Weekend Missions

I did two full missions with guild groups this weekend. First we did Deep Forge, which I tanked with Fezzik, who is now tricked out in the first tier of void shard leather armor.

I was pretty pleased with how it went. Had very little trouble tanking all the trash in the place, as far as taking hits goes. I had Milia (a templar) and Kat (a Fury) for healing. The bosses were a bit hairy, especially right at the beginning, but I don't think I ever got into the red. Except for that time we wiped, of course.

But that was totally different. Really.

We were fighting Firelord Kaern. It was my first time fighting him, and in spite of the lengthy explanation my group gave to me about how the fight goes, they neglected to mention that I might be teleported to the middle of the lava that the "racetrack" you fight him on surrounds. So we kind of lost the thread when that happened. Got him the second time though. It's a cool fight, and I don't want to spoil it for those (probably few) of you that haven't done it yet.

Like most of the boss fights in TSO, he does something else that's tricky, but can be handled by keeping your eyes open and communicating well with each other. I don't know how you'd manage this fight without voice chat.

The other instance was Sunday morning in Najena's Hollow Tower. This is such a interestingly constructed zone. I played Toldain this time around. The weekend was our first after the change that made void shards into Heirloom items and thus sharable among your alts on the same account. That helps make up group composition a lot, since you can take who is needed rather than who needs shards.

In any case, we cleared all the bosses of this zone in a personal first. Karaya had managed it before and guided us through it. We had the most difficult time not with the final ring event orchestrated by Najena herself, but with Magmadin on the level above. The fast respawn of the drakes on that level turned small lapses of concentration into big problems. Honestly, I like stuff like that, because you can see the difference when we revived, took a break, and came back, got up our full focus and nailed it. That's a very satisfying experience.

The final ring event pretty much ran as expected, with one odd glitch. We downed the Reformed Magolemus, anc cleared the rest of the ring event, and headed down the steps to Najena's lair to get the discovery AA. And the ring event started again!

Oops! We weren't prepared for that and we wiped. But we'd finished the mission and the daily double, so we declared victory and went home.