Shores of Tuern

My pet tank and I have slowly been working our way through the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. We've reached a point where, in order to unlock the next character boon, we both need an item that, according to the campaign window, comes from the Shores of Tuern skirmish.

Our first problem was that we couldn't figure out how to get there. According to the wiki it's unlocked through the campaign window, which is blatantly not true anymore, and our skirmish queue only displayed the epic version. Since we were supposedly sufficiently geared for epic anyway, we decided to give that a go, though not without trepidation.

We got into a group relatively quickly, and seemed to do okay on the trash, even though people were getting downed on almost every pull. Then we got to the boss, a fire-breathing dragonborn with two rage drake adds. There was a lore entry that suggested that killing the adds first would cause him to enrage. It didn't seem to matter either way, as we were wiped out within seconds.

We tried again, with the same result, and people started dropping group, with replacements getting rotated in almost instantly. What was bewildering to me was that everybody else appeared to be massively overgeared for the place, yet they quickly died all the same, and nobody seemed to want to offer up any advice on what was going wrong.

Eventually a rogue spoke up that he had "an idea", which turned out to be what you could call an exploit. Apparently it's possible to wall-jump up to where the entrance to the area with the boss is located, and if one person is willing to sacrifice themselves, the two rage drakes can be pulled up to that door where the boss won't follow. People who die can then respawn outside and even though they are separated from the rest of the group by a blue "magic wall", it is apparently possible to attack through it so that you can help with killing the drakes from outside.

After a couple of failed attempts we managed to kill the drakes, with three people stuck outside and only the rogue and a scourge warlock left inside the area. I believe that the plan had been to get the boss to evade so that he could then be fought without the adds, however the scourge warlock's companion pet had a different idea and decided to face the boss on its own. Funnily enough, for all the one-shotting he had done to the players, he seemed to be incapable of killing the pet, so after a couple of minutes of everyone waiting for it to die, the rogue and warlock decided to join in instead (as the pet was holding aggro very effectively by that point) and slowly took the boss down.

I'm very much against exploiting but had a hard time feeling too bad about this one as the fight just seemed so impossibly hard and was still a handful even while using the rogue's "trick". That aside, I told myself that we were only doing it this one time to get our campaign item anyway.

As it turns out, it's actually a rare drop, and neither my pet tank nor I actually got one. On the plus side, we also found out that it's possible to purchase it from a vendor instead if you grind out lots and lots of campaign currency via dailies. I can't help but feel that epic skirmishes and dungeons are simply too tough for us.