So I didn’t get in as much game time as I had wanted to this weekend. Combination of me being tired and some kin issues took away from my plans to hit 65 and run some of the new instances. I just hit 64 on my Warden and actually dusted off my Minstrel for a bit of instance fun in Moria.
My warden is about half-way through Mirkwood (at least I just started at the middle quest hub according to the geography) and has been running a fair number of skirmishes. I’m really enjoying them and usually run the tier 2’s, but I did attempt a Tier 3 yesterday which was quite tricky. I ended up dying once when I was a little over-zealous and pulled 2 of the areas, which each had a lieutenant. Once I realized that was not a smart thing, it was pretty smooth – certainly much harder and I had to pace myself more but quite doable. Sadly I didn’t Fraps it, as today, I got completely and totally spanked in a tier 3. I don’t think my soldier is good enough to do it as I just can’t keep up with the DPS and heals all on my own. I’m getting hit constantly for 500ish damage and just can’t out-heal that much damage. Normal mobs have ~6K morale (as opposed to the ~4K in Mirkwood for same level), signatures have ~12K and elites have 30K – all about 50% higher then their normal counterparts.
For Mirkwood, I’m mostly enjoying it and really do like the epic storyline so far (I’m only through book 6). However, I am a little frustrated as there’s a TON of repeat quests. And by this I mean – go here and kill 10 mobs, then come back and I’ll send you there to go kill more looking for a certain drop, and finally go back again to kill their leader. Now granted, the areas are all pretty close and I do like the stories so I’m not as upset about this as other areas (north downs) but there are some spots that I think could’ve been combined. I would really like them to tier the quests as you’re doing them – either like deeds, or like the skirmish starting quest worked where we had to collect 10 war orders, and then the quest updated to get the target list. So after you kill 10 mobs, you get a quest pop-up to go find this special drop, and then finally go kill the boss or something like that. Basically weave the story together closer and not force us to always go back to town. Granted, my bags are pretty full so I am in camp quite often, so I may be nit-picking here a bit 🙂
I did hop on my Minstrel to run the Halls of Crafting (HoC) instance with some friends of mine – and to my surprise they wanted me to trait for damage. For those of you who haven’t done the HoC there are lots of mobs and it can get pretty intense. It is one of my favorite instances to run on my warden as I can pull the whole room and tank them all quite effectively. Plus all DPS classes can go pretty much full out and I rarely have agro issues. So I was excited to run it as an AoE minnie and not have to worry about healing. It was an absolute blast, we ripped through it with zero issues and my only sadness about it was that I didn’t Fraps any of it. With all the fun I had in that instance, I decided to get my minnie into skirmishes and check them out with him running in full glowy-hand mode. I also chose a sage as my soldier to see if I could maximize my DPS 🙂
For soldiers my favorites so far are the protector, sage, and archer. I totally forgot about the “Ultimate” skills available from the skirmish captain until reading OJellyBelly’s comment on the sage, so there will most likely be some things that I’ll need to add. It seems like the sage does more damage then the archer, but I haven’t done much to really compare the two.
I uploaded a couple more videos (ok a few, hit the 10 minute cap) today so check them out on YouTube. I’m still trying to figure out a good process as I keep on hitting little weird quirks, but I’m slowly working out the kinks on it. And I have to suggest if you don’t have it already, getting the Gears extension for your browser allows for batched file uploads to YouTube 🙂
Any requests ya’ll would like to see?
Thievery & Mischief Skirmish:
Siege of Gondomon
Tuckborough
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