14.6 -- hints and tips -- *spoilers*

[OnyxBlade]

wow... book 14.6 is rather hard.

Here's some tidbits I picked up last night doing it.

Laerdan has a one-shot kill. You use the eye on a mob, then the bow shot and their dead. poof. just like that. There's a rather long induction, but it's a great opening shot.

Tidbits to remember regarding one-shot kills:
If you one-shot kill from max-range, no-one will aggo against you.

If you one-shot kill the mob that has "ally of" (ie: the wolves in this instance) before they have aggro on you, the "alliy" will disappear.

The fire-arrow is nearly enough to kill a mob by itself. It may take 1 to 3 auto-attacks.

Elf-Trick is a crazy strong skill.

Here's my general fight strategy. Open up with the one-shot skill, shoot an archer with the fire arrow. When the melee folks get near you, use elf-trick and then use a single fire-arrow on any more archers while you use the AOE attack while your fire-arrow cools-down (after the stun wears off). The fire-arrows will eventually cause the archers to come melee you, by the time they get to you a single AOE attack or melee auto-attack will finish them off.

Be fully rested before you run up stairs. There's a chief encounter that starts as soon as you run up a specific set of stairs that you'll want to be fully healed for.

Pop your heal over time at the beginning of the fight so that you'll have it available a minute later should you need it.

Use the same tactic as above and the only problem you'll have is power issues, so you'll be auto-attacking at the end, but his auto-attack is pretty darned good.

And then the last fight. If you want to call it a fight. Basically you have to survive an onslaught for 2 minutes. If you kill someone, they'll respawn.

Here's what I ultimately did. When Amarthiel is half-way through her speech, pop a self-heal. If you time it right, you'll get a couple pulses of heals and you'll be able to use the self-heal twice more during the battle. I then ran elf-tricked the melee group and then ran around like a headless chicken around the arena, kiting everyone until either the self-heal or elf-trick timer was up in which case I used it. I gathered as many of the archers together as possible and used the elf-trick on them as soon as the melee folks caught up.

I ended with around 4k morale the last time I tried it.

I give this encounter a D, just because of this last fight.

[Brunli of the Many Names]

The only thing I could add to this is when you run up the stairs to start that fight, run back down to the bottom once you aggro someone, you'll split up mobs that way and only fight 2-3 at a time. Repeat until that series ends (I think it was 3 groups).

[Verewen of Rohan]

I'll have to give that a try, Brunli... I tried 14.6 this morning and got my rear handed to me at that very spot. Will give it another go tomorrow morning, let's see how I do!

[Delaney]

Heh, forgot I had even tried this one. I sort of wish I could go back ... the first parts weren't bad, although I took them *exceedingly* slowly. The last part - well, I now understand Onyxblade's grade. I was lucky enough to survive the first time, but by the absolute thinnest margin possible. The last second on the timer expired just before I did.

[OnyxBlade]

I enjoyed the instance all the way to that last part. The first time I tried, I actually killed 3 or 4 of them and then yelled "WHAT THE HECK?!" when they respawned. Total nonsense.

[pepper]

You don't actually have to kill any of the first two groups leading up to the stairs. If you take it slow, you can go around them and then one-shot kill the patrols. There is one group at the top of the hill that you can one shot off the ones you can see and then use your skills to kill the rest. Did I mention I like the oneshot? Can I have this heartseeker on steroids?

I'm such a hunter. I totally forgot about the strategy for the large group at the top of the stairs and stood rooted to one spot as always. That fire arrow DOT (which looks nothing like a fire arrow) is awesome.

The last part is definitely pure luck. Stun, heal, and run around like a chicken with your head cut off.

I have to say that I utterly hate this kind of session play. It really yanks you out of the game experience. And they could have put more thought into the icons for those skills, so that they were more intuitive. When hunters use a fire oil, those icons looks like they are on fire. Our AOEs have multiple arrows...even the standard 2 shot skill shows two arrows.

[duri]

well I wish I had seen this thread before I did 14.6! I did 14.6 this morning, and if Verewen hadnt sent me an IM after, I wouldnt have realized how big of a deal it was. I died at the Orc Chief, and that was mainly because I wasnt paying attention (I hadnt even looked at all of Laerdan's skills, LOL - playing the Angmarim in the previous quest had lulled me into a false sense of security). So the second time through, I sat down and really focused (not easy for me with real world distractions) and got all the way through it. When the last encounter ended, and I heard the boss say something about 'take him alive', I thought it was scripted so that you would die no matter what. It was only after Verewen told me that I realized there was a timer, and that I had lasted two minutes!

The strategy I used, for what its worth, was to keep self-healing and mezzing and stunning. I didnt run, I just stayed in the far corner and moved back when i mezzed or rooted or stunned. Since I didnt know the encounter was on a timer, I fought the whole time. The advantage of fighting is that you can kill the melee attackers, I think I killed all but one of them before the end, and may have even gotten an archer. Reflecting on the above, I think you would probably take less damage by mezzing and stunning and running and not even fighting. But if you want to fight, it can be done.

I didnt like the session play. I agree it ruins the sense of immersion. I also didnt like the end of book 13, with the plot twist that I thought made no sense whatsoever - why would she let us live? Overall I think Turbine did a great job with the epic quests, but sometimes they seem to get a little carried away with the plot.

And why does every major quest have to end with a boss? Why not just a *whole bunch* of orcs? Big battles against swarms of regular mobs can be just as fun as a boss battle. The instances in LotRO are so WoW-ish. Its fine to have some of that, but no need to do it every. single. time. One of the best battles I had in LotRO was in the Sarnur caverns, when a new group member ran to join the group and brought like 8 adds... and we were already fighting 3. A few of us lived, but just barely, and it was a blast.