Raiding

Last night I participated in my first raid in LotRO. It wasn’t an instance, it was against a spider boss named Bogbereth (or “Bog breath,” as my Kinship leader calls her). Having tackled the world dragons in WoW, I was expecting a lot of carnage on our side for not so much reward. Actually, we did exceptionally well. This being our first raid as a kinship, everyone level 45 and up wanted in. In short order, we had all the people that wanted to come ready and in Gath Forthnir for the raid. We went from GF into the spider lair, crushing everything in our path. We wound up in a dead end filled with small swarm spiders which we quickly demolished. Then a couple of elite spiders appeared and we took them out too. Then it was her: the giant spider queen herself.

Anticipated raid time: half-an-hour. Actual elapsed time including travel: 18 minutes. We were done so fast some of us, such as myself, had to stand around a minute to think of other stuff to do. I ended up on a kinship run to get some folks caught up with their book 7 and 8 quests. My groupmates were also nice enough to help my sneaksy hobbit butt get back to the place where I needed to complete book 9.1.

I thought back to the Bogbereth raid experience when I was reading an insightful post on Hardcore Casual about WoW Raiding. Most of the LotRO raiding I've hear of has involved less time and effort than raiding in WoW. I'm rather heartened by it - not that I'll get "easy epics," I could seriously care less about cartoon armor for my cartoon guy, but that I'll be able to see raids as just another fun thing I can do rather than a crappy-paying second job.