Monster Menagerie – The Wight

Hello and welcome! This is going to be a brand new series of articles, done in a similar way to my Pet ones, but focusing more on the fearsome critters, beasties and other assorted monstrosities you may find and confront in your travels through Middle-earth. Of particular note will be the various abilities each creature can have and use against you.

To begin, I decided to go with an enemy we face all too often in these bleak days – The wight. To be specific, I will look at each of the different forms a wight can take, and what tactics they have at their disposal.

Note: These names are completely unofficial, completely inappropriate for the lore, and completely hilarious(at least to me).

The ‘Belcher’

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This first brand of Wight is in my opinion the most annoying, and also one of the toughest you encounter. This guy has two big skills that make him easily noticeable amongst his brethren. The first is his namesake, called Diseased Roar in the combat log. This skill does moderate damage to you and inflicts you with Diseased Frailty, a debuff that reduces your maximum vitality by hefty amount for a upwards of five minutes(the amount of vitality and duration of the debuff vary depending on the level of the mob).

THIS THING USED TO ANNOY THE HECK OUTTA ME. While it is easy to tell when he’s going to use it(there’s an audio cue and he will lean backwards to yell at you) there is no induction to interrupt him with, and the range of the thing is quite large so there’s no backing out of it either. Way back when, these stat debuffs used to not get removed after leaving combat for a few seconds, so if you didn’t have a way of removing it you were stuck with a crippled Morale pool and Morale regen.

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His second iconic skill is known as Virulent Disease in the combat log, although I like to refer to it as the ‘Screw you from beyond the Void’ skill. This ability triggers when the Belcher dies, and consists of an effect ‘patch’. For as long as you are standing in it, your Power will be constantly drained, and there will be a strong chance for you to receive an additional debuff called Diseased Feebleness. This one works similarly to Frailty, except it reduces your Might AND Agility. Not as dangerous an effect in my humble opinion, but still something you want to look out for.

A final note on this guy, he does posses the same Shadow Aura ability as all other wights, which will hit you with Shadow damage while in the vicinity of the wight.

The ‘Sumo Wrestler’

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This next one is also quite irritating to fight, especially if you don’t happen to posses good burst DPS. The signature move of this guy triggers when the wight’s Morale drops to a certain point(my experience suggests that it happens around 50% and lower). What will happen is that every so often he will do an animation as if he’s going to throw up and he will ‘throw up’ a swarm level worm. He can and will do this multiple times, and each time he does it will cost him a little of his Morale.

Yes, he can in fact kill himself by using this ability too much, and I have seen it happen often when you don’t make sure to kill him off completely. By the time he died he had summoned about four of the things, and at low levels when your gear isn’t so great, that many mobs hitting you can be quite perilous. If you see a Sumo at low Morale, be sure to finish him off or you’ll have a swarm on you before you realise what’s going on.

Once again, this guy has Shadow Aura.

The ‘Skeleton Crew’

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I grouped these because none of them appear to have any unique abilities of note. Aside from their types of attacks(the top is Ranged and the bottom Melee) they are identical. These also have the Shadow Aura effect. These are the common forms of wight you will encounter, and are generally the weakest. The very bottom Wight is on average the toughest type of wight you can encounter. They are usually signature or above, and they have the same abilities as the Belcher.

Conclusion and Notes

Be aware that these are only rough groupings. The Devs have on occasion given abilities to types of wights that normally do not possess them.

I know there are wights with unique abilities inside instances like Great Barrows, but because they are not regularly encountered on the landscape they will not be covered here.

As always, please comment if you have any corrections or suggestions for something I may have overlooked. Thanks for reading!