Mists of Pandaria Beta: Crypt of Forgotten Kings scenario
The Crypt of Forgotten Kings scenario is a basic dungeon crawl that pits you and two allies against the evil infesting an ancient tomb. Compared to the Unga Ingoo scenario I ran a couple of months back, it's much more of a no-frills scenario. You go in, smash some faces, don't step on some tiles, and in general root out the sha corruption by, well, the roots.
It's actually very refreshing to just get on with it, sometimes, and Crypt of Forgotten Kings is that to a T. You zone in and find the Shado-Pan waiting for you. One of their elders had gone ahead into the crypt and is now sha-corrupted himself. You have to stop him, cleanse the corruption, and then descend into the crypt yourself and mete out justice to the sha lurking within.
The initial fight with the Shado-Pan isn't terribly hard. The main difficulty comes in making sure to watch where you step, because there are various elemental traps on the floor that will damage your entire group. After a fight that moves all along the chamber (so be careful where you step), the corrupted Shado-Pan falls, and you make your way down to the pool of life to cleanse the sha from its waters. There's a bar that appears on your screen that tells you exactly when you're done, and the sha boil up from the water and attack in waves until you've cleansed it.
These fights can be a little hairy. There didn't seem to be any particular healing mechanic involved in either fight, just zerging and hoping to kill the sha before we went down. I relied on Impending Victory a lot for these waves. I'm not sure if I missed a healing mechanic or if it's just not there yet.
After cleaning the sha pool, several mogu appear and attack. These mogu claim to be crypt guardians, and let me tell you, they're doing a terrible job.
As you can see above, the lightning traps do a not-inconsiderable amount of damage to you and your whole party, so it really helps to avoid them. These mogu guardians and sha continue to keep you on your toes as you descend into the lower levels of the crypt. There, you find quilien statues, more guardians and finally, the lowest level.
The final level is completely full of sha, including the final boss of the scenario, the Abomination of Anger. The sha are appearing out of some form of destroyable rift that you can attack and close, which is what we did. Then, you can ascend the back stairs to the overlooking platform where two unique sha monstrosities guard the Abomination of Anger itself.
The Abomination hits pretty hard, but the three of us put it down without anyone dying. Some health bars got pretty low, however. Healing or a proper tank would probably have made it much simpler, but it was certainly doable with three DPSers. Ranged DPS would have been nice (we were three melee, a monk, paladin and warrior), but again, it wasn't too hard to get them all down. Scenarios so far seem tuned to be forgiving for three people, but we're all in epic 463 PvP or heroic dungeon gear, so a fresh level 90 will probably have to play more carefully than we did.
After destroying the sha, there was a nice little surprise. The last time I ran a scenario, it just ended as the boss died. This time, something dropped.
I won the roll on this Cache of Powerful Armor, which contained nothing but 38 gold. Attaway to get my hopes up! I have no idea if the Cache is intended to drop loot or just money. Wowhead indicates it drops both gold and experience, which since I'm max level explains why it just dropped gold. It was a nice little prize, but had I known that's all it drops, I probably wouldn't have bothered to roll on it at all.
So there's your Crypt of Forgotten Kings: sha, mogu and quilien to smash, foulness to expunge, and a good old-fashioned descent into evil. It's not fancy, but it gets the job done.
It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
