Success!

After a fair few nights, lining up for a lot of tries at Shadow Challenge Mode,

many times purposefully wiping in order to preserve the challenge,

Innocent finally prevailed and conquered the challenge mode with a few seconds to spare!

For the first time I actually remembered to get a screenshot of the deed completion popping up on my screen. 😛  We don’t have a video unfortunately due to our camera man not raiding with us that night.  It was such a relief to finally get this done.  I was starting to feel like we were banging our heads on the wall.  It’s quite the stressful fight for an LM as well.  Also your pet won’t stay on the boss even when you take it off assist.  It makes me feel dumb when I notice my bear is sat in the middle of the room doing nothing!  The last thing I want to be paying attention to is if my pet is attacking the boss or not!  Anyway, Innocent is now 3/5 for the challenge modes, which is basically all that is possible until Turbine fixes the Fire and Frost and Saruman fights.

I also received my 3rd(!) first ager.  It’s sorta weird to have what feels like so many to me as never before have I been lucky enough to receive a 1st age token while it’s still currently the best in the game.  I decided to make my rk a new fire stone.  I lucked out with my legacies, but the base stats were a fair bit of a let down.  I don’t get why the devs do this.  You can see the difference between my new stone and my 2nd ager.  It’s going to be hard to give those passives up, but on the whole, the 1st ager is definitely better.  But seriously:  what rk wants agility or parry rating?  or how about might on an LM staff?  Why even bother having these useless things ingame, especially when it deflates players a bit after the elation of getting a new weapon?  Ah well, I’m certainly enjoying the higher dps and menacing tanks even more. 😉

Visiting Old Places

My RK recently reached 75 so I’ve been working on getting her geared up.  The LIs were certainly a challenge but I mostly got lucky with my reforges.  This is the one aspect that I dislike when a character hits the level cap, especially with Turbine still not having any way to remove relics without TP (anyone heard of these mythical relic removal scrolls dropping ingame? Any more stat tomes either? Yeah, I thought not) and the exorbitant cost of getting the relics you want through shards and gold.  The amount I spent in both of those currencies sorting my RK’s four LIs (dps stone/bag, healing stone/bag) out was a bit astonishing.  It made me thankful that the other classes I have at endgame aren’t near as difficult.  I suppose champ could be if I decided I wanted to tank, but that is never going to happen. 😉 

I was lucky enough to be able to take my RK to a T1 Tower of Orthanc run and have plenty of seals in the wallet so that the day after she hit 75 she had 4/6 of the raid fire set.  Our alliance did an alt run since we’d finished T2 wing raiding early that week.  Unfortunately we weren’t able to get Saruman down as we were a bit too squishy.  The fight illustrated the importance of virtues for me.  She had most around 7-8, a few higher, but not the important ones.  Whilst my RK has nearly the morale of my LM, the attacks from Saruman and the poison/shadow clouds he put down hurt A LOT. 

So off to deed I go!

It took me to Mirkwood and allowed me to enjoy the sights there.  Gotta find an upside to deeds right? Turbine Points and pretty sights?  I don’t think many people liked the region but I actually did.  I found the quests to be pretty mediocre but I felt Turbine got the look and atmosphere spot on.  Whilst deeding there, I ran into some lovely light and surroundings (if you can call a dead, creepy forest lovely.. all in the eye of the beholder and how you choose to look at it I suppose!) and finally took some time to take some screenies of the outfit I recently got my RK.

When I first laid eyes on the ToO T1 RK robe, I knew I had to get it.  It was one of my incentives for leveling up. 😉 That and sweet RK fire dps (which is so very, very fun!) So I splurged, spent the seals, got the robe and it’s definitely been worth it!  I have to resist putting it on all my characters. 😛

In the Ashenslades, not long after dawn:
-Chest: Robe of Cleansing Fire (ToO t1 rk set)
-Shoulders: Disused Mantle of the Dunland Soothsayer (Dunland quest reward)
-Gloves: Lore-Keepers Gloves (Barad Guldur LM raid set)
-Shoes: Memory of the West Shoes (Ost Dunoth LM raid set) You can’t see these, but I found them to be good boots that didn’t clip with the robe.

 

I look forward to finishing up her virtues and getting her some Limlight jewelry as I’d much rather take her to raids than my champ.  I definitely prefer a caster class but I also really enjoy aoe destruction. 😛  Champ is great for the aoe, but it generally has to get in more dangerous spots, tends to have to offtank, but its dps isn’t as good as RK’s and the power consumption has become annoying.  My raiding alliance always seems to want more ranged classes (especially for stuff like Shadow Wing as we’re trying to crack the challenge) and dps and I’ve felt my champ isn’t the best contribution to that.  Of course my LM is my main, but we have several in the alliance so we have to rotate.  RK would keep the caster in me satisfied yet also lets me burn stuff down and who knows, maybe one day heal. 😛

 

I also couldn’t resist taking some RK action shots in the spider cave in the Scuttledells.  The light was too nice and RK’s have some really picture-worthy skills.

Runekeeper action shots

I’ve been leveling a Runekeeper with a friend (him on a champ) and have been having a blast. (And it’s also created a backlog of screenies of our adventures :P) RK is an epicly fun class. I’ve noticed my favourite classes tend to be flashy and quick, so RK fits in perfectly. I always had a feeling I’d love this class, so was trying to save it for later as I still don’t have a tank, but my friend bugged me enough and with the opportunity to duo level…well I couldn’t pass that up.

I have a 65 minstrel who is decently geared, but I really never ever liked healing on her. I just assumed that healing stressed me out and I didn’t like doing it at all. That was one thing that was making me put off RK now that I think about it: I didn’t want to have to heal. But my friend is a good RK himself, so he’s been able to give me tips. And we’ve been trying plenty of hard stuff so I’ve gotten lots of practice healing. I’ve actually found RK healing to be quite enjoyable! I love the hots! I love that I can go from fully attuned dps to healing in a matter of seconds (without the cheat legendary trait mind you :P). Leveling this class is definitely the final nail in the coffin for my poor minstrel. Once my RK is at the level cap, the minstrel will officially be just a crafting mule as RKs totally pwn minstrels in my humble opinion.

RKs also make for some pretty and flashy screenshots!