First of all I’m going to start this article off with a quote: “Hmmmmmmmm.” Now, that’s not a particularly interesting quote on its own but the fact that it was said by the Turbine dev Graalx2 in response to a complaint about the lore-master’s ranged slot item (which was promised in November 2010) does make it fairly interesting. I’ve got no idea what it’s going to be, but I’m certainly looking forward to it and hope that it makes it into Update 6!

Anyway, I’m concluding my series of Update 5 instance guides this week with an overview of The Foundry, a 6-person instance centered around Sauraman’s Ring Forge. I’ll look at doing some guides on various Tower of Orthanc wings in the coming weeks, too. As with the previous guides, these are written mainly from a lore-master’s perspective but also give a general overview of the tactics of the instance. For reference, here’s links to the previous guides:

The Foundry

Diseases/wounds? The fire-callers do a moderate damage fire wound, but it’s nothing too scary.
Stuns? All three boss fights have stuns.
CC required? Nope. There’s some places where it’s theoretically useful but it’s not worth the loss of personal DPS.
Trait setup: 4 Red, +2 whatever. Overall, the level of damage in this instance is pretty low so you don’t necessarily need to trait 2-blue, especially if you already have offhealing. Feel free to take whatever you want – improved sop:c, a 6th red, even dunedain learning if you’re OCD about stun prot and like to get lazy like me :) .
Recommended pet: Raven on the first boss due to lots of random tactical damage, raven or bear on the others, whichever will add the most DPS to your group.

Strategy:

I would consider the Foundry to be probably the easiest 6-person instance that Turbine has released since Moria; it’s far, far easier to beat the Foundry T2 challenge than Sammath Gul, Sari Surma or Lost Temple. While there are quite a few tricky mechanics here and there, the overall level of incoming damage means that a lot of them can be ignored and there’s nothing even remotely as tough as the Lost Temple disease mechanics or the controlled DPS races in the Gortheron and Osan fights. Continuing the trend of the In Your Absence cluster, there’s also no need for lore-master cc here – I recommend just traiting for DPS, especially given how great sticky gourd is for mowing through the trash mobs.

Trash

Overall, the trash in this instance isn’t very difficult and you should basically be able to faceroll through it. Because of all the AOE, lore-masters love the trash in this instance (1500-2000 DPS is easily achievable on most of the 20-30s pulls), there’s just so many mobs to just unload on. Be nice on your tank, but not too nice – blowing stuff up is fun :) . Stuff will die very, very quickly if you also have a champ along for the ride. Some of the pulls have a “purple eye drops purple puddle” mechanic which you’ll be familiar with if you did NCF/Ivar in OD, but quite frankly I find you can just ignore it in the trash pulls because stuff dies so quickly and it does so little damage. Feel free to move away from your group if you get the eye though.

I love the smell of burning trash in the mor... no wait, anytime.

Leading up to the first boss are some stationary and some pathing groups of orcs. It’s no biggie if you pull both together usually, but probably try to keep them separate. There are two goblin “snitches” who will run away to wake up an ~85k troll as soon as they are aggroed, it’s a good idea to root/stun/burn these as soon as they’re going to be woken up. I have noticed a strange bug a couple of times with them where they sometimes disappear immediately after getting rooted (had this happen with both a hunter and lore-master root), if that happens they’ll be returning with the troll shortly afterwards so be alert.

On the way to the second boss there’s a couple of trolls, some fire arrow orcs and lots and lots of AOE goodness. There’s more packs of orcs on the way to the third boss and these groups introduce the fire-callers, which put a moderately damaging fire wound on people and seem to do a bit of damage – kill them first, AOE away. The final room before the last boss has some fun stompy pilons (similar to the last boss in The Waterworks), just don’t get crushed underneath them.

Boss 1 – Dhâr (Orc)

The fight against Dhar is easily the hardest fight in the instance, and requires your group to at least learn some mechanics and positioning. The square room is divided up into a 3×3 grid of smaller squares, with grates separating each square. At the end of each row of squares is a set of 3 levers, each set has a ~14k add standing at it. The main mechanic in this fight is that Dhar will gain a damage-absorbing shield at about 90% morale. This shield can only be removed, temporarily, by dropping overhead trash on top of him. The trash can be dropped by pulling levers and falls into one of the six squares. The leftmost lever in each row of squares drops trash onto the square closest to it.

So the goal is to line the boss up on a square when he gets his shield, pull the coresponding lever to drop trash on him and then quickly DPS him down while he’s temporarily vulnerable. The group should have a designated lever puller and this person and the tank should coordinate which square is going to have a trash drop (or just have the tank pull it somewhere and the lever puller respond to that). Note that if the actual drop misses Dhar, he can be dragged through the trash shortly after it falls and that will still work. When the trash does fall, it causes a short duration stun so it’s not a bad idea to keep stun immunity up on your tank.

