Well, Draigoch seems to be the topic of the week so I thought I’d chime in with a guide to the fight from a lore-master’s perspective. While my raid group hasn’t managed to get beyond phase 2 yet, mainly because we haven’t really been able to put much time into it with organisational difficulties, I’ve got enough of an impression of the fight from what I’ve seen and reading other guides that I think I can offer some useful tips. This guide will mainly be focussed on preparation and characacter build, because quite frankly the fight itself is pretty boring mechanically. As long as you can follow your DPS group positioning leader and can hit FM buttons correctly, there’s really not much you need to be doing outside of your standard debuff/DPS/spot-heal/power-share role.
Normally I’m a pretty big fan of the things Turbine puts out and am generally not too bothered by the LOTRO store, however this last “guide” from Turbine really annoyed me. I’m sure you’ve all seen mention of it as it was blasted out to everyone as part of their normal email communications. It wasn’t until we started chatting about it on twitter that I really started to realize why it was bugging me so much and decided to rant about it a bit.
The guide starts off with some actual decent spoiler free tips, so I thought this would be good. But then it derails quickly into a bunch of store items that can help with your fight without any mention of the fact that many have craftable equivalents. I don’t have a problem with talking about the store, but when that becomes the focus of the article, it really rubs me the wrong way as it makes it seem like Turbine wants you to believe you need these items to succeed in the raid.
I love it when the community does work for me that I can reference I was working up some information on Minstrels and still plan on doing a video but Cloudie-wan on the forums put up an AMAZING 15 post guide on all things that have changed for the Minstrel. If you have a Minnie, I’d highly suggest checking out the thread.
A couple corrections up front, only one of the Brother (Shield, Blade, or Song) can be active at any given time. And the 2-set bonus for the Leader of Men line has been tweaked to include both the Improved Kick bonus as well as the 10 second Mark skills cooldown reduction. Enough of the small stuff, lets get into the meat of it.
Turbine is having daily sales throughout the month of July in addition to the normal weekly sales. These sales are valid only for one day and run from 12am to 3am Eastern (-4 GMT).
I’m not really sure how to start this other than “Holy Cow!” Graalx2 released quite the bombshell on the community today as he posted a new Developer Diary on all the upcoming stat changes with Isengard.
Lately I’ve found myself playing my Minstrel and Captain more often as I’m filling in for groups and for whatever reason I just happen to walk into groups with a tank (or tanks if raiding) that don’t have enough of the other classes. Plus it does appear that Captains (at least on Silverlode where I play) are in high demand at the end-game. With this in mind, I thought I’d spend a little time talking about those classes as I’m really enjoying my time on them. These two were my first two characters to level cap (started during open beta) but despite being about 2 years older then my Warden they only slightly have more /played time then her
This post will mainly concern my Minstrel, but don’t worry I’ll have another one for my Captain. And before anyone panics, I’m not shelving my Warden I’m just trying to get more accustomed to these other classes such that when I spot fill-in for groups I actually know what I’m doing.
I had a great time joining the crew over on the Dunedain podcast recently as we chat about the Warden class and various other topics. It was a pretty open discussion covering quite a few topics so take a listen to get a better feel for if you’d like to hear more from me in the future .
They have a number of great episodes so make sure to add them to your podcast list if you’re in to those. I linked to the site but the player below will play the episode I was on.
I was working up some information on Minstrels and still plan on doing a video but Cloudie-wan on the forums put up an AMAZING 15 post guide on all things that have changed for the Minstrel. If you have a Minnie, I’d highly suggest 
I had a great time joining the crew over on 
