“Helegrod… Once a dwarf-hold in the Misty Mountains, until the coming of a great dragon. Though the dragon has long since perished, and the ice of many long winters has engulfed the ruins, rumours out of the North speak of a terrible shadow returning to the frozen halls…”
June 2007 saw the arrival of LOTRO’s first ever group raid, and so far the game’s one and only 24-man raid. TWA found it as hard as every other kinship to get together a full kin group of 24 properly equipped raiders, so whilst some of us completed the raid individually by joining multi-kin groups, it was probably not until October 2008 that we succeeded in a kinship-only kill. For that reason alone we are unlikely ever to see another 24-man raid – though one’s mind also boggles at the thought of how SSG’s tired old servers would react to two dozen of today’s players active in a single instance.
Helegrod also pioneered the use of ‘wings’, bosses with their own separate sections, all of which had to be completed before you got to face off against Thorog the dragon. One of these, the Spider Wing, still often comes up nowadays as a weekly instance; the other two were the Giant and Drake Wings. In the third photo, TWA raiders approach Grisgart, the Drake Wing challenge.
