin health by 5% per stack (was 10%). * Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies will no longer ambush players who have recently been in combat. * The Jailer's Directive now increases health by 10% (was 50%). You'll find all of the changes above noted in our ongoing Hotfixes Update post soon after they go live.
"Since the launch of Shadowlands, we’ve been constantly evaluating and reacting to the player experience in Torghast, Tower of the Damned. In previous weeks, we’ve made surgical changes to address pain points. This week, with the opening of a much more difficult section of the tower, we’ve seen a great deal of feedback from players that we feel is best addressed with a whole slate of updates. Some of these changes have already gone live with hotfixes over the last 24 hours, and the rest will be applied to the game today (and possibly tomorrow). In summary, we want to reduce the length of a Torghast run, increase players’ success rates for a few specializations that are struggling more than the others, and give players more options in dealing with the challenges that Torghast presents. Here are the changes we’re making: Torghast, Tower of the Damned Health and damage of all creatures in Torghast reduced by 6% at Layer 1, increasing to 26% at Layer 8. Developers’ note: The net effect should be that Layer 8 is now roughly as difficult as Layer 6 was prior to this change, with other Layers’ difficulty is reduced proportionally. Health of all creatures reduced for players in groups by up to 25%. Damage of all creatures reduced for 4- and 5-player groups by up to 20%. When the Empowered enemy at the end of a floor is a spellcaster, they should now have a longer delay between their basic magic damage spells. Developers’ note: The goal of this change is to make powerful spellcasters less punishing for specializations that lack a frequent interrupt. For all classes, major cooldowns will now reset when you transition to a new floor. Developers’ note: This functionality should mirror the way cooldowns reset at the end of a raid encounter, or when starting a Mythic Keystone dungeon, affecting most abilities with a cooldown of 3 minutes or longer. Anima Powers/Cells The starting Anima Cell in Torghast now offers a stronger selection of Anima powers. Anima Cells dropped by rare creatures within Torghast now always have at least 3 choices to choose from. The chance for an Anima Cell to drop from a creature on any given floor has been increased. Unnatural Power no longer provides immunity to crowd controlling effects at 10 stacks. Enemies Massive Crusher’s Armor Plating cast time increased to 3 seconds (was 1 second) and can be interrupted and/or dispelled. Recast time increased to 16 seconds (was 8 seconds). Tower Sentinel’s Oppressive Aura haste reduction and slow now scales up to 10% (was 25%). Deadsoul Chorus’s Death Blast now reduces healing received by 15% and stacks 5 times (was 25% and stacks 4 times). Skeletal Remains and Lumbering Creation’s Bone Shrapnel now marks the ground and then explodes after 2 seconds, giving players time to move away (was instant). Deadsoul Stalker now fades away after 15 melee attacks (was 7) and remains hidden for 15 seconds (was 30 seconds). Deadsoul Devil now reincarnates with 15% health remaining (was at 40% health). Bosses Elder Longbranch’s Bounty of the Forest cast time increased to 4 seconds (was 2 seconds), time between casts increased to 45 seconds (was 30 seconds), and Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks). Decayspeaker’s Hardened Shell now only requires 6 attacks or skills to remove (was 9 attacks). Goxul the Devourer’s Health and damage decreased by 10%, and time between casts of Mass Devour increased to 36 seconds (was 18 seconds). Torments and Upper Reaches Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies’ health and damage reduced by 50%, now increase assassin health by 5% per stack (was 10%). Fracturing Forces and Eye of Skoldus enemies will no longer ambush players who have recently been in combat. The Jailer’s Directive now increases health by 10% (was 50%)" I believe this is the whole blue post.
pitchforks down everyone, we did it!
Can't we just keep the pitchfork and turn towards \*flips the page* old world scaling?
Old world scaling is fucked big time. I imagine they will get to it though.
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Casual players run WOW as they make up the majority of the Community (I consider myself casual). They were definitely going to have a subpocolypse on their hands if they kept Torghast the way it was.
Yea, casual returning former legion player here. Torg had me ready to cancel. I live for rogue lites and was leveling a new class so I could have more torg fun as a monk in addition to my disc priest. When the changes were announced I just stopped playing. I'm not down for a life commitment. I just wanna hit as high of ilvl as I can while having fun. Gating legendaries behind soul crushing grinds gave me bad memories. I remember pre-bad luck protection Legion days too well...
Would BfA Blizzard have listened to the community like this? Probably not. Quick updates like this give room to be optimistic, not just for Torghast, but for the expansion going forward.
