Temple of the Deathwyrm guide

[thegreatfox]

Raid basics:

When you die a Keeper (wraith) will spawn. You can’t be raised until the keeper is killed, but if you rubberband to your soulstone twice the keeper will vanish, allowing you to be raised.

Light beams in the mirror puzzles are deadly if you stand in them but can be safely run through, unless you lag. They can also be absorbed by spell absorb.

There is one shrine in the raid and there are 6 mirror puzzles, 2 path splits, and a miniboss before reaching it.

The order of the raid is:
Mirror puzzle #1
Mirror puzzle #2
Path split 1
Mirror puzzle #3
Mirror puzzle #4
Miniboss
Mirror puzzle #5
Mirror puzzle #6
path split 2
Shrine room (raid locks here)
End fight

Mirror puzzles:

You have to use mirrors to get a beam of light from a starting crystal to the receptor crystal in order to open a portal to continue the raid. Trash spawns while you solve the puzzle and the dracolich will shoot negative energy blasts at whoever has her aggro. Turning mirrors seems to draw her aggro, so ideally a pale master should solve the puzzle, or someone can range her to keep aggro. In order to hit her you usually have to be as far back as possible. The rest of the group will clean up trash and get trash off of the puzzle solvers.
For most of the mirror puzzles I find it easier to solve backwards from the receptors, with 1 exception. Mirror puzzle #2 has 2 starting crystals and 2 receptors and the beams of the 2 pass each other within the puzzle. For this one I find it easier to solve them both going forward from the start. Once you have practiced it a bit though you can start solving it backwards too, which is faster and generally safer. Having 2 people solve puzzles in opposite directions greatly speeds things up. One person starts from the end of the puzzle and the other starts from the beginning.

Puzzle #1 you solve backwards from the receptor, nothing really special about it.

Puzzle #2 has 2 starting crystals and 2 receptor crystals. 1 takes a bit longer to solve than the other.

Puzzle #3 is a regular solve backwards one.

Puzzle #4 should have its starting crystal turned twice and then solved backwards.

Puzzle #5 is another solve backwards one, but for this one the dracolich is not preset and there is a red named helmed horror. The light beam from the start crystal will not activate until the helmed horror is killed.

Puzzle #6 is similar to #5 in that there is a red named mob that needs to be killed for the crystal to activate, but for this one the beams are all diagonal.

1st Path split:

After mirror puzzle #2 you come across the first path split. There are 3 options here but only 2 will be open, determined randomly.



Jump Puzzle:
To the left is a jump puzzle, which requires no or very few resources to get through. It is difficult though and requires learning, which can take a while for many people. In order to save time people new to the jump puzzle can return through the portal to the mirror puzzle, kill themselves in a beam, and be carried to the top. If you are wearing spell absorb you should take it off before jumping into the beam. After the raid is finished you can go back and practice for as long as you wish.

Trapped Hall:
To the right is a trapped hallway. A lever is pulled to open a gate and a trapper is sent in to remove traps from the hallway. While they are doing that mobs will spawn continuously for the party to fight. However, after some traps have been removed from the entrance of the hall the lever can be pulled and the entire party can move into the hallway, leaving the mobs outside the gate. The rest is just removing traps and pulling some levers to open a gate for people.

Portal maze/riddle:
Forward takes you to a room with 2 more portals. There is a dwarven rune on the wall that can be read by either a dwarf or someone with a high intelligence (around 36 I think). The rune contains a riddle which will reveal which direction to go, but there is a second page to the riddle that will tell you if the riddle was a lie or not. For instance, if a riddle says to go left, but the second page says it was a lie, then you should go right. Someone should go through first to confirm it is the correct way to go. If the portal is correct it will lead to another room with more portals. If it is the wrong way you will come into a room with an NPC skeleton dwarf who will kill you if you talk to him. If you go the wrong way you will need to Ddoor to get out or die by talking to him, which will take you to a room with a res shrine and a portal that takes you back to the start of the puzzle. This is repeated several times until you come across one with 5 portals in it. There will be a rune like the others, but this time when you figure out the riddle for left or right it correlates to the portals directly to the left and right of the rune. If chosen correctly you will come out into another room with portals but you can jump onto and over a wall here to reach the end. If you have NPC chat active you will be able to see the riddles once someone reads them, allowing you to provide input on what you think the correct answer is without actually having to read the rune.


