Saturday, August 29, 2020

The Mists of Tirna Scithe

 What an evocative name for a dungeon!

Anyway, despite this being the third dungeon you're supposed to go through (it being the leveling dungeon for Ardenweald,) I wound up hitting this first after the Necrotic Wake and Plaguefall left my options for LFG (given that you can level alts through the zone in any order, I assume that subsequent level-ups will just have them scale - I'm not really sure why they can't just have level-scaling the first go around, and just force you to do the zones in the story order.)

This is a dungeon that will be polarizing, as it has puzzle-like elements that are definitely not straightforward the first go around, and are also prone to griefing if you have a jerk in the party.

The first segment is rather straight-forward - you fight your way through Drust that are trying to subvert things within the area, ultimately facing one of those tall tree-like beings with the Drust guy who is dominating it - getting the tree-dude down to 20% will cause him to become friendly and stun the boss for a little, before the boss reasserts control.

The second part is going to be the rough one. Much like the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time, you're presented with "rooms" in a sort of maze with walls of mist. You have to go through the correct wall, or the whole party gets sent back to the beginning of the maze (though once you get a mist wall right, the way clears permanently, so you don't have to write down which is the right way or anything.)

In theory, you're supposed to find the wall with the symbol that has no match among the doors you're offered - you need to ride up to a little stump for the symbol to appear. There were one or two times I could have sworn I went through the door with the unique symbol and still got teleported back, but I could have just been mistaken.

Anyway, the second boss is a fight against a playful fairy, who among other things, occasionally makes clones of herself with those same symbols. And I've got to be honest, I could not figure out how to pick the correct clone, because each seemed to have a unique symbol (maybe there was another clue I was missing?)

The final wing has you fighting engorged Gorm-insects on a dried-out branches leading to the great tree stump where the final boss resides. The boss is relatively straightforward, with some adds and a shield you have to burst down to interrupt her big bad ability.

While, like most of Ardenweald, the dungeon is very pretty, I'm a little at a loss to explain why, exactly, I'm there. Yes, the Gorm-mother is feasting on the essence of a wild god from some other world, but at least in the leveling quests, the Drust are built up as this insidious danger but then don't have anyone like Gorak Tul to actually represent them with a real personality. We know they're invading from Thros - another realm of the Shadowlands that we visit in BFA - but I really hope we get more of their story, because at the moment it doesn't feel like they have any real connection to the Drust we met in Drustvar apart from aesthetic and the name.

While I haven't done either of the Revendreth dungeons, both has a final boss who plays a major role in the quests of the zone, which is something I think they should always strive for with dungeons. This felt a bit like a grab-bag of elements to the zone with little bearing on the zone's actual plot - or if it did have such a bearing, it wasn't really presented very well.

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