Ding 21 and Great Barrows

So I hit the magical 21st level and I'm ALL PSYCHED because now I can finally use the Herald's hammer trait. It's pretty cool . . . 'nough said. Being that I'm past 20th now, life is good for a minstrel. I have the rez spell. I have a couple of incredibly efficient heals. I'm wanted to play wac-a-mole with people's health bars. yes, life is good.

So a fellow Kinmate (Ramiel) . . . or guildy . . . however you want to say it . . . was asking for help from a minstrel in the Greater Barrows instance. Now I had been seeing people mention this instance and my interest was piqued, so I decided to give her a go.

I should have probably not gone since the wife was starting to put the children to bed, but I felt I deserved it after tilling the flower beds, mowing the lawn, and after putting in a hardcore 4 days in a row of Kari working nights while I watched the kids. As it turns out, a dad's work is never done . . . and I caught a little wife agro, but this wasn't too bad.

Anyway, this went rather well. I was the lowest level toon in the house at 21. We had a level 27, a level 25, a few level 23s, and me. This instance was everything you'd expect for an instance . . . a couple neat events, mostly elite mobs with a good amount of hitpoints, some swarms of regular mobs, and a couple bosses. We were after the main boss at the end, which you need a key to get to. Since 3 people already had their keys, we didn't complete the key quest for those that needed it (i.e., me). Time constraints . . . and this was cool with me.

We get the end boss down to 1-2k hitpoints (out of 15k-ish) and wipe on him. He does a nasty mana drain and has adds as part of his script, and everybody pretty much ran out of energy and was losing life like crazy. This apparently is normal and he's just tough. Well, we all retreat back to our bind point at the beginning of the instance and start running through the instance to give it a second shot; however, the same door we had opened before was now perma-locked and stopping our bloodthirsty rally to go beat on him again. This apparently was a surprise, a bug, working as intended, or someone accidentally closed the door from the inside. If I get any insights to that, I'll be sure to post them. Killing the end boss is a quest as well . . . I just didn't have it yet. I think you have to complete the key to get the quest to kill him.

It was good fun, and I'm definitely up for more instance runs like that.