Originally posted by ORLY:

Did I miss something?

There's sort of two camps in the forums. Those who love mistlands and those who find the design annoying. I enjoyed the progression on difficulty in mistlands.

In a way, the game trains your senses gradually. Starting from swamps, you pay attention to your footing and terrain. In mountains and plains, you should start learning to pay attention to sounds (wolves) and move a little slower to spot mosquitoes, wolf packs, and drakes in the distance. You use terrain a lot more to handle situations when wolf packs hunt you.

Mistland progresses both concepts on using terrain and listening to your senses. Remembering where is a good place to engage and fall back. If you hear fluttering, rumbling, then you need to go even slower. Get some height. Not every part of Mistland has mist. Mark, fallback and use those open areas as your arena.

You could create wisp lights to plant, mark your path and provide visibility. To me, mistlands was designed to be dangerous when you move too fast, much like running around in plains without awareness of deathquitoes will just get you killed (you could be pulling 3-4 at one go) no matter how geared you are.

Seekers and soldiers have fixed attack patterns which over time makes it easy to take them out once you know their patterns. Seekers come in groups of 3. When they fly, go defensive and prepare to dodge if required.

Find a good arena to kite them, then using bombs (preparation before going into mistlands) to take most of them out is the safest and most effective way for me.

The game design heavily rewards exercising caution and preparation.

Impatience is probably what's getting you killed and killing your experience.

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Finally, you don't need to kill dvergers to get what you need. You can find them in mines. And you really only need 1. Dverger camps and their other forts often get attacked by seekers and gjalls. Again, the game design allows for both methods to obtain what you need. Being nice to them just takes a little longer. (again, patience).