Epic Conclusions

I've mostly been tinkering around with the Summer Festival: completing the daily quests to get tokens that I've been spending on the new consumables deeds. Tonight, I completed the "Too Much Drinking, Too Much Running" deed when Signar won the Keg Race.

I haven't had much luck with the Hobbit Eating Contest, and everything was on cooldown, so I went back to Enedwaith to do the repeatables for reputation with the Grey Company (I should be kindred later today).

While working on the Uniformity quest (gathering uniforms from the Shieldbreakers), someone on Unite started asking for a group for the Nar's Peak repeatables. I needed the gold tokens, so I joined up. These are actually fairly easy runs; they are just time consuming. After turning in those quests, I finished off the reputation quests.

At that point, I figured the cooldown on race quests had expired; thus, I ran to Thorin's Hall and Hobbiton to pick up more race tokens. While I was en route, I got a message from a player with whom I've run several instance: his kin was going to run the The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu, but they needed a Lore-Master. At first, I was reluctant - it's a bit too long a run, and it was already 9:30PM. In the end, I decided to run it, because I really want to get kindred with every faction.

The run went exceptionally well, except for the second boss, Zurm. We wiped, mostly because I was expecting the last wave to enter in the wrong place and didn't get the stuns off in time. The second attempt went much better, and we downed him without much incident.

Even Thrang, a fight I normally dread, went really well. The mechanics of the fight finally sunk into my head, and we were able to defeat him fairly easily. That left only Thaurlach, the Balrog.

I haven't had much luck with Thaurlach. I got credit for defeating him once, but I was defeated early, and spent much of the fight watching the group take him down. I've faced him a couple of times since, but after 3-4 wipes, the group usually disbands. This fight is easily one of the most difficult in the game.

We wiped on the first attempt. I'm not sure what happened, but we regrouped and went for it again. The second time, things were going much better. We took out the Ever-Seer, all the adds, and even burned Thaurlach down to around 30K. Suddenly, though, people started dying.

Without prelude, there were suddenly just four of us left: a champion, a minstrel, a burg, and - surprisingly - yours truly. We all had massive dread, little health, and little power, but were so close to having him down. I was sure it was going to be another wipe, especially considering that we were in the AoE stage of the fight. Even Glathlírel, the NPC that we escort in this fight, was nearly dead.

From my perspective, I realized I had to power everyone up, spot heal to help out the mini, apply stun immunity on the champ, and start dealing damage. The remaining four buckled down, and before I knew it, we had Thaurlach down!

It was truly an epic moment.