Finally! Sword Halls pulls through for me!

 WARNING: Wall of Text ahead. If you don't actually play the game this could be pretty boring.

 I got the cloak from Sword Halls in Mirkwood that I've been dying to get!!

Sword Halls is a three-person instance in Dol Guldur in Mirkwood. You run in, activate the instance by moving close enough to the nazgul and his fell beast to get him to start talking to you, and then you wait for the first boss to come out at you. Well, the first boss doesn't come immediately. Instead, you have to fight two waves each consisting of three cronies similar in makeup to the boss you're going to soon face. The first boss, the fire boss Urchon or some such name, is actually the hardest one to beat. He has a fire attack that snakes across the floor every once in a while, and in all the times we've run it we've only managed to interrrupt it once to prevent him from getting it off. If you have a good healer or plenty of wound pots you don't have to worry about it and can just stand there and get burned, but if you're like me, most of the time you don't have many pots or a healer worth their salt, so you're reduced to running about and firing off a quickshot when you can. Once he hits 20k you can as a hunter go Burn Hot/ Strength stance (assuming your tank has a good hold on him) and really burn him down the rest of the way in a hurry. Regaining power afterwards shouldn't be an issue if you burn him down fast enough, there should be a nice gap before the next set of people come in.

The next two waves are going to be varying types of morrovail, relatively simple and brain-free to beat. Then comes the boss, a morrovail named Carcheron or something. I'm not good with names. For some reason, no matter what group I run with, she always runs straight for me as soon as she comes in the room, whether I shoot her or not. Ah well. I just try and take her as a lesson in letting the tank gather aggro a bit before laying into her. The only thing to really watch out for with her is she has a selfheal every once in a while you need to try and interrupt, but usually a guard can handle this no problem, even if they aren't traited for quick interrupts.

The last set are a bunch of orcs. These will go down alot faster if you can fear/mezz/stun the one that will be standing in the back, esp. when the other two orcs start looking at him and chanting something in their orcish way. If he is feared out, they will keep going with their induction anyways, essentially giving you three orcs just standing there for you to wail on without them even touching you. The boss attached to them is a big Gerthyrg troll. He is also fairly simple, if a bit hard on the AoE damage, so tanks keep him turned around if you can. Also, every ten or fifteen k or so, he will turn green and run to the center of the room. Once that happens, there is a bloodspot on the floor to the left of the instance entrance. You need to be standing on this spot. If you aren't , his huge AoE attack will punt you and cause a huge amount of damage. If you are running without a healer, this could kill you in a hurry.

After he's down there's nothing left to do but to divy up the loot, usually a bunch of ixp runes/relics, and occasionally some third ages and off-hands. Make sure everyone loots each chest so that you get all three of your DG tokens. Also sometimes you can get some really nice jewelry and cloaks from the chests. I finally got the cloak I've been going after for a while.



And it only took a month and a half of trying and countless chests to get it. Granted, it didn't even drop from my chest (thanks Rashaldir for letting me roll on it! And on the one time I decided to switch chests, lol!!!) but I have it! Yay! Hopefully this puts me closer to a day without power problems. That +44 Fate certainly will help with the icpr, that's for sure. And nothing wrong at all with those other stats, that's for sure. It looks pretty sweet too. Sort of heraldic or something.

 Now to just get the +70 agi jewelry from SG.

Irony to the nth degree

Today I announced in Kin chat that I was heading out to the Moors. Did anyone want to come with me? No, but one member charged me with making sure that the relic stayed safe. I had never seen the relic. I didn't even know where it was kept, or who was guarding it. All I knew was that the freeps having it meant we got a nice experience gain boost. Losing the relic meant losing that buff. So, I nodded dumbly and rode off to the moors, not quite sure what I had just promised and hoping he was joking. He didn't really mean for me to watch over this mythical relic, did he? Surely he was joking.

Later, out on the moors, I somehow managed to scrape together a group of a captain, warden and a minstrel. A pretty awesome group. We managed to get a bit of renown off of a group of creeps, and then, after wiping the floor with them, they disappeared. We rode around like chickens for about fifteen minutes looking for them when something popped up in the announcements. Something I had never seen before. Something I didn't want to see. Something that one Kin member had jinxed into happening:

They were stealing the relic. 

If you can manage to read the orange line of text in the chat box, you will see that a certain fragment is being stolen by a warg named Heathcliffe. This warg and I, at least on my end, have a particularly uneasy history, but I digress. 

We jumped on our horses and ran in circles in a panic for a few minutes until we figured out the route they would probably take to deposit where we assumed they would have to take the relic. None of us had ever seen the relic. We all had seen Heathcliffe though, so we made a rough guess and charged off towards the Orc fortress of Dar-gazugasomething. I forget what it was called. With a daring charge and an insane amount of good luck, we made it into the very heart of the fortress. Right where Heathcliffe the warg would have to put the relic. Heathcliffe was not there. 

We stood about dancing for a second, certain that we had averted a crisis and all we had to do was wait for the pup to show up so we could stick him full of arrows and reclaim the relic for the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. Things were starting to feel both a bit triumphant and epic.

Then, in the midst of our celebrations, I noticed some movement at the entrance to the room. Before I could barely get the words "Hey, guys, um, warg" out, Heathcliffe had blazed past us, the relic held tightly in his teeth. The relic was lost. I had watched it happen. The one thing I had never seen, never even known where it came from or where it went - I saw it on the one day when a Kin member charged me not to lose it.

So class, the word of the day is irony.

Here's to you Heathcliffe and your daring-do. Here's to your group, with your warleaders and your spiders and your wargs, who wiped us out, still in the midst of our celebrations, while you blazed past us with that thing blazing like a beacon. Here's to the captain, warden, and minstrel, who fought so bravely and tried their best to keep a squishy hunter alive.