The Tower
Within the Maw looms an immense structure known as the Tower of the Damned. Inside, players will discover a new kind of experience to take on and explore.
Torghast, Tower of the Damned is an instanced dungeon scalable from 1 to 5 players, with difficulty that adjusts to the size of your party. As you ascend the tower, both you and your enemies will grow in power. You’ll also encounter new challenges with increasing complexity to overcome.
The tower will change each time you enter it, providing variability in your experiences and encouraging you to explore. Where you may have turned right during one foray into the tower, you may find you that you can only go left the next time. Not only do the floorplans change within the tower, but so too do the monsters you face, the traps, the bonuses, and the rewards for overcoming each new challenge.
As you climb, you’ll need to be wary of the fast rate at which your enemies become more difficult on each new floor. The Jailer will send more and more deadly creatures to thwart you and your party. Each floor will also become more complex. To overcome these challenges, you’ll need to search out and collect Anima.
The tower is not a timed experience, so exploration of each level could make the difference between success or failure, as that’s how you’ll discover the powers that can help you as you ascend. Anima in the Maw presents itself as a form of potential energy that you’ll come across, which offers you a choice of how you want it to benefit you. As an example, you might be given the choice between something like Obleron Endurance, which increases your maximum health by 10%, or Obleron Talisman which increases your mastery by 5%. You could stack lots of damage this way, but you may find that you’re still dying to the challenges of the tower if you don’t also choose to bolster your survivability too.
As another example, you could find an ability like Corruption Antenna, which gives your attacks a chance to curse your target, dealing 35,440 Shadow damage to your target over 8 seconds. Later, you might find Shadowed Iris, which makes it so when you deal Shadow damage, it has a chance to blind the target, reducing their chance to hit by 75% for 12 seconds. These abilities could work well together, creating a synergy that makes your attacks more effective.
Within the tower you’ll also find epic powers to use, such as the Golden Idol, which grants the ability to see which enemies are carrying Anima. This provides you and your party with the ability to determine which enemies will be most beneficial to kill, helping you determine if your party should take them on or leave them be and move on.
The abilities your party acquires through Anima can lead to a wide variety of interesting experiences as you play through the tower. You’ll want to try to coordinate between your allies to maximize your effectiveness as a party—but beware becoming overconfident. Powers that may work well on one floor may not benefit you on another. As an example, you could take Bloating Fodder, which will cause Mawrats within the tower to explode on death, dealing 10,631 Plague damage to all other nearby enemies. With enough stacks of this ability on these annoying creatures, you could do a massive amount of damage to anything nearby. This is useful when you’re on a floor with plenty of Mawrats to put to your use, but not as useful if you progress to a floor without any crawling around.
The tower is always changing from run to run—but it is also changing over time. As you press further into the Maw, the Jailer may change his tactics against you.
Within the first couple of weeks of the Shadowlands expansion, the Jailer will unleash a horde of monstrosities into the Maw and the tower itself in an event called The Beasts of Prodigum, changing the experience. During this event you may gain some new powers that can help you counter these beasts, such as the Chain of Command, which calls forth Horgul, a powerful Shade Hound that can stun individual enemies and draw their attention. You might also come across a Shade Essence-Lure that calls forth Valloc, a powerful Soul Eater that can inflict area damage and silence enemies.
Runes and Legendaries
Great rewards await those you push themselves to their limits to climb the tower. As you progress through Torghast, you’ll gather runes along the way that you can take to a runeforge, where the Runesage will help you forge legendary items. You’ll also be able to learn a bit more about origins of iconic legendary items such Frostmourne or the Helm of Domination. You’ll also have more control over how you craft your legendaries, meaning you’ll be able to determine what slot they go in, what benefits they give you, and maybe even what secondary stats they have.