Drak'Tharon Keep (74-76)

Next up for the Ekerameter is the first troll dungeon you'll run into in Wrath of the Lich King, Drak'Tharon Keep. Situated roughly where the zones of the Grizzly Hills, Zul'Drak, and the Dragonblight trisect, in the past this keep served as the Drakkari Empire's southern bastion. Now, however, the Scourge have driven the Drakkari out in their march into Zul'Drak and hold the Keep against all comers.




Technically, Drak'Tharon Keep is in Grizzly Hills, although it is also accessible from Zul'Drak; in fact, once you pick up the flight path for Light's Breach just inside ZD, it's a quicker trip to land there and ride south to DTK than to weave your way up through the forest from Conquest Hold.

While not immediately available - in fact, for one of the two lines, a minimum of an hour of questing is required - there are two quests that eventually lead here. This follows the renewed trend by Blizzard of giving clear quest support to almost all of their dungeons. Seek out some familiar faces at Granite Hills in the forests directly south of Drak'Tharon Keep for how to get started on these.



Drak'Tharon Keep Ekerameter:

Difficulty - 3
Loot - 4
PUG Factor - 2
FUCK YEAH Quotient - 4
Overall - 4

Troll dungeons have gotten a pretty poor reputation through the course of the game. Zul'Farrak is tiny yet has tons of trash, Sunken Temple is... horrible (the only instance for which I'd give a PUG Factor rating in the negatives), and Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman have both caused their share of headaches. So, now it's ice trolls? Well, for one, Drak'Tharon Keep is as much DEAD trolls as anything - the Scourge have taken over, and nearly every inhabitant is reanimated. Additionally, the design of the place is unlike anything I've seen before - it seems sort of a strange combination of Mayan and Japanese architecture. Moving on into Zul'Drak proper gives some Greco-Roman hints too.



Difficulty-wise, the place is average. At present in the beta, the bosses are on the easy side, but that may be intentional for most of the leveling dungeons. Trash can be tricky in places. Considering this is around the Mana-Tombs/Auchenai Crypts point in leveling in comparison to TBC, this place beats the pants off of those.

The loot here is well-suited for the levels, with a good mix of drops. As with most dungeons, each boss has 3 blue drops, meaning you won't need to run these places a thousand times unless your luck is truly horrendous. The two quest lines that lead here also give some good additional blues. An errant PUG member could cause havoc in the pulls leading to the latter two bosses, so keep your idiots on tight leashes. In the FYQ side of things, one of the quest lines, while having an ending that most will see coming, nevertheless concludes in a very cool fashion, and sets up a storyline that continues into Zul'Drak.

All told, this place defies the odds for a troll dungeon, and is definitely worth running several times for good XP and drops in the mid 70s.