The trick with the levers, is that once one is pulled it can’t be pulled again. And you remember those adds I mentioned? They will randomly stand there and pull levers. So killing them is the first priority. They don’t need to be tanked specifically, just kill them quickly (lore-master stuns and roots are good to keep them from killing squishies). They do respawn if killed, so it’s theoretically possible to just keep one mezzed for the whole fight, but it’s not worth it for a lore-master to trait a mez just for this, so only go the cc option if you have a burglar in the group who doesn’t mind going in mischief stance.

There are three other mechanics of note in this fight:

  • The squares will randomly and periodically fill up with highly damaging lava. Don’t stand in the fire.
  • The boss will periodically call out a random person’s name. An AOE fire-spot will appear under that person’s feet. Don’t stand in the fire.
  • Steam will spurt out from the walls along the grates in between the squares, doing about 2-3k damage. It’s theoretically possible to spot a small steam burst before the vent, but in practice that’s pretty much impossible so you can either just heal through this or not stand on the grates; this will expose you to a risk of getting hit by lava though so the healer’s gonna be healing something either way.

All of these mechanics mean it’s good for your group to stay as spread out as possible.

As I said, this is the toughest fight in the instance, and minstrel healers in particular will start running out of power so do share it with them. Encourage everyone to blow their cooldowns though, because once it’s over, there’s not much else they’ll need them fore.

Boss 2 – Gurbák (Troll)

The thing to watch out for with Gurbak is the walls of the room. They’re insta-death. And he’s a troll so you just know there’s going to be punting. So surprise, surprise, the trick is to tank him in the center of the room. Crazy, I know. If the tank can keep the troll in the middle of the room, with everyone grouped up behind him, then you win this fight. That’s all there is to it. Given the supreme importance of positioning, make sure to tell your hunters (always the hunters) that it’s not a DPS race so give the tank plenty of time to build up a threat lead.

I have no idea what that purple thing is either.

Gurbak will periodically punt the tank and also occasionally turn around to punt a random group member. For this reason the tank might need to turn him around so the troll doesn’t get too close to the walls, just have the rest of the group switch around to stay behind him if this happens. He has a big induction AOE attack too which should be easy for just about any class other than lore-masters to interrupt. I hate not having an interrupt (and no, blinding flash is not a usable interrupt without fast loader traite). Anyway, apart from that, keep stun immunity up on the tank and fire away.

Boss 3 – Penrith (Angmarin), Ghashanuz (Orc) and The Ring Forge of Orthanc (it’s a forge)

This is perhaps the most disappointing fight in the instance because it really has the setup to be an awesome fun fight, but because the level of damage coming at the group is so low (with one exception) it ends up just being a fairly boring grind fest. There’s no real pressure on a group here if they have a workable strategy, it’s just a question of DPSing 600k total morale down while walking clockwise around the room.

The second boss in LOTRO within the "object" genus.

The setup is pretty simple – 2 bosses, one forge. The bosses need to be separated from each other or else they do additional damage, so have two people tank them (they don’t do much damage, you can tank it with a non-tank traited champ or captain very easily). All three mobs will periodically green out and do their thing, so you’ll need to be switching targets from time to time. Challenge condition (which all groups should be doing if they’re on T2) is simply to kill the forge before either of the bosses. When the forge is dead, the bosses get enraged and do significantly more damage. This isn’t a very difficult challenge condition, all you need to do is make sure to get Penrith and Ghashanuz down to ~15k before killing the forge, and then finish them off quickly.

The additional mechanics are as follows:

  • The big one to watch out for is the fire which gets spawned from time tom time at the far right of the room (1 o’clock if you take the entrance as 6 o’clock) and then spreads clockwise around the room. This MUST be avoided. For this reason, you should start off in the bottom part of the room and then when the fire spawns, the whole group runs around clockwise to 12 o’clock until the fire has cleared from the first place where it spawns and then move back to where you started and wait for the next one. The only thing that is likely to kill you in this fight is this fire. It doesn’t move very fast, but be on your toes.
  • As with the trash, purple eyes appear over random people’s head and they drop 5 purple puddles over about 20s. It’s probably a good idea to drop these around the edge of the room. Don’t spend the whole 20s running though, only run after you drop a puddle.
  • The orc boss does occasional stuns on its tank and the forge enters a phase where it will do short duration stuns on everyone in the room for about 30sec. I recommend keeping up stun immunity on the orc tank, yourself and the healer. Reactively use SI on anyone who looks like they’re in danger of getting stun-trapped in the fire or a purple puddle.

And that’s pretty much it. As I said, it has the potential to be an interesting fight, and the whole place is nicely atmospheric, but it ends up being pretty long and tedious I find. Ah well.

Anyway, I hope those guides helped. Feel free to ask any questions or give any additional hints in the comments!

 

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