So I’ve been pretty quiet of late partly due to a hectic schedule at work but also a bit of a down-time in game as well.  I just have lost a bit of motivation of late but after a blast last week I should be back up and in full gear here soon.

First off, I did want to comment quickly on the WB acquisition of Turbine as I’ve been back and forth on it quite a bit.  For the most part I don’t think it will make too much of a difference but hopefully it will help Turbine with some resource issues like the Isengard Preview server.  But I think LOTRO will remain relatively unchanged with most of the changes being on the application of Turbine’s systems to other WB games.  I will also be curious to see if we see anything further on LOTRO subscription numbers, although any current statistics will be skewed by the large number of lifetime subscribers that I’m sure Turbine/WB won’t release.

I’m enjoying all the new My.LOTRO lotteries, including the new one for the rare Symbol drop for crafting 2nd Age Legendaries.  I’m sure many (including all the Euro folks) don’t like this idea but as long as they don’t do it terribly often I’m all for giving players little treats here and there.  I do also appreciate them putting the PvMP armor set barter items in the gift box item list, although I still think they need LOTS more work in this area.  I really want to get these sets but the way the Delving currently works it is quite a challenge to get things done in there.

So, on to my fun week as I was travelling some and had a good deal of un-interrupted play time from the hotel.  Tuesday night I had my first run through Dar Narburg (DN) on my Warden.  I was a little worried as I was going to be main tanking most of it but I also wasn’t the only “new” person in there so we took it rather slow and steady.  We had a couple of rough spots but did manage to get 2 bosses down and an attempt on the 3rd before folks decided to call it a night.  All in all it was a fun time and I especially enjoyed seeing these fights from a different perspective as I had only been in there on my Captain and Minstrel previously.

After that I did a pretty smooth SG run and am one run away from finishing off my Mirkwood Radiance set.  I still enjoy that dungeon, but that may just be because I haven’t run it as much as other people have.  Which is probably a good thing as my Minstrel still needs quite a few more runs in there to finish off his set.

However for me the real fun came on Wednesday night as I made my first steps in the “new” Mirkwood raid BG.  I’ve had lots of chance to go on this raid but timing has never quite worked out so I was excited to get a shot to go this week.  I did feel a bit bad as I realized I was a little under-prepared with things like food and tokens.  Needless to say, I need to get back into better habits if I’m going to continue to raid 🙂  We didn’t get terribly far but we had a fair number of new people and were pretty low on DPS.  We did manage through the Gauntlet pretty well and I quite enjoyed that series of battles.  Essentially it is a timed run through the first area of the raid with numerous kinds of mobs and timed waves.  I was set on read guard basically keeping the Uruk out of the group as not only can I keep him busy but am relatively self-sufficient.  We did have a couple of deaths in there but were able to get through it in our first pass and made it to the first boss Durchest.  We had some poor information for our first run and butchered the agro portion of it, but after that wipe was able to regroup and make a much better attempt.  We had 2 wardens and a guard near him to distribute the damage from his big attack with us working to build threat and tier up the debuff at the same time.  The main problem we ended up having was on this debuff in that at times it would appear to wear off which just created all sorts of timing issues.  And each additional add brings another 10 gloom into the picture just to make things real fun 🙂  We didn’t get him down as we had some time constraints for some and couldn’t find enough replacements.  Certainly I’m still learning the fight, but there’s some mechanic in there that’s just not obvious to me.  It also gets pretty crazy in there as you’re not only trying to build/maintain threat but clear his corruptions and keep your HoTs and defense up.  For those of you interested or looking for information on this raid here are some links that might help:

And finally, based on some of these runs I’ve really come to realize that I need to get back into some semblance of a kinship search.  I’ve been kinless for quite a while now after leaving my last kinship but I really do enjoy running this kind of content and trying to PUG it can be challenging.  I haven’t quite decided what to do, but there are a few options I’m debating between as there are a couple of kins I’ve found, I have some good friends in both Fat Smokin Hobbits and Strayhold, and there’s been significant purging of some of the people who bugged me most in my previous kinship so I might return there.  But most importantly I think I just need to get my butt in-game more 😉