New Raid Details

[Melwhin]

Article about the new raids and raid changes.

The new raids sound like tons of fun, but it looks like they re-used a lot of old assets to make Dale and the Lonely Mountain. Ah well.

Also the seals thing makes no sense to me but I assume it's bad news.

[Taisie]

Flight to the Lonely Mountain progresses the story to where the residents of Dale are fleeing inside the giant mountain town to seal themselves in for safety. It's the job of you and your raid to hold the Easterling horde at bay to buy the refugees time. The entire raid takes place in and around a patch of river as you experience the most harrowing 10 minutes of your life.

That's the goal, really: to survive 10 minutes. It's not going to be easy, as wave after wave of Easterlings crash down upon you. These aren't toothless mobs, either; each soldier has his own special technique, from counters to auras to AoEs to heals. If your team isn't on top of things, you can get overrun quickly. The optional challenge is to forgo turtling and try to kill 100 mobs during that time span.

LoL Oh...this is going to hurt...


With this raid, the residents of Dale are safely inside the Lonely Mountain -- but not completely safe, it turns out. The Easterlings have devised a bit of chemical warfare by trapping a Fire Grim, slathering it with chemicals, and then pumping the harmful gas into vents to drive the people out.

LoL...

This is where the raid gets interesting. On Tiers 1 and 2, players have the option to choose from several battle effects -- in essence, to customize the boss battle to come. There are six options, from a fiery floor to constant reinforcements to the bosses getting huge damage boosts if their health differs by more than a percent. On Tier 3, well, you get all six factors. Good luck!

So glad I'm not the one who leads the new end game content, time to break out the good beer, whole new frustrations for merowin! These new instances sound insane, I can't wait for the dieing to begin, lets see us heal through that!

[Marithil]

Is it just me, or does the Fight To The Lonely Mountain sound like a skirmish rather than a raid? For that matter, so does the new 6 man. (a bit)

I think these will be very doable by us on T1. I think T2 is in our grasps if we put some work into it. Whose up for a little misadventure in the 6 man when the update comes out?!

[Golbo]

As long as we don't have to keep track of any stupid reckless elf brothers who go galavanting off in whatever directions they please (Elrohir and Elosir, I'M LOOKIN' AT YOOOUU!), we should be okay.

[Georgion]

Marithil wrote:

Is it just me, or does the Fight To The Lonely Mountain sound like a skirmish rather than a raid? For that matter, so does the new 6 man. (a bit) I think these will be very doable by us on T1. I think T2 is in our grasps if we put some work into it. Whose up for a little misadventure in the 6 man when the update comes out?!

Oh, I'm in. I'm definitely in. Looking forward to running new full-group instances again since ToO has become virtually nonexistent with the Rohan release.

[Georgion]

Oh, and on the seals thing... ostensibly, the justification given is that they don't want people who have been banking seals from the current raids over the past few months to be able to just come in and buy the best gear from day one. In the past, they combated this by creating "third medallions of x," "fourth medallions of x," and so on.

Since they've consolidated into only three layers now, though; marks, medallions, and seals; they would have to either make the new gear cost a huge number of seals or reset everyone's seals to zero so they have to start from scratch in earning the new gear. They chose the latter, so they're converting every seal you currently have into 20 medallions each.

It's an imperfect solution, but I understand what they're trying to do.

Bottom line: if you want something at your current level that costs seals, better buy it before U10 pops!