Pumping Irony

Tonight was the follow-up to last week’s raid into the Rift of Nurz Ghashu to attempt to defeat the balrog Thaurlach, Glathirel’s Bane before our raid locks expire.

Our first try something went wrong in Group #1′s switch room, and several Ever-seers and darklings came out to help the balrog party with us. An unscripted hope wipe triggered in the midst of this and someone panicked and popped their hope token out of turn. Wipe.

Tuesdays several kinships do Balrog-only runs, so we all went to Rivendell to wait out the hope token cooldown as well as waiting for one of the kinships to turn the chain in to Glorfindel, where everyone in the area gets an unwipeable +4 hope buff for 3 hours. I think it was Meaning of Haste who turned theirs in tonight, then we headed back into the Rift to confront the Balrog once again.

This time things went much smoother, everyone kept their cool in tight situations, and we used our hope tokens in order. I think we only had one unscripted hope wipe that I can remember and it was dealt with just fine. All the switch rooms went as planned, I even managed to root all but one of the mobs in my group’s switch room and locked them inside so they were taken out of the equation. That brought both groups back outside to tackle Thaulach himself!

The group has been through the fight several times, and the leader has taken plenty of notes and was calling what to expect and when to expect it. Very calmly, very friendly, very patiently. However, they’ve never actually killed the Balrog in all this time. I love that not only have I stumbled upon such a friendly group, but one who, like myself, prefers to get the strategies on their own instead of Raiding By Numbers and following someone else’s strategy. They’ve been working on this for a long time and tonight, it all paid off.

Thaulach has been defeated!

I haven’t been in a raid that was this excited and happy over a boss kill since my raid group finally downed Nefarion for the first time in WoW’s Blackwing Lair raid back in pre-TBC days. The raid leader was literally shaking; everyone was in such a great mood! Goddamn I miss raiding! Stuff like this makes it so easy to relapse into that hardcore raiding routine… You guys will help keep me centered, right? Right? *knock knock, is this thing on?* Anyway I am so, so happy for the guys who have worked so hard doing this, and I am honored to have been there for their first balrog kill.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Lord of the Rings Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.