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I Really Want To Face LOTRO's Balrog Again - MMORPG.com
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I Really Want To Face LOTRO's Balrog Again - MMORPG.com
There are few encounters I remember really well than the Balrog fight in The Lord of the Rings Online. The reason isn't simply because facing off against a "Demon of the Underworld" is memorable. It's has more to do with how my Kinship seeming formed an enmity for the Balrog of Morgoth.
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The variety of combat, tactics and great enemies defined the Rift, making it possibly the best dungeon I have ever played.
Complexity, the feeling of something dangerous is hidden in depths. And enemies in the old times were strong.
And finding tactic to beat the Balrog was most funny and entertainment thing in LOTRO.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Well put.
So, the Rift was my first time raid leading (after only starting to raid at all 1 month earlier....) and I loved it. In my guild, we found Thrang much harder than Thaurlach, but Thaurlach was way more fun to fight. I still remember the tactics all these years later:
Phase 1:
Enter the room...
Leave one hunter in the middle to kill slugs, everyone else run to the left.
Stunlock the big guy on the other side of the pee, focus down the big guy on this side. AoE the slugs before they reach the big guy and morph into big guys themselves.
Cleanse the pee after killing everything, then sprint back to middle.
Repeat on the right hand side.
Phase 2:
Everyone stand on the glowing circle.
Team 1 (lm, hunt, champ) head to the left room. LM roots enemies, hunter as backup, champ hits the switch.
Team 2 (cap, random) head to the right. Cap heal-kites the adds, random hits switch.
Pee is now non-toxic, tank jumps in to tank the balrog, everyone else return to circle and kill off any adds
Phase 3:
Everyone except tank and healer run to back room
Second tank takes blind one, everyone else spaces out left and right. Kill all the slugs before the reach black holes.
Captains need to be on point removing fears, loremasters on point removing wounds.
Take down the blind one.
Heal up
Solve puzzle on the wall
Phase 4:
Door opens, everyone sprints back to glowing circle, main tank hits all their cooldown to not die.
Tank and spank balrog for 5 minutes or so
Get out of the water when the rog jumps
At about 12k hp, captains pop last stand + in harms way, everyone else pop all cooldowns. You now have 10 seconds to kill the boss, or we all die.
So many times, we'd get to that last 10k health, the last 10 seconds of the fight, but we'd run out of power, or damage, or whatever. We'd be so close to killing him, had been fighting him for the previous 20 minutes, but we'd wipe. Was an amazing experience killing him for the first time though, we were all so excited about it. iirc, the whole guild went down the pracing pony for a piss up afterwards.
Whilst The Rift was (and still is) my favourite raid ever, it was never really about the depth of combat (though, lotro had deeper combat than any game I've ever played before or since). Later raids (specifially the Mirkwood raids) were much more complicated and had deeper tactics.
What the Rift did was give you fights that had lots of tactics, but weren't necessarily that hard. If you didnt know the tactics, they seemed really hard, but once you knew the tactics they became pretty trivial. There was less randomness, less pressure on resources compared to later raids. this gave a nice sense of accomplishment once you'd mastered a fight as well as not making it too difficult to overcome. Only really Thrang and Thaurlach put big pressure on being high-skilled players, but that was mostly just because the damage output of those bosses was a lot higher.
I honestly don't disagree with this, Torval. I really disliked Helegrod personally. The reason why The Rift is so near and dear to my heart though is mostly because of Eruchin's relationship with the raid. I've never been an avid raider though, and I'm happy that LOTRO moved away from that being a focus for the most part. Though the ones in Moria were pretty cool too...
I remember doing CD, Uru and BG runs in the original SoA days with the kin. Back when weapon speed and damage types mattered. That BG bow was the drop for all us original hunters we chased.
I never got it....
"It's has more to do with how my Kinship seeming formed an enmity for..."
"It" and "seemingly" -- and although "seemingly" would be grammatical, it might be better to leave it out entirely, and the Kinship had an actual enmity ... hmm, "towards" might be better than "for"...
Oh well, nobody cares about English these days.
Not sure why I never had an mmorpg account but this post brought back memories!