Raiding

Today was my first experience raiding in The Lord of the Rings Online. My kinship has been doing weekly raids for a month or so now with some other allied kinships. I abstained at first due to level (much lower than 50 and you'll have trouble hitting the mobs). Even after I dinged 50, I didn't jump right on the bandwagon. I had been in a couple raiding kinships in WoW and figured I'd hold off.

Then it happened: one of the kinships in the raid alliance created a drama thread on the forums of my kinship about how they felt disrespected and used because we had decided to create a separate raid with more of our own members present from the two largest kinships in the alliance. The last raid we were on with them resulted in a slew of complaints to our officers (myself included) about the behavior of some of the other kinship's members. As I understand it, I was not on the raid, there was much screaming at other raid participants on vent and some loot drama that happened. The reports reminded me about everything I hated about WoW raiding. The storm settled down quickly and the other officers and I agreed to end the old alliance in favor of a new one with just the two largest kinships.

I went to Helegrond with them last night. It was actually a lot of fun. We took down the first boss and then proceeded to take out the four bosses at the entrance (we wiped once largely because we were trying a new strategy, once we switched back to the old one people knew better we crushed them with only a couple dead). Not knowing what I was doing, I just used my main assist and hit whatever he was hitting. We ventured further in and took out the spider. As a wrap-up to the evening, we attempted the big dragon boss (Thorag?) and got owned. I actually died twice: once when I was just trying to get into position (he set fire to the bridge I was on) and once after I rezzed and rode back in on my pony.

One thing I've become a lot more familiar with in LotRO is the graphics / advanced graphics options. Most of the time, I can run it on very high. For most of the raid, I used medium. For the spider boss, which is very graphically intensive, I ran on low graphics. The changes helped quite a bit in dealing with lag issues and display problems. It's a nice touch in a game as graphically intense as LotRO to be able to switch around my settings so easily to accommodate for game conditions.

And another tip if anyone else experiences element deformities such as horizontal slices (pixels or sets of pixels which extend from the edges of objects to infinity): turn on the "synch to refresh rate" in advanced graphics. I turned it on and haven't had many problems since. It will take up more resources on your machine but it makes things look a LOT better.