2nd path split:
After mirror puzzle #6 there is a second path split, just like the first with a left, forward, and right portal, 2 of which will be active.

Red light green light:
To the left is a lethal game of red light green light. You have to make your way through a twisting hall while fighting mobs. There are orbs floating throughout it and they will glow green, yellow, or red. Green means you can move freely, yellow means it will turn red soon, and red means you should stop moving. If you move while it is red you will die. Moving includes jumping or falling through the air but not turning or attacking. It is very buggy however and will sometimes kill you even when you are standing still. Spell absorption will prevent the death effect if you mess up or if it bugs. Be wary of spellcasters though. There are very few, maybe 2 in the entire place, but if you don’t take off your spell absorb they will drain it. There are some doors blocked by barriers in it as well and these are removed by standing on all the buttons in the area. Once the door is open you can leave the buttons. When it bugs and kills you despite standing still it seems to be related to turning while in mouse look mode. Turning off mouse look mode could prevent it from killing you while standing still, so I highly recommend you avoid mouse look mode.

Gravity:
This one is the forward portal. Imagine the crucible swim but without water and someone is sitting in front of a switch at the start that changes gravity. It’s pretty much a maze and there are several buttons in it that need to be found in order to proceed. There are 6 buttons that have to be active at the same time in order to finish it and each one has a trap on it. 6 evasion characters are highly recommended for this. I have the least experience with this one because it is generally regarded as terrible. It does, however, have an extra chest at the end of it, but you must get the ENTIRE RAID PARTY through the spiky gravity maze in order to proceed.

Tower:
Through the right portal you come into a room with a tower in the middle. You must climb the tower and you will find mobs at the top. One of them has a black-blue aura around them. Whoever kills this mob will get the aura. You must take the aura down the tower to the phylactery within 10 seconds in order to remove a shield around it and damage it. The phylactery is to the north, and casters should stay down by it so that they can dot it when the shield goes down. It will take damage from the dot even after the shield returns, making things go along much faster. Ruin works very well too as well as any high damage single hit abilities. Removing featherfall will help you descend the tower in time. Failure to reach the phylactery in time will result in the person with the aura taking massive damage and the party must wait for the next aura mob to come along before being able to proceed.

Miniboss:
After mirror puzzle #4 you go through the portal to a small room with a lot of bone piles and a miniboss. The miniboss is a bone guardian, a construct made of bones. It is typed as a construct and not as an undead. He acts like a drow mistress and will sacrifice skeleton trash mobs once it gets down to about 50% hp. On EN he does not have very much hp and can actually be beaten down quickly enough to drop him before he can sacrifice trash. Even on EH it can be done if the parties DPS is good enough. Once the bone guardian is killed there will be a chest to loot.

End fight:
The end fight consists of the dracolich and a lot of trash mobs. There are spellwards that spawn when the fight starts so a trapper needs to find and disable them all. There are skeleton archers, red name battleragers, and red name deathlords. Archers can cause lag so should be killed. The deathlords need to be killed ASAP because they give a buff to the dracolich for each one alive. Each one living gives her 50% extra damage and 20% damage resistance up to 100% damage resistance and 250% extra damage. They buff themselves with displacement so true seeing should be used to kill them as quickly as possible. The battleragers have too much hp to kill quickly so should be kited by someone. A trick to kiting them is to drag them all towards the ledge overlooking the rest of the temple. There is a sort of fence or barrier there and the battleragers will run all the way around it to get to you. So kiting can be as simple as jumping back and forth over the fence. Everything respawns constantly in a pattern. There are 5 positions that mobs can spawn at and they spawn in groups containing archers, 1 deathlord, and 1 battlerager (if the maximum number of battleragers has not been met yet). There is 1 position by each lever, 1 in the middle of the ledge/fence, and 1 in the middle of each side wall. Enemeis will spawn 2 positions clockwise of the last group that spawned, and the first group spawns at the NE corner of the area shortly after the fight starts.

