Flight to the Lonely Mountain

As promised todays post will be about Flight to the lonely Mountain. This is probably one of the most hated raids in Lotro history, and there are several reasons for it. For starters it’s a lair raid, just like the other Erebor raids, and they are generally disliked (Watcher would probably be the exception). But not only is it a lair raid, but there’s also no real boss, just trash mobs, and in general that just gives it the feel of one of the regular quest instances where you guard against attacking enemies (but without any NPC’s helping you). Flight also got of on a bad start, and was taken down almost immediately after release due to bugs in it. It stayed down for quite some time upsetting a lot of people not being able to complete their deeds. It also meant that the raiding kinships couldn’t even start their T2C attempts.

Another thing that makes this raid unlikeable is probably the huge differance in difficulty on T1/T2/C. This raid is probably the easiest raid out there on T1, where you just have to stack a few champs on the spawn point to aoe everything down, but becomes quite a tricky raid on T2, where you have to keep mobs alive, place the groups correctly and above all DPS the right targets in the right order. On T2C this might just be one of the toughest raids in the game, it has after all not been completed by anybody yet. If this is because of the difficulty, or because there’s less dedicated raiders now could be discussed, but I know that there is top raiding kinships that did try it for a long time without success.

What amazes me is that many of the raiding kinships have now stopped trying. I could understand it if T2C had actually been beaten by someone, but right now world first can still be claimed.

I’m not in a raiding kinship myself, but I raid on a regular basis with another kinship, and even after our many, many tries, we have not given up. There is individual players that has, but we still manage (if barely) to get people to still run it. The problem we have right now, is that we never have the same people, if we could have the same 12 every try, we would probably be a lot closer to completing it than we are now. The kinship I raid with cannot get people enough by itself to run it, so there’s where I, and some others, come in, but every single time we actually have to PuG the last 1-3 spots. That means that the whole fight, and tactics, must be explained once again, stealing time from actually being in there doing our stuff. We tried a brand new tactic last Friday and Sunday, and it seems really promising. Hopefully we’ll get some more time testing it this Friday.

The thing I would like to see is that the kinships that stopped trying it would post their strategies on the official forums. Since they no longer benefit from any of that information themselves anymore, it could be a nice thing to let other people (that are still trying) take part of their tactics, and perhaps above all, why they didn’t work. I could understand if kinships still trying it would keep their mouths shut, since you wouldn’t want to give away the world first to someone else by giving them the last piece of the puzzle, but if you don’t even have any intentions of trying it anymore, please share!

It would really suck if this raid wasn’t completed before Helms Deep arrive.