Welcome everyone to a new chapter of MMOries of a Gamer, the weekly column where I tell you of my MMO life, telling you stories of many games I’ve played.
Last week, I left you wondering what would be the fate of two crazy adventurers, kind of lost into the Old Forest on Lord of the Rings Online. They made it out of the dangerous areas of the forest and just arrived on a grassy hill, with a house on it, when they heard someone singing,
“Hey dol, derry dol!”
Yes, dear friends, right there he was, Tom Bombadil.
Some thoughts
It was so cool to see him for the first time, with his weird clothes, his funny smile on his face and the lovely words he says all the time, encouraging you and making you feel absolutely safe.
We entered his house. It was a wonderful place where you could just sit down and relax, listening to probably the best music I’ve ever heard in any game. Goldberry was away, collecting flowers at the waterfall of a river, northwest. But we spend like half an hour there, chatting, laughing… Check this great video, found on Youtube, for a glimpse of the place.
Thanks FathomFan, for the astounding video.
Those moments make MMO gaming unique. When you play in virtual worlds “populated” by thousands of other players, you add the human factor to the game, you share things. You can make friends or enemies… you can love and you can hate. All of this makes the game “alive”, getting you to experience moments you treasure. I bet if you put some MMO gamers in a room and you tell them to talk about their gaming moments, they could be there talking forever.
To me, Lord of the Rings Online was so special in many ways. I used to go to the Prancing Poney, go to the tiny stage it has and play my harp. Some players used to sit around and listen to my music, others used to dance around and at the end of every song, everyone applauded. It was so exciting. Once, I recited poetry with my minstrel and a lot of players came to thank me for the performance. Three of them even started to shout, inspired by my poem, saying they would go to Rivendell to sing of the beautiful words I told them. Unforgettable.
More adventures
LOTRO is awesome for roleplaying, but offers so much more to gamers. There are a bunch of dungeons to explore (I love dungeons) and, before the first expansion Mines of Moria shipped, one of the high-level places you could go was Angmar.
I promise that what I’m about to tell you is true. Because, some of you won’t believe it, I’m sure.
Carn Dûm was the ultimate high-level dungeon of Lord of the Rings Online. Before the free addition of The Rift, the 12 man raiding area, it was Helegrod, the 24 man raid area, but Carn Dûm was the main dungeon set for a single group. This dungeon was so big and it was tricky as hell. You had to do several things, in order to advance deeper into the dungeon and took us several runs to find out how to do it.
We had epic fights there, Helchgam dropped the awesome Stone-Biter axe when we killed it. That fight was amazing, cutting its tentacles, hiding myself from AOE damage behind the huge columns, before collapsing. Simply epic. But nothing to do to with what happened afterwards.
My gaming group was full of old friends and relatives. We all had our jobs, girlfriends, wives… we had a life. That’s why we used to gather once a week, to play together, with a goal decided way before. That way we could optimize our playing time and achieve a lot of things in-game. That day, we went to Carn Dûm, don’t remember the names of the places we were at, but I remember we ended up on a huge square with a boss in the middle, surrounded by a lot of grouped enemies. We took our time to study how to beat the boss, studying the routes of all roamers in the area, taking note of all classes present among the ranks of our enemies, deciding a precise positioning tactics and so on. Once we were ready, our tank attacked and we started the fight… but something was terribly wrong. Suddenly, all mobs in the area turned to us and attacked at the same time. There were like 20 enemies and the boss, attacking us and defeating us. We were shocked. What had happened? It was a bug.
After recovering we tried once more and the same happened. The truth is that I simply didn’t try to fight or heal, thought that fight was impossible if all the enemies were bugged and attacking at the same time, way far from “aggro” range, so I called a Game Master. I wrote down what was happening and waited patiently for a response, but that response never came, at least in the form of a private message.
We were there, waiting. No response. Time passed till the group started to become nervous and impatient. Then, the Captain of of the group said,
“Damn it! Lets do it the hard way! We can do it, people, lets kick their fat asses, we can do it!!”
Everyone felt an energy boost. It was incredible. The Captain attacked, bringing the whole pack of enemies, like I said, there were like 20 of them and the boss. We fought like it was the last time, shouting through the voice chat, using every single skill, power, potion… we fought and we fought and the enemies started to fall to their knees. The tank was taking care of the boss for like 15 minutes! I was healing, looking at the health bars, targeting, using gear powers, moving my character from here to there, it was a turmoil of commands and warnings… we fought and that fight was never-ending. I started to feel dizzy and my head ached, but one by one, all the enemies were down till we only had the boss remaining.
-“GO, people, GOOO!! We have them! We’re gonna make it!!”
-I told you!! I told you we would defeat these lowlifes!!”
The boss was no problem for us, we started to take him down easily and we were so thrilled, so happy to do such a tremendous fight. There were 20 enemies and a boss and we were only a single group.
We were close to defeating the boss, then all of a sudden, a cracking sound accompanied by a huge lightning bolt, blinded us for a second. I thought another bug was coming to “the party” but it wasn’t that, no. The boss was instantly killed by the bolt and we all got the quest item we were looking for.
-“What the…”
-“Does someone know what happened?”
I did, or at least, I have a theory.
The Game Master received my request for help and came to see what was happening. I bet he was right there when we pulled for the last time, desperate from waiting for a response. Then, he saw the area was bugged, as the whole bunch of enemies attacked, and decided to watch and enjoy the fun. But then, 6 crazy players kill everything on a 15-20 minutes long fight, manage to survive and start taking the boss down. He denied us the pleasure of such an epic victory. He instant-killed the boss and, though none of us looted him, we all got the quest item.
He said nothing at all, not a single word, nada.
Hey Mr. GM, we owned all your mobs. You didn’t help us, we defeated everything, we won an impossible fight and your “death touch” was unnecessary. We owned the game, that day.
Dedicated to Delinor, Mizram, Brenan, Rashiel, Aeskandir and Saril.
See you all next week on MMOries of a Gamer: Age of Conan.
MMOries of a Gamer updates every Sunday.
First of all I want to congratulate such amazing video. I was astonished despite having played and visited and explored the lands showed there, the coordination and composition is just awesome.
Second… I can’t believe I had forgotten that fight, though I was not on Delinor but playing the Guardian.It -was- epic, and exciting and thrilling and felt so good when we realized we had managed to survive that bugged fight. Such a bittersweet victory in the end, thanks to some “divine intervention”. The name of the boss is Avalgaith, a Cargul boss surrounded by priests that summon two pale folk each. That run was particularly long, having to fight the right path to each boss with the key to the next part of the dungeon.
I remember other nice fight, when we were lower level. Great Barrows, being guided there by Tom Bombadil and left on our own to fight our way through a dark creepy place ridden with spiders and skeletons and undead creatures, and there were just four of us! Guardian, Captain, Minstrel and Hunter if I remember correctly. The fight with Thadúr the Ravager took a few attempts and the shoutings over voice chat were overwhelming when we took him down. Compared to that fight Sambrog himself was a piece of cake, curiously. :) Ah, good ole times.
That’s a pretty mysterious lightning bolt!? Did it look like you were going to die toward the end, or were you pretty much gunna make it? In that case if it was a GM, he should have set off a mystical choir to hail your awesomeness!
Actually come to think of it, it might be in the code – if a battle takes too long that might happen. In wow that happened to me and a friend playing a pally who was healing me. We faught for ages – but in that case the boss reset rather than gave us any quest item.
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