The goal here is to beat down the dracolich to 40% hp, which will cause her to summon shadows. When a shadow dies there is a chance for it to drop a portal called shadowy remains. This portal takes you to the shadowfell where there are 4 red names waiting, 2 beholders and 2 helmed horrors. Only 2 of these red names need to be killed though, the beholder and helmed horror to the north are usually the ones picked. Once they are killed a crystal will activate and open a portal. Everyone will gather at the portal and fend off respawning shadows while 1 person goes into the portal, destroys the phylactery that is inside, and then tells the rest when they are out. Once that person is teleported back to the normal side the portal they were in will reset and the location of the true phylactery will change. Think wisdom test in crucible, just pick the same door until it is the right door. Then the next person will go in and destroy the phylactery. Repeat until the real phylactery is destroyed. Sometimes this method seems to not work very well, or maybe even bug, and it will take a very long time to find the real phylactery, if you find it at all. For instances like this there is another method you can use to find the phylactery. For this method you send a person into the portal like normal, but instead of killing the phylactery right away they will prep it. Once they go inside you turn the crystal that is shooting the beam and it will connect to a different receptor crystal, opening another portal. You send someone into this portal as well. Then you turn the crystal some more until it opens a third portal and have someone go into that one as well. Everyone will prep their phylacteries and once prepped need to tell the others that it is prepped. Once they are all prepped they need to be killed at the same time. You have about 5 seconds after the first is killed to kill it before being kicked out of the rooms. This method allows you to kill 3 phylacteries (or even 6 if you clear the other 2 red names out) at the same time. This method has a higher chance to work than the single portal method, but requires some coordination that the other method does not. If you have a well coordinated team though, you could get the real phylactery in a single try by occupying all 6 of the phylactery portals. Once the real one is found and destroyed fragments will drop in the shadowfell. Each person can carry 1 fragment. People need to grab a fragment then return to the normal world and place the fragment in a ward on the ground. Once all wards are filled the dracolich must be lured into the center of the circle formed by the wards and beaten down. Once she gets very low on HP she will collapse. This is announced with DM text and as soon as it shows up 2 people need to pull the 2 levers on either side of the area. Stealthy characters make the best lever pullers since they can avoid detection of mobs that spawn at the levers. If stealth characters are not available it helps to have 1 or 2 people guard them and take mob aggro once they spawn at the levers. People should be ready on the levers once she starts getting low. If done quickly enough and the dracolich is centered correctly the raid is won. If it is not done correctly the dracolich will rise again and need to be beaten down once more. Trash does not despawn though so it needs to be cleaned up before looting. Once the real phylactery has been found and all the wards have been filled there is no reason to go to the shadowfell anymore. Should she summon more shadows and those shadows drop a portal, you should ignore it. If for some reason you do go to the shadowfell, do not go into one of the phylactery rooms, simply turn around and go back through the big portal. If you go into a phylactery room, die, and do not tell anyone where you are, they might complete the raid without realizing you are on the shadow side. If the raid is finished with you still dead in a phylactery room, there will be no way to retrieve you and you will get no loot.

[BOgre]

Really nice guide. Thank you.

[pjstechie]

Tips for gravity

1) if you are hanging on a ledge, you dont get affected by gravity

2) you dont need evasion, you dont need to stand on the buttons the whole time (and get trap blasted). just hang out (literally, see above) and wait for every button to be covered.

nice guide!