Alts Finish A Book

It was the first Saturday night in June we did not manage to get our instance group together.  Somebody was still out of town, so it was declared an alts night.  We decided to try to get through a bit more of the Epic quest line.

We started out with

Liadan – 20 Elf Loremaster
Wilifred – 20 Hobbit Mistral
Tistann – 19 Elf Hunter

You will notice a distinct lack of tanking classes in this group.  All squishies.  While we were running along through quests that were several levels below us, this lack of heavy armor would hurt us.  A lot. 

First I had to catch up.  I was the only one not ready to head to the Old Forest and speak to Tom Bombadil, so we had to run out and kill crows for Lenglinn the Lazy then run back to Bree to speak with Strider again.  He pointed the lot of us at the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil.

Bombadil.  I can see why he lives nearly alone out in the forest.  He’d drive you nuts if he were your next door neighbor.  He is like a rustic Ned Flanders with a beard, ADD, and a slightly altered rhyming scheme.

Anyway, we would end up talking to Bombadil quite a bit.

The first time we spoke to him, he sent us off gather some lillies for Hashberry Goldberry while Old Man Willow drained our power.  After that he led us off to an instance of The Great Barrow with instructions to follow the Witch-king.

We traveled, we saw the Witch-king at the front door.  We saw him go in.  We attempted to follow.

We were defeated by the mobs at the front door.  Not a good sign.

We regrouped outside of Bombadil’s house, chased him around until he stood still long enough to speak to, then headed back to the instance.

We did learn one nice thing; these instances do not respawn, so the brute force, banging your head against the wall method is somewhat viable.  And a good thing for us.  Several times we would be defeated, but only after whittling down an encounter enough that we could take it the next time around.

Battering our way through the instance and facing more than a few defeats,  we finally caught up with the Witch-king.  Fortunately, he doesn’t spend time fighting low level players like us. 

Still, he took the time to lay down the dread on us.  This screen shot shows some serious dread. 

Look at Tistann’s morale.  And, of course, look at Liadan.  While Wilifred and Tistann are up there in their best “Superman facing kryptonite” poses and eating up dread with a bucket, Liadan is a few steps back with little dread and no change in posture.  Again.  I think this pretty much settles the fact that she is smarter than us.

After a bit the Witch-king moved on, offering to drop Ivar off at his seafood place on the way, and left us to face some minions more in our range.  They killed us… er, defeated us… but through the magic of rally points, we came back and won the second round.

My favorite mob in this fight was the deadly tomb-wight and its creeping arm minion.

We opted to fight on the steps, which actually turned to our advantage as the creeping arm had some difficulty negotiating the stairs.

And then there was the final fight.  Sambrog looks pretty easy sitting there alone.  By the time we had gotten to Sambrog here we had been defeated five times.  All our combined crowd control abilities could not stop us from getting stomped over and over.

Sambrog starts off non-aggro with the usual quest ring over his head.  But then you talk to him and he goes aggro.   And he summons four helpers.  Yes, we went down for defeat number six here.

One final trot through the whole instance back to Sambrog.  We decided to use all of our crowd control to try to get the job done.  If this had been a stand up fight, we would have gone down again, but it turns out you only have to beat Sambrog down to about half health and suddenly Tom Bombadil shows up and finishes everybody off for you.

If he could do that, what did he need us for?

Still, we managed to lose Wilifred during the battle.  One more defeat.  His equipment came up on the paper doll as badly damaged after that.

We wrapped things up with Bombadil and found ourselves at the end of Book I.  We headed back to the Prancing Pony and found that Strider had left.  Gandalf was around though, and he started us out on Book II.