LOTRO : Turtle Raid - Spoilers!

I have recently changed kin in LOTRO to the Eleventy-First. The two leaders are great and made me feel welcome straight away, it also helps that I have a couple of old friends in the kin too. Everyone seems to be playing the new Turtle raid at the moment, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to get to know my kin a little better.

Now there are some Tolkienites that mock the very idea that there should even be a giant turtle in Middle-Earth. I don't have such problems myself - Tolkien may not have thought of writing about a giant turtle, but he didn't forget to include the giant elephants, spiders and eagles did he? I suppose a turtle should probably not be part of the forces of evil, but I'm willing to let that slide.

Falin the Brave attacks from underneath...

So then, this turtle raid is just a 10 minute fight if you did not know that. There are no pre-req's or quests required or hours of grinding before hand - just enter the instance in the middle of the Water-Works, trudge though a couple of corridors and you are ready to face a nice little 12 man boss fight.

The catch is that it's a very hard fight and a bit of a DPS-fest.

I have not managed to defeat the turtle yet, but the favourite strategy seems to involve the groups strongest champion taking all the aggro and dps-ing his/her heart out. This leaves the guardian free to keep the champ constantly Shield-Walled which in theory keeps the champ protected from those nasty DOTs.

...then decides attacking from behind is more sensible

The guardian's shield wall takes a lot of power though, and this seems to be the main problem. Once we get the beast down past 200k morale the group quickly runs out of power. Another issue is that the hunters are always instructed to switch to an aggressive stance towards the end of the fight. When this happened I just could not keep the aggro (I happened to be the aggro-ing champ for a few of the fights), although this issue is probably secondary to the losing power one.

It's a nice challenge though, I have wiped nearly 10 times so far but the rewards include first-age weapons for a couple of lucky raiders. If you don't normally raid, but fancy a one-off 10 man boss fight, I recommend you try it.