Pumping Irony

So I went on my first real raid into The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu tonight! I’d signed up last weekend with a new raid alliance on Arkenstone that sounded conceptually similar to my raid coalition from World of Warcraft. I’ve actually been slowly in the process of building up a base of trusted and skilled players to form the core of a raid group myself before I’d heard about this group. If this works out — and so far this week in chat and in tonight’s raid, they were an unbelievably friendly, talented, and welcoming bunch of players — it will save me from having full-time leadership dumped in my lap.

Apparently their weekly routine is to go in the day before and take down the first two bosses to to set those raid locks for the leader for the real raid the next night. Tonight we went straight into the Rift and ran to where the giant NPC was captured and into the next section.

It’s after 2am now because I’ve spent a few hours working through Book 12 (yes, I’ve slacked on my Book quests…) and I wouldn’t expect to be remembering every detail and every boss name from a single time through anyway, but I’ll say that it’s a fantastic raid! The layout, the design, the atmosphere, the events… everything is incredibly well done! Bravo, Turbine, bravo!

I did get a lot of compliments from the people in the raid that it was nice having a competent Lore-master for a change! Hey, I try!

We blitzed through every encounter and every boss without a single issue. The guys knew what to do in each and the leader very patiently explained and gave instructions. Only once did one of the champions come close to defeat. Not sure what was going on, but I was able to quickly get within range and fire off a spot heal to keep him up until his minstrel got to him, then ran back to keep my guardian immune from stuns and cured of diseases during one of the dual-boss encounters.

Finally — the balrog, Thaulach! I’ll be the first to admit that when I saw screenshots of the balrog I was a little “meh” about it. Sure, you’re not going to get ILM or Weta Digital-quality graphics in an MMORPG just yet, but still. As usual, still images don’t even come close to doing justice to the real experience. The animations, effects and sounds are so cinematic; so engaging. I was smiling ear-to-ear the whole damned time! Of course, as with all things LOTRO, there’s even a story behind the encounter which is told to as you play.

Glathlirel, an elf from the first age (I suppose one of these days I should brush up on my Tolkien so I’d know what that means) who fought and imprisoned this balrog tells the story over chat and voiceovers as she aids the players in their various tasks to defeat Thaurlach. We did fine on the first few tasks. Once we got to the point where the raid splits into two groups to go into two separate chambers with a wheel-lock level puzzle, things went downhill. I walked into the chamber where a World-Eater or two were running around with some darklings. I managed to fire off a single mez before being defeated from what seemed to be too much dread combined with the Ever-seer’s damaging shadow aura. My captain gave me a combat-rez but I was defeated again within a couple minutes. Note to self: work on improving Arwellyn’s Will attribute! 

I’m not sure how the other group was doing in their chamber, but obviously we weren’t doing great in ours. Then it happened. Thaurlach broke free of his mystical binds before we had finished in those chambers. First, I just have to say: holy shit was that cool! Just like in the movie where the balrog summons his whip into existence with a sort of cascading flame effect, Thaurlach brings a massive sword into being and puts it to good use! Then, he comes rushing into the chamber my group in! I was chatting with some friends who’d done the Rift last year and they were like “Huh? He came into the room? I don’t think he’s supposed to move around.” Well, he moves around just fine now!

One of his oh-so-special abilities is a shadow attack that also wipes the raid’s hope, which is nothing short of devastating, and he managed to do it more times tonight than the guys said they’d ever seen before. We did brief one minor change in strategy they wanted to try (again, it was my first time so I wouldn’t know what they’re talking about yet) and they didn’t know if that was allowing the more frequent hope-wipes or not, but everyone’s hope tokens were on cooldown and at least three more known hope-wipes were still coming as part of the final fight with Thaurlach.

Needless to say, the balrog’s hope-wipes did us in. It’s a five-day cooldown on the raid though, and the guys said they definitely wanted me back to give it another shot on Tuesday! Looking forward to it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 3:22 am and is filed under LOTRO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.