alt="LotRO's Rise of Isengard: Survive the Culling Pit of Avardin!" />

There's some neat new stuff happening in the
Lord of the Rings Online's latest expansion, Rise
of Isengard, that hasn't been mentioned much in any
dev diaries or PR blasts. Late in my First
Day in Dunland, I came across something of a
surprise. I had not spent a whole lot of time questing during
Beta, so I knew nothing about the Culling Pit in
Avardin. It's a great, gore-splattered gladiator
arena with 4 banners in the middle and a raised ring for
spectators around the outside. I went in, not knowing what it was
or what to expect, and it turned out to be awesome... kinda like
Spartacus, but without the nudity and cussing. Well... okay, so
that makes it almost nothing like Spartacus, but it was still
awesome.

Before you go here, get yourself a solid 6-man group. This isn't
an instance - it's not a separate, private space, and people can
watch the fights - but it sort of behaves like one. Pick up the
quest from the announcer, Geralht, at the back, and don't leave
the arena - once you have the quest, you have to stay in the Pit
or you automatically fail and have to go back to pick it up again.
When you have the quest, one of the banners will start glowing.
Don't click it until everyone is buffed and ready.

This is a gladiatorial contest, pitting your team against four
different groups of powerful mobs. Treat it like you would any
instance - you need a strong, balanced group with tanks, healers
and DPS. My group initially consisted of 3 Guardians, a Burglar, a
Champion and my Hunter - none of us really knew what to expect and
didn't realize the pressing need for a healer. This error was
quickly made apparent, and the Champion dropped out to allow us to
find a healer replacement. We found a Minstrel and tried again.

The first fight is the easiest - a handful of Dunlending
warrior-types, each with around 75,000 morale. The three guards
rounded them up in the middle of the "bowl" and kept them there,
while I pew-pewed from the outside and the Burglar ran around the
edges. Once we got a healer, we beat this group first try. Another
group I know of tried a different method - kiting the mobs around
the ring and burning them down one at a time, which proved
ineffective. The mobs kept resetting on that group, and they never
got past the first fight. To do this properly, you need at least 2
tanks and a good healer that can keep up with the hammering.

The second group is a flight of three drakes - one fire, one ice
and one acid, each with around 150,000 morale. This fight was much
harder. The drakes all have damaging auras and powerful ranged
breath weapons. The fire drake and cold drake auras are mobile,
following the drakes as they walk around, but the acid drake
seemed to drop clouds rather than emit a damaging aura. We took
out the cold drake first, then the fire drake, then the acid one
last. It may not have been the ideal order, but it worked okay for
us.

The third fight was comparatively easy - a big, gnarly giant and
his bear. The giant has 644,000 morale, and the bear much, much
less. This was an endurance fight - the Burglar had to pop a lot
of Fellowship Manouevers to restore our flagging power, and I
actually switched from Strength to Endurance stance a few times.

Fight number four was the most difficult. We wiped a couple of
times on this one before we figured it out. This fight is three
uruk-hai with 300,000 morale or so. They have damaging auras and
are stronger when they are close together, so we kept them
separated as much as possible, using the big blood patches as
positioning guides. Also, they distribute damage among themselves.
There didn't appear to be a way to split them up enough to prevent
the damage from being distributed - since we had three tanks, we
had one for each of the uruks. We focused DPS on one, and the
other two tanks held the other two off to the sides. The first
uruk to die was one of the ones being tanked rather than the one
being DPSed, and came as a bit of a surprise.

One of the more difficult aspects of this fight was the uruks'
use of stuns - they would bash the tanks unconscious and then go
peeling off after a secondary target while the tank was stunned.
They seemed to prefer going after the group's DPSer - me - or the
healer, so non-tanks in this fight need to be able to take a bit
of a beating. Having a Lore-master use Sign of
Righteousness to give the tanks stun-immunity would
help enormously here.

Our fighting drew a number of spectators - some players got bold
and came right inside the arena to watch up close (and, I strongly
suspect, at least one of them threw some outside heals at us to
keep us standing). It was a proud moment taking down the last of
the uruk-hai, and particularly so with people watching and asking
questions about it. This is now one of my very favorite things
about the expansion so far, and there is much yet to come.