No more hounding fear

I saw this on the forums and had to share – this is probably one of the most annoying and un-curable effects mobs can place on you in LOTRO.  The slow, the duration, the lack of cures, everything about it just plain sucks.  And thankfully the devs have listened to us and it is being removed from the game.  Check out the post and the full thread of much rejoicing.

A couple more Sword Hall videos

So I uploaded a couple more videos today to share.  Both feature the Sword Halls 3-man instance in Mirkwood.

The first one is me soloing the first boss on my warden.  Pretty tricky and did take me a couple runs to get it down 🙂  I do switch out some gear as the additional negation and procs from the mirkwood crafted set really helped out.  Main thing is to follow the adage “stay out of the fire” 😉  I mainly did it just as proof that I could, I’m not sure it makes sense to really farm this as its much quicker and easier to do it as a group.  Although if I get bored, farming it for the first chest might not be a bad return for relics, runes, and the barter coin.

The second video is a run we did last night doing challenge mode or what used to be called hard mode.  Basically for this instance, challenge mode is all 3 bosses at once.  Pretty fun fight and very taxing on the healer.  I was actually pleasantly surprised on this one as this was a PUG – but we just walked in and went to it 🙂  I think the group makeup did help as we had great DPS from the hunter and the Rune-keeper’s heals are over time could  be kept up on both of us.

Post patch things I’ve noticed in Mirkwood

First off, apparently we’ve started a welcome back weekend that’s not only offering +5% experience bonus but also 100% discount to all stables!  That certainly will help me out as I work on my minstrel.  Also check out the full news post for all the details.

There’s also a new gold star repeatable quest available in the Mirkwood camp of Gathburz.  It isn’t a new quest, but the “Death from Below” quest is now repeatable such that there are I believe 3 repeatable quests per day I’ve found to farm the gold star emblems.  The nice part is that the drops required for the “Badges of Dishonour“ quest can be found quite easily in the “Death from Below” quest such that you can kill 2 birds with one stone.  The main usage for these items are the scroll of delving (+10 levels) and Beleriand damage scrolls in addition to the horse, port, cosmetic items, etc.

Also on the live boards, I couldn’t help laugh when reading this post from JWBarry on the Fords of Bruinen Skirmish.

Continuing with the armor comparisons I’ve done, Hakon continues to update his with not only shields but also non-legendary weapons.  Check out not only this post but also the thread in in general.