LOTRO: Duoing the Limlight Gorges

My boyfriend (champion) and I (lore-master) finished the introduction quests in the Limlight Gorge yesterday, and it was much fun! The Limlight Gorge stands out from the other areas because you actually have to fight reasonably powerful enemies. The creatures are as dangerous as the landscape looks ominous. The quests are meant for a small fellowship and I had been looking forward to more challenging quests for some time. It's intriguing how eager people are to gather more people in order to make content trivial again, though. If you really want to have fun you should not do them with six (as many people on my server seem to do), but duo, like we did.

Warning - Lore-master talk - Warning

As a lore-master, I found four reds and three blues (Healer, Light of Hope and Improved Flanking) plus eagle a great combination. Swapping in OD-set in for the Beacon of Hope HoT and AoE flank heals (macros <3) gave great healing. Alternatively, full Ancient Master would probably have worked well too, but reds speed things up and some of the harder parts were more of a challenge without that extra bit of crowd-control.

/End of lore-master talk - it's safe now

So what sort of stuff did we run into?

Trolls

The trolls weren't much of a problem to duo. You do have to know that they get stacking unremovable buffs over time that make them hit like hell, so the faster you kill them, the easier it is. We started with crazy DPS right away (Ancient Craft!), waited a bit with Fire-lore so it was on at the end of the fight (when the damage taken is the highest), kept stun immunity up and made sure only the champion was facing the troll (frontal AoE). For the introduction quests you had to fight several at once. Two was fine (I kept one rooted), but for the last part with three trolls I have to admit that a full Blinding Flash would have made it a lot easier. Without the fast daze, one of the two rooted trolls was bound to hit me when he got out of his root, and - oh my - I felt so squishy then.

Huorns

These were fine to duo. Keeping the champion up was easy: the main danger was me getting killed myself by the DoT and roots that the big ones randomly call upon you. Lore-masters with their light armour are a lot squishier than heavy armour classes, and I received less heals than the champion (no Beacon of Hope nor double flank heal from Air-lore/OD-set on yourself). Wisdom of the Council was my friend.

Spiders

Now these were scary things. The normal ones were fine, but the huge ones spawn these venomous widow adds that put a horrible unremovable DoT on you if they reach you (just like in the Roots six-man) - and then you're basically screwed. Crowd-controlling these and then stunning + letting the champion AoE them down seemed the way to deal with them. I must admit we did not make these duo though, we had a kinnie (captain) coming over who also needed the quest and we did those spiders with the three of us. I would very much like to try this again though, this time with Blinding Flash traited: hopefully that will give me a bit more time to heal the champion (this is hard when you're forced to kite venomous spiders all the time). To be continued!

Who knows, next time you see "[LFF]: need healer for Limlight", you might just think "No you don't!" and try something adventurous yourself.