Raid Guide: Flight to the Lonely Mountain

 

If you’ve ever done or attempted the Survival Barrow Downs skirmish, then this fight is quite similar.  The raid is always timed (10 minutes) as it’s not about how far you get or which boss you defeat, it’s about surviving until the game says “Time’s Up!”

Full disclosure: This is the Erebor raid I’ve done the least because people on my server just seem to hate it.  Tier 1 is boring and tier 2 is too much of a hassle to do more than every once in a long while. That said, I have completed it on both tier 1 and tier 2 using my lore-master and warden.  I have not gone for challenge.

 

Mechanics

This fight is very basic as far as mechanics go.  On tier 1, a wave of enemies will appear every two minutes.  If you have a decent enough group, you’ll probably be standing around for most of the raid waiting for the next wave to spawn.  On tier 2, they tweak this a little bit.  Enemy waves still appear on a timer, but if you have fewer than 3 enemies alive at any point before the next timed wave, a new wave will spawn regardless of the timed waves’ timer.  The challenge quest is to defeat 80 enemies (yay update) during the raid.

There are only a set number of waves possible, but which one of the set you get is random. I’ll go over the different enemies first.

 

Enemy Types

There are four types of enemies you must deal with on tier 1 and one additional type on tier 2. They are…

Captain: Marked with a shield. This guy buffs those around him and the buff gets stronger each time one of the Easterlings dies. Immune to CC.

Archers: Marked with an arrow. These guys pew pew.  They power up a Heartseeker (if you’re a hunter, you know what that means) and shoot a random player with it.

Warriors: Marked with a spear. These guys cleave, so tanks must grab them and face them away from groups.

Summoners: Marked with a sun. As you might have guessed from the name, they summon stuff. When you see a bunch of saber kitties running around, it’s their fault. They also spawn damaging clouds you need to avoid. Finally, they have adaptation, making them immune to repeated CC attempts.

Berserker: Unmarked. This guy is tier 2 only. They do not come in with any wave and instead spawn randomly, attack randomly, and cannot be CC’d.

 

Combinations

These are the different combinations of enemies that can appear in a new wave.  Since you don’t know which one you’ll get, it’s impossible to create a step-by-step guide for the raid as a whole. What I will do however is try to establish priorities. Exact numbers taken from lotro-wiki.

1. Captain x1, Summoner x1, Warrior x5
2. Archer x6, Warrior x4
3. Archer x6, Captain x2, Summoner x2
4. Archer x2, Captain x2, Summoner x2, Warrior x2
5. Archer x2, Summoner x4, Warrior x2
6. Captain x4, Warrior x3
7. Captain x2, Summoner x4, Warrior x1

 

Things to Keep in Mind

You have a stun-breaker ability on a long cooldown when you enter the raid. Use it liberally. It would be a very good idea to bring a lore-master to protect the tanks and healers from stuns though.

This fight is very AoE-heavy. Avoid becoming sedentary and be ready to move at a second’s notice. Avoid the red damaging clouds, pull enemies out of green healing circles, avoid enemy cleaves, and cure your debuffs (draughts, again!).

Each fight, regardless of tier, starts with one of each type standing on the opposite shore of the river.  It’s easiest to daze the summoner and archer while a tank pulls the warrior, captain, and any kitties and faces them away from the group.  The kill order would be captain, pets / warrior, summoner, and then archer (since archer can be re-dazed).

 

Tier 1

This fight is about killing all enemies quickly, since new waves spawn only on the timer.  After the initial fight, the tank should go toward the top of the hill to intercept the next wave.  On tier 1, this raid can be done with one experienced tank, though having an off-tank doesn’t hurt.

The priority targets are always captains and summoners.  Lore-masters, burglars, and any CC hunters should daze as many archers as possible while the group takes care of the other enemy types.  Captain buffs can become very potent if left until last, while summoners can continue to summon cats if left to their own devices.  As long as the tank has warriors turned away from the group, they are not too bad, but are a priority after summoners and captains. Archers can be left until last usually, but if you get that nasty wave with six archers, two captains, and two summoners, you’ll probably be tempted to take at least one out initially.

 

Tier 2

The deal here is to keep at least 3 enemies alive until the next timed wave horn blows.  At that point you kill any high priority targets, the remaining three from the previous wave, and then hold on to another three. The same basic rules apply as in tier 1: CC archers, kill captains and summoners first, and so on.  One major change is that berserkers always get top priority.  If allowed to roam free in your raid, they will make short work of dps and healers.

This fight will be vastly easier with two tanks.  What I’ve done in groups is have the tanks alternate waves.  The first tank will grab one wave, while the other is off-tank.  When the time for the next wave comes, the off-tank goes to pick up that wave and the previous main tank becomes off-tank. There are other ways to do it too. Use whatever works best.

What will change from wave to wave is which enemies you leave alive. If at all possible, you want dead summoners and captains, while keeping some combination of warriors and archers alive. However this is not always possible as you can see from the list. If you get four summoners, two captains, and one warrior, you have to save both captains.  Saving summoners will only result in more kitties and damage clouds, so they pull ahead of captains on the kill list. Saving captains would require more healing on the tank, but that’s less complex than making sure everyone in a raid avoids all the AoE.

I should point out that “leaving alive” doesn’t mean “leave at full HP.” Ideally, you’d get all of the saved enemies to low enough HP that they’d die within a few hits by dps.

 

Challenge

Basically, you are combining the tier 2 difficulty with the tier 1 strategy.  You will get seven to ten Easterlings per wave and with only five timed waves, that will amount to about half of what you need for the challenge.  Instead of saving enemies until the next wave spawns, you’d do a quick situation check and if ready, finish off the remaining enemies to spawn a new wave. You need to get waves to spawn at about twice the rate they do on the timer. In other words, a minute per wave instead of two minutes per. In order to not get overwhelmed and steamrolled, you’d need very high dps and everyone to be coordinated.

 

That covers all I know about this fight. Feel free to leave comments, questions, compliments, and grooming tips, personal or animal, below.