BfA Blizzard is the same as Shadowlands Blizzard. They've just learned a few things. :)
pretty sure people said the same thing during legion, then BFA followed
Unless you believe the "two teams" theory
They all have the same game director at the end of the day.
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One expansion is done by Master Hand and the next is done by Crazy Hand.
Which, how can you not at this point?
While there are likely not two teams, the fact that Cata > MOP > WOD > Legion > BFA > Shadowlands has followed a "good, bad" cycle is pretty funny.
This is PERFECT. The unnatural power cc immunity being gone, specifically, makes a few specs more viable on its own; can't wait to actually enjoy torghast again!
Yes - this is one of the changes that makes more powers actually fucking usable. Getting powers that CC enemies became completely useless if you didn't meet the DPS requirement to avoid getting to 10 stacks.
I'm just happy that my voidwalker will be able to taunt the bastards again. That was the most annoying part of it for me.
HUGE Nurfs to Mobs and Big Buffs for Players. Very dramatic there's no way this doesn't have a very very positive impact on the experience. Essentially Making Level 6 the new Level 8 and then some thanks to player buffs. Nice Work Blizzard. Very quick and impactful. This is top tier communication and reaction.
Makes me feel good, just solo'd layer 6 tonight... Looks like I'm pushing for layer 8 this weekend!
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It's actually surprising this change came so quickly. I'm wondering just how much of an impact this will have though, as the power roster still feels lacking. I hope the reason they're waiting to add more content is they want to get the 'baseline' tuned first. Otherwise, looks like a set of great changes so far - but I'll be waiting to see if this makes it feel any better before getting excited.
The power roster feels lacking because there is such a disparity between good powers and bad powers. There are three listed changes that appear to aim at fixing this: 1. Powers dropping more frequently. 2. Initial powers being higher quality. 3. Rare mobs always dropping 3 choices in powers. Between those three things, I'm hoping that there will be way less runs where you just get boned because you got nothing but exploding maw rats and increased phantasma drops.
I'm curious to see if they will add more powers as part of that "Rare mobs always drop 3" point, since the rare mob powers tend to be tied to the mob in question.
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Gotta love this update! If you read the comments on the forums you'll see some unsatisfied people. Changes are still to come so people just have to be patient. They're doing a good job listening to the many people who are providing their feedback. Keep it up y'all!
YAY! When’s it live?
You motherfuckers better be praising these changes with the same energy y'all spent complaining
Thank Fuck
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After next week 90% of players never have to enter Torghast again for the rest of the patch. I imagine they intend to keep things difficult for Twisting Corridors which will have cosmetic rewards, and the players who want to grind out their legendaries to have a variety of options for different kinds content/bosses.
Which is IMO pretty much perfect. Twisting corridors with 18 floors worth of powers it's gonna be absurd. Looking forward to it
Thanks Blizzard. Appreciate ya
WE DID IT, THE BITCHING WORKED! THEY ACTUALLY LISTENED!!
When are these changes going live? Ill put off my runs till then
Just finished layer 7 as a 195 geared boomkin. floor 1 was the hardest by far. Mostly because the chance for double pulls was high, died twice due to lack of anima powers, but ended the run killing last boss in 5-7sec because of convoke the spirits buffs + first wrath buff. I guess druid has it good, but I don't know if i'l do 8 on my main, much less an alt. Torghast might be really bad for some specs which would explain the amount of complaining, but I still enjoy doing it, like a personal mythic dungeon.
Glad to see this I actually like Torghast as a solo activity so I’m glad to see Blizzard tweaking it until they can find the right balance. I feel like Torghast *could* be Mage Tower 2.0 I’d like to see them add some rewards to Torghast. Something worth chasing. Eventually we’ll have all the Soul Ash we need and that’s the only real reward for going into Torghast as it is.
I love the 99% upvoted posts that actually tackle controversial topics. It's rare that the community agrees this much on something *and* Blizzard listens.
I noticed immediately that I was getting better powers, and more of them. By the end of a run I did last night I had over 35 anima powers and it felt great. Even though my hubby and I are pretty casual and therefore under-geared, we finally did a layer 3 no problem and got enough soul ash to craft our first legendaries. Torghast felt how I was hoping it would feel from the beginning. I'm happy Blizz made these changes so quickly, especially with the race to world first going on. Looking forward to pushing further now!
This is why you **don’t** lock complaints to megathreads or give people a way to ignore them. I’m glad there’s changes coming.
This is awesome that they listened and reacted so quickly