Tomb of Annihalation

Completing the initial story line will take players to Port Nyanzaru, a small port city and basically the last true outpost in Chult after the Spellplague destroyed Mezro. The associated Soshenstar River is not directly accessible from the overworld map. You need to head to the south gate in Nyanzaru to travel to the jungles.

Port Nyanzaru

First of all, Port Nyanzaru is a full-fledged social hub. It has all the vendors and utility to fully park your toons there. So players don’t need to go back to Protector’s Enclave unless they want to pick up quests. This fact separates it from Icewind Dale, which had most stuff, but not everything. The most notable absentee was the bank of course.

This setup makes sense because you can just park your toons nearby while you play Module 12. On the map I have also marked some special places that help you navigate and find module relevant places. In the north there’s the Merchant Prince’s Villa where you pick up daily and weekly quests from Wakanga O’tamu. There’s also a bait vendor (yes Fishing again!) and several armor vendors for the new equipment.

The only downside of this setup is that pug lfgs might be further scattered across multiple zones. Compiling a group could mean posting in Protector’s Enclace, Sea of Moving Ice and Port Nyanzaru, depending on the dungeon.

Soshenstar River

Taking the south gate exit you’ll be able to explore Soshenstar River, a massive jungle map that’s both beautiful and dangerous. The map is divided by the titular river on which you can use your boats and fishing poles! VIP signpost will come in handy on this map because the quest givers in Camp Vengeance are on the opposite site of the entrance.

Scrying Stones

I found two Scrying Stone stones so far. I’ll update the map if I happen to run into the third one. Otherwise this is something you have to figure out yourself.

Fauna

One thing is certain: The devs didn’t joke around when talking about difficulty. Lower level characters will certainly have their hands full with all kinds of dinosaurs. The other mobs are usual pushovers, but all Raptors are annoying, deadly or both. They do not only hit comparably hard, but have an Ambush ability that briefly stuns you on your Mount. Combined with an insane aggro range it’s sometimes impossible to sneak by even on a legendary steed.

If you already run into trouble beating Compys, Deinonychuses or Velocyraptors you should definitely stay away from the bigger Allosauruses or Tyrannosaurs. These are not only stronger but also control immune.  I had most success fighting the zone with a MoF Control Wizard, which combines great control and survivability with decent enough damage. It’s however not like endgame toons really have to worry. You might want to take a more careful approach nonetheless.

Flora

The devs put a lot of work into the zone and it shows. It’s visually stunning and makes sense in terms of feel and theme. In the Yuan-Ti and Batiri area as well as around Camp Vengeance a few mobs less would have done, but that’s basically all I have as “complaint”.

No more daily progression

Daily progression is a thing of the past in the Jungles of Chult. The devs already started to give players a little bit more freedom on how to do stuff in the River District in letting them progress towards a daily goal by a flurry of zone related tasks. You could run Dig Sites, Heroic Encounters, upgrade Guard Posts or just slay mobs. Now in the Jungles of Chult, players can even decide when to do their “Weekly Haul”. Essentially there is no longer daily progression, just a weekly one. And you are free to choose when and how you are going to fill up that bar.

It’s kind of similar to the early progression in Underdark, where you could farm as much Demonic Ichor as you liked, but with a weekly cap of 400. What this does is it takes away the pressure to log in daily and do tasks to keep up.

Wakanga O’tamu

Whenever you want you can pick up quests at the Merchant Prince Wakanga O’tamu in Port Nayanzaru and progress towards your “Weekly Haul”. Wakanga offers a weekly quest for 25 “Forgotten Totems”, the progression currency, and several so-called “Patrols” for five Totems each. Another quests doubles the Patrol rewards, but that one can only be picked up six times per week. So with these quests alone you can get 8555 Totems pretty easy on any day. After being done with the weeklies, you can still infinitely repeat the Patrols and the zone quests in Soshenstar River. That’s how you get to 100, or more as the limit can be upped with campaign tasks.

Campaign Trees

There are three different campaign trees you can progress in. The Monster Hunt on the left is an independent system that rewards unique gear (check the”Hunts of Chult” collection window on the PTS). We’ll get into Hunting in a separate article. The middle tree ups the Weekly Haul by 25 per task up to 175 and also unlocks the new Dungeon, the Tomb of the Nine Gods. A key for the Tomb has its own task and costs 25 Totems, which seems fairly cheap.

Boons

On the right you have a choice of boons, which are structures a bit differently this time. The tasks give you three points which you can use on any combination of a set of six boons. Each boon also comes in three tiers, making it possible to spend all your points on a single one. All have 800/1200/1600 Hit Points and the six other boosts are:

• 500/750/1000 Power
• 500/750/1000 Regeneration (this one comes with 1200/1600/2000 HP)
• 500/750/1000 Defense
• 500/750/1000 Deflect
• 5%/10%/15% Damage vs. Dinos
• 5%/10%/15% Defense vs. Dinos

• Chance on Hit to gain a stack of Death Syphon. On killing a creature, your release all stacks of Death Syphon in a burst at all nearby enemies. Each enemy receives 2000 damage per second lasting 1 second per stack of Death Syphon. You restore 1% of your max health for every stack released. Stacks up to ten times.
• Chance on Hit to apply Lingering Curse to your target which lasts for 10 seconds. Can be applied once per 60 seconds. When a target which has Lingering Curse is killed, its soul explodes out at a random enemy within 20 feet, causing 30,000 damage and applying Lingering Curse.
• Death’s Blessing: When an enemy dies nearby, you reduce incoming damage by 1% and gain 1% increased incoming healing for 10 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.
• Chance on being hit to gain a stack of Impenetrable Jungle. At 10 stacks, the next hit taken will release a burst, rooting all nearby enemies for 4 seconds.

Campaign Length

All tasks add up to a total of 1,715 Totems. Even though you’ll eventually be able to earn more Totems per week, you are probably looking at three months of work. So players basically pay for a more casual campaign approach with an extended grind. I personally don’t think it’s too bad, because you are really only looking at 12-15 days of work, which is way less than in the River District or Storm Kings Thunder with their daily progression system.

Overall I like the setup. It really helps to ease the pressure on the daily load and more importantly let players do what they want to do and not what they fell they have to do. It’s really a step into the right direction and if we would get a rework of all older campaigns with weekly instead of daily caps, yes please!

Even if “Jungles of Chult” comes with the downside of a longer campaign, you are more comfortably able to get multiple chars through it. In times where maintaining alternate characters is nearly impossible, this is more important than catering to the power player that is able to come in daily.

Sometimes you need special items for restoring, here is where you can get those.

• the 1* trophies drop almost everywhere
• trex fang from kos HE/ fishing / red trex
• batiri trinket from brave (red) batiri
• bigclaw pincer from bigclaw big blue crabs
• rotting ogre femur from big rotting ogres
• venomtail poison from big scorpions (called venomtail)
• smilodon tooth from big tigers called smilodon
• and eotyrannus talon from big raptors (spawn instead of the 3 deunysomthings sometimes)