World of Warcraft: Shadowlands introduced Zereth Mortis, the cradle of creation in the Warcraft universe, with its "Eternity's End" patch, capping off the story of the Shadowlands with a large zone that boasts plenty of lucrative treasures to discover, with enticing cosmetic rewards to collect, and even a few interesting puzzles to solve.

Puzzles in World of Warcraft are rare and few between, and perhaps the most famous puzzle still remains tied to the epic journey to obtain the Lucid Nightmare mount, added to the game in the Argus patch of Legion. The puzzles introduced in Zereth Mortis are no less complex on paper, but they're a lot shorter and more varied. They come in three types: Cantaric, Mezzonic, and Fugueal. This guide will focus on the Mezzonic puzzles guarding its respective protolocks and how to solve them.

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Before World of Warcraft players can dive into Mezzonic puzzle-solving, they must undertake the quest named "Your First Mezzonic Protolock" from Firim in Exile's Hollow. This Shadowlands broker will explain how the puzzle works, and to complete the quest, players will need to use their wits to solve their first Mezzonic puzzle.

It has 25 tiles in a 5x5 grid, in a random assortment of "active" and "inactive" tiles. Clicking on any tile will alter its status from active to inactive (or vice versa) – doing the same for the four tiles in any direction surrounding it. The puzzle is considered solved if all tiles are turned to an inactive state.

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The method depicted above is not the quickest way to solve the puzzle, but it is the safest one. The first step players will need to make is to clear the top rows from the bottom until only the last row remains. To do this, the safest way is to click on any tile that has an active tile above it – and only on those tiles.

In the provided example, that means clicking on the four tiles in the second row that each have active tiles above them, resulting in the puzzle state to the right.

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This process should be repeated for any subsequent rows until only the bottommost row remains active. The next step would be to match the residue tiles in the bottom row by activating tiles in the top row. For example, if the bottommost tiles that remained were #1 and #5, as shown in the example above, then the player would need to activate the topmost #1 tile, and then the #3 and #4 tiles.

An important thing to note is that the players should only activate tiles from the topmost row for the method to work properly.

With the top and bottom rows matching, World of Warcraft players need only repeat the process from the first step, clearing out the top layers – except this time, there will be no active tiles left on the bottommost layer, leaving the puzzle properly solved.

After solving their first Mezzonic Protolock puzzle in Zereth Mortis, the only thing left for players to do is to hand in the quest to Firim.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is available on PC.

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