Getting accustomed to the dungeons in an expansion should be your first goal because of how much of the gearing process uses them. From fresh 60 runs to get started on up to high mythic+, any PvE player needs to spend lots of time in the dungeons and could do the vast majority of their gearing in dungeons if they so desired. Once you have your first character completed, you could even level in dungeons if you prefer on future alts.
Easily the most frustrating dungeon for people who haven’t yet gotten their bearings, Mists of Tirna Scithe is the leveling dungeon for Ardenweald. It’s a three-boss dungeon with a few secrets for Night Fae covenant members, but it ends up being a bit of a slog with your average random group.
The puzzle between Ingra Maloch and Mistcaller stifles many groups who have trouble understanding what they’re meant to do to solve it. Mastering the puzzle makes it a quick run, but you’ll need to make sure players who don’t know what they’re doing aren’t making premature selections. One player making the wrong choice resets everyone.
Night Fae Covenant Bonus: Overgrown Roots
Like all Shadowlands Dungeons, Mists of Tirna Scithe features a bonus for members of the local covenant. For Tirna Scithe, Night Fae can remove walls of Overgrown Roots. The first of these is immediately on your left as you spawn in, and allows you to skip the first few trash packs. They’re not particularly hard fights, but a skip is a skip. If you have a Night Fae in the party there’s not much reason not to use it, though you may want to consider how much you’re skipping for Mythic+ runs. Much of the first stretch is easy to skip past with a Night Fae and Rogue in the party.
There is a second root wall just in front of the first boss arena, but instead of a skip, this provides some stat buffs from mushrooms in the area. They give 10% in a stat and are a fairly solid buff for as long as you have them. Worth picking up, but much less flashy than the first.
How To Beat Ingra Maloch
Once you’ve worked through or skipped the initial trash packs, you’ll face down Ingra Maloch and his subjugated Tirnenn, Droman Oulfarran. While Maloch is the boss here, you’ll want to focus down the Droman first. For the most part, the fight is quite simple if you pour damage onto Oulfarran, as he has the majority of the actual mechanics. Ingra casts interruptible spells and commands Oulfarran to use Bewildering Pollen and Tears of the Forest, the first of which is a frontal cone that disorients anyone hit, the second hits areas on the ground and leaves a lingering, damaging AoE behind.
If the Droman stays up too long, Maloch will cast Embrace Darkness and shield himself against 80% of incoming damage and place ticking damage on every member of the party. Lowering the Droman’s health will cause it to break the charm and cast Droman’s Wrath which breaks the Embrace Darkness effect, stuns Ingra Maloch, and amplifies the damage he takes by 200%. Since most of the danger of the encounter is on the Droman anyway, focusing it down and then burning Maloch during these amplified phases leads to the smoothest run.
On Mythic, Maloch can fear the party, and Tears of the Forest will ramp in difficulty with each cast until you trigger Droman’s Wrath; this is just more reason to focus down the Droman first and doesn’t change how you have to approach the encounter.
How To Beat The Mists of Tirna Scithe Puzzle
The real final boss for many random groups; as soon as you exit Ingra Maloch’s arena, you’ll be faced by a gauntlet of trash encounters paired with a seemingly simple puzzle. Unfortunately, many players jump the gun or don’t know how to complete this, you’ll easily spend a giant chunk of time here if your group makes mistakes and any player doing so will pull all of you back to the beginning.
Each room features several pillars on the ground. Walking into them will display a picture above them. There are a total of 8 for each pillar to select from, and several pillars in each room. You can repeat images on more than one pillar in a room and the game is finding the image that doesn’t belong. Each one has one of two shapes, flowers or leaves, can be opaque or transparent, and can be circled or not. In each grouping, one image has a difference in a category that all three other images share. If you walk into the mist of the correct gate, it will allow you to pass to the next encounter. If you walk into the wrong gate the entire party will be teleported back to the entrance and need to run back to the current room.
Make sure to check every image, as selecting early may make it seem like the difference is something that is actually only shared by two of the images. I recommend having a mobile party member checking the pictures as you fight the encounters to save time.
How To Beat Mistcaller
Following the maze, Mistcaller is thankfully a simple affair that has very little in the way of unavoidable difficulty. She plays several games with the party as mechanics. Dodgeball is the first, and spawns an orb that shoots out in a line for heavy damage, on mythic, several fake arrows for its direction will spawn and you’ll need to look for the orb itself to know which arrow to avoid. The second is Patty Cake, which will deal heavy damage and disorient the tank; it is interruptible but only by the target, just make sure to interrupt it and you’re fine.
The last normal game is Freeze Tag, which spawns a fox spirit that fixates on a target and will freeze anyone it touches in place. The fixate target should kite it while your DPS kill it if it spawns. It often doesn’t because of Guessing Game, which is cast every 30% of Mistcaller’s health and takes precedence. This is the maze puzzle but adjusted for a boss. Mistcaller will summon clones of herself, and then disappear, each clone is marked with one of the maze symbols and you must kill the odd symbol out. Destroying the wrong clones causes party-wide damage.
On Mythic, instead of disappearing, Mistcaller becomes immune to damage and continues the rest of the encounter until the clone is killed.
How To Beat Tred’ova
After you defeat Mistcaller, you’ll be on the home stretch. You have a few Gorm trash packs between you and the final boss, all of which don’t do anything particularly troubling. Interrupt what’s interruptible, and work your way through them. The most dangerous feature of this section is probably just that you can fall off.
Once you get to Tred’ova, you’ll be faced with a very underwhelming encounter on the lower difficulties. There are a few flavors of AoE artillery damage that you need to avoid and fixating adds to kill. The only particularly meaningful mechanics here are Mind Link, which forces your party members to spread out to break a damaging link between them, and Consumption, which shields Tred’ova as she eats from the corpse in the center of the room, and pulses party-wide damage. One of your two types of AoE to avoid will happen during this phase. Burn through the shield and you’ll be allowed to interrupt consumption and move back to the rest of the encounter. All told it’s very simple and very easy.
On Mythic, however, an upgraded mechanic and a new mechanic make the fight much more complex. To start, one of the AoEs you needed to dodge before, Acidic Expulsion, will now leave puddles on the ground that restrict the space you can move in. This makes it harder to break Mind Links, harder to dodge further AoEs, and generally makes the fight more hectic.
In addition, instead of just spawning fixating adds, Tred’ova has gained the ability to spawn several infesters. Each one is thrown directly at a targetted party member and applies a debilitating effect, the least of which is pacifying them so that they cannot deal damage. The second stuns the target which leaves them standing still and vulnerable to the AoEs you needed to dodge.
The last mind controls them, no matter which, the rest of the party will need to break out the infester targets as quickly as possible to stay caught up with other mechanics. Managing your space in the arena while managing all of these mechanics creates a much more involved encounter than the normal and heroic version.