Today is, first and foremost, my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetheart! Feel free to wish her well in the comments…
She is also happy to share the day with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. It’s a good day.
- Ethic
Archive for the 'Lord of the Rings Online' Category Page 2 of 15
I’ve been playing a Shaman in Warhammer Online during beta on a regular basis and find the mechanic they use to encourage both healing and damage dealing to be entertaining. How it works is that basically the more damage you do, the more effective your healing spells become and the more you heal your friends, the more powerful your attack skills become. Therefore, the system encourages you to play the balance of damage and healing. No longer are the healers getting yelled at for attacking. It’s all part of the design and I find it quite fun.
Now along comes the Rune-keeper in Lord of the Rings Online. This is one of the new classes coming out with the Mines of Moria expansion. The thing that caught my eye here is a system called Attunement. The Rune-keeper is also a healer/damage dealing hybrid like the Shaman, but in this case Turbine has appeared to flip the design over. The more damage you do, the better you get at doing damage. The more healing you do, the better you get at healing. It seems to actually discourage you from filling both roles. Instead, I guess you must pick one role or the other before you start the fight. I can’t tell at this point if one will be more fun than the other but I plan to create a Rune-keeper when the expansion launches to test the class. My gut tells me the Shaman will be more fun, but I could be wrong.
- Ethic
Do you know how you can tell a game is still getting new blood? Mid-level group quests full of people that have never done them before. Early level might indicate free trial folks, and many people have not done everything at fifty, but The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ epic books are something I expect every veteran to have done at least once.
Do you know why you level faster solo? Your time is worth nothing to your teammates. They are quite happy to make you wait for them, to go in some random direction rather than following a lead, and to ignore instructions from people who have done the quest before. If someone is two steps later than you on a quest, he has probably just done those steps, so you should listen to him if he says to run a town over then come back. No, you won’t just wait there for him, run to the next town to talk to whoever or else you will be stuck a step behind on the quest chain.
Do you even know how to read the quest instructions? It says to talk to someone in the next town over. You cannot catch up with us if you will not follow the quest instructions or the repeat of them from your teammates.
If you have a partner or a group on which you can rely, you can level faster teamed than solo. A nice thing about being in a guild is that even if half of them are idiots, you know who the idiots are.
: Zubon
Do clumps of solo quests. Try to stay in the blue to orange range.
It really is that easy. Quests will come in clumps, with several contacts sending you into the same area. Get every quest you can in an area, then head out and do three to six at a time. When your bags are full of loot, come back, turn in quests, then do another batch. Group if it is convenient, but you can level very quickly without it, and waiting for a group is the part that slows you down. (You may want to make an exception to finish your epic books, and those are the easiest groups to find.) If you have few or increasingly green/gray quests in an area, move to the next area; you should have a quest telling you to talk to someone there.
Continue reading ‘How to Level Quickly in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™’
You can receive a variety of titles in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ for eating and drinking. “Vegetarian” is one of them. You must eat six each of six vegetable dishes, including Stuffed Cabbage. Stuffed? What is it stuffed with? Checking the recipe: pork! At least it is not long pork.
: Zubon
Some games require grouping. We hate that, especially when certain classes are required, because you can easily spend half your in-game time looking for group members. Some games encourage soloing. We often like that, but single-player games deliver a much better solo experience. Some games discourage grouping, often as an accident of game mechanics, which is just poor. Some games encourage and reward grouping without requiring it, which is the best of all possible worlds.
I have a very long version with many examples after the break, but that is the core of my message today: encourage grouping, do not require it, and make sure the game mechanics really do encourage it.
You encourage grouping by increasing rewards for groups and adding abilities that require groups to take full advantage of them. You require grouping by giving enemies ridiculous numbers of hit points, failing to scale encounters for different numbers, or making encounters that demand (or all but demand) several specific abilities that are spread across the classes. You discourage grouping by making quests difficult to do together and failing to scale encounters for different numbers. Yes, a lack of scaling can both require and discourage grouping.
A gift from the Landroval server to you. Some may not make much sense if you do not know The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ PvMP or some names on our server, but you can probably pick out who is a warg and who is a spider.
: Zubon
Update note: “banjo” is a healer reference. Until recently, all Minstrel healing animations involved playing a lute. Hence.
I was listening to Michael Munger’s podcast on price-gouging last week, and it reminded me of the price of silver in Middle Earth. “The only way you get low prices is by letting people charge high prices.”
Silver is a bottleneck for jewelers. There are two types of metal nodes at each crafting tier, and silver is the less common one in tier 2. If you want to advance a jeweler, you make a lot of silver jewelry or polish a double-lot of gems. As a tier 2 resource, it is where the level 15-20 folks hang out, not the level-capped masses. Because it is a less common resource with relatively few people collecting it, price is high. It was selling for higher prices than ancient silver, the tier 5 (top-level) jeweler metal (which was just made more common).