My first day in Volume 3

I was pretty successful yesterday, although I ended up running out of steam towards the evening 🙂 and didn’t get quite as much done as I had planned.

I started off on my Minstrel as I had less to do on him.  I had logged out the previous night at Gath Forthnir such that I could jump right in and finish off the final quest of Volume 1.  Considering this is still a level 50 quest, my 65 minstrel had a LOT of fun running through there.  The “Inspire Greatness” buff is quite fun and I ended up having some real nifty big numbers floating around my screen 😉  The biggest was my Call to the 2nd Age critting for over 5K on all three mobs attacking me!  Here’s a shot of me in the middle of that quest, and a shot of the buff (notice at this point I had forgotten to re-do my legendaries)…

And of course, here’s the prize at the end of the book my new horse:

I did finally remember to re-set all my legendary items and did pick up the new cooking recipes, but haven’t had a chance to make any of the new eats or even decide which ones I’m going to make.  That’s for another day…

After that it was over to my Warden who did have more work to do.  I started out working through Book 14 and quickly decided that I really wanted to see how much I could do using the Inspire Greatness buff.  Now I did get myself into a little bit of trouble during the last part of Book 14.  For those of you that have done it, you’ll remember there are various little pockets of mobs both outside the ring-forge and then even more once you fight your way inside.  As I was outside, I didn’t have too many issues:

Once I got inside I decided that I would go ahead and pull not just the entire room but the troll “boss” at the end.  Now to further compound things, I sorta forgot there’s a dread zone right where I was standing.  So for a long while I was fighting in like 5 dread which caused me to cower every once in a while 🙂  If you notice in the above shots, with the Inspire Greatness buff I have over 30K Morale but with the combination of the dread (which knocked off about half my health) and mobs I ended up getting down under 1K so I actually thought I was going to fail.  But will all the mobs, once I moved out of the dread zone I was able to leach back enough health to bump that back up over 10K when I finally finished off the last mob.

After a pretty big sigh of relief (I really didn’t want to have to re-do that instance, or admit failure) I did make it through and finish the rest of that instance and all of Book 15.  I had forgotten how good the story was during those 2 books which made up for the times I was griping about the travel back and forth to Dellosad.  So my Warden is also sporting the new pretty horse (and notice the scaled down pool):

After finishing off Volume 1, I noticed in my quest log that I hadn’t finished Volume 2, 8.6 which is a small fellowship quest.  I figured what the heck, I’ll give it a go as it is a level 60 quest 🙂  I remembered it being pretty short and not terribly tricky, but I forgot the final mob did have over 100K morale, plus a few friends.  There are some breaks in the fight and there’s only one mob to fight at a time, otherwise there’d be no way to even come close to soloing it.  The fight was a bit tricky and I was paying a too much attention to take screen-shots (or a video) but I was able to solo it after kiting on the last 2 mobs in order to regen as I finished them off.  Luckily Wardens are very good at kiting 😉

I then finished up my evening running through Volume 3 Book 1 and managed to get my Warden up to the Rift Skirmish but my eyes decided I needed a break so that will have to wait for another day.

On the whole, the update has all sorts of great additions.  The Volume 1 revamp is a huge success and quite popular as I did see quite a few others like me running through Books 14 and 15.  I’ll be curious to hear how folks are finding it when done more on level as opposed to 15 levels higher like me 😉  The only down side for me was that without anyone in the group, I had way too much loot and not enough bag space.  Some of those instances in books 14 and 15 are pretty long, so there were lots of bodies left on the ground as I just didn’t have any space left 🙁  I haven’t tried the new Minstrel skill, but the Warden gambit is quite nice.  And while Volume 3 is a tour of Middle-Earth there’s a very fun story and I really enjoyed the quests.  Plus with the addition of the quest reward travel options, you can chose to make it as quick and painless as you want :).

I’ll have some more posts as I progress including some updates on my Minstrel in the Mirkwood instances.  And I may have a post coming as we get closer to the Dragon Age expansion, but we’ll see.