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To preface this, I'm a major quester. I do all quests and lore content on release without a guide unless I get really stumped. In fact, I like doing most content on release with no foreknowledge. This is how I like to challenge myself in this game, and I know others do too, even if we are not many. I did all the archaeology mysteries without help save a few of the obscure gargoyle riddles, like the goblin potion.
So as you can imagine I was really excited for Orthen and its mysteries and lore. However, I quickly became stumped by the Know Thy Measure mystery. It was pretty clear that you have to translate the poem from the journal entries into Dragonkin and input the words into the pylon. Three letter words and three symbols to input. It was also obvious that I had to finish this mystery as Mordaut states that the key to unlocking the southern sites is located in the northern sites, and I had done the other mystery and gotten all journal pages I could.
However, I wasn't sure how to translate to Dragonkin. I spent ages scouring every journal page, every location in the sites , using Orthen artefacts on anything I could find and fully talking to any relevant npcs I could think of (Mordaut is useless). I couldn't find anything of relevance, so I thought maybe I was wrong, you don't have to translate to Dragonkin.
Eventually I had the idea to look at other Dragonkin locations to see if the secret was there. Kerapac's lab seemed like a good starting place as we did some translating there, but it's destroyed and inaccessible after Desperate Measures (plus the matching names with "Measure"!) so there must be another way. Queue me searching daemonheim, the metal dragon dungeons, Kethsi, the other dragon kin labs etc. to no avail.
After hours of trying, I caved and looked at the wiki for answers. The wiki told me that I was correct, you do have to translate the poem to the dragonkin alphabet, but doesn't say how to do that. Under the page for the dragonkin language it states that the dragonkin alphabet can be translated in Desperate Measures. So I was right, but you can't do that after Desperate Measures because the lab is destroyed!
So you have to have either a) started but not finished Desperate Measures b) kept note of the Dragonkin language during the quest. Both of these are pretty ridiculous, even I didn't keep a note of the alphabet from the quest.
So if you've done Desperate Measures then Know Thy Measure is literally impossible save brute forcing or having future sight and keeping note of the alphabet, which just sucks, unless there is an alternate way to translate. If this was just excess lore then fine, that's not a problem, but the two southern locations and their content are locked behind Know Thy Measure.
Needless to say all the fun has been sucked out of Orthen for me and I won't be bothering to solve any of the other mysteries myself. I know the majority of people won't care about this as they'll just look at the wiki, but I find myself extremely frustrated and disappointed about content I was really looking forward to and thought I would find really exciting.
Tl;dr: please make translating to the dragonkin alphabet possible after Desperate Measures.
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