a group of adventurers on an epic quest
It is back. Do not forget to harvest your mushrooms (although the reward is not that stellar). Because this is Turbine, there are masks. Those are actually the character’s eyes peeking through the holes, not just something painted on the texture, one of those details that shows off the graphics but is almost invisible in practice. The pub crawl is back too, if you want to work on your Inn League reputation.
: Zubon
Captains are the most under-rated class in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™. They are the most hybridized class I have seen in any game, and they still work. We are used to seeing broken hybrids, either brokenly powerful (and therefore overshadowing the classes they are hybridizing) or too weak (so just wait until you get the first-best for whatever your gap is). Captains, while rarely required for a successful group, contribute meaningfully in any role they can fill, without over-shadowing the original class.
Captains are melee buffers, a rare decision to make. Beyond being The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™’s primary buff class, a Captain is also an off-tank, secondary healer, secondary DPS, pet class, and teleporter. They also have a little ranged DPS. They are the go-to class for in-combat rezes and curing fear effects.
Beyond the usual damage and tanking that you expect from meleers, Captains bring to the table some bonuses not found on other classes. Whenever an enemy hits the ground, good things happen (like healing). They can mark targets for more damage or for life leech. Banners and buffs add massively to your morale. With the critical hit buff, my Hunter clears 25%. Their late-game buff is the mighty In Defense of Middle Earth, which adds +50 to everything for everyone. That is huge when stats cap at 500. They also have the ultimate in survivability: when Last Stand is active, the Captain cannot die.
Hybrids and buffers are hard to sell in most games, difficult to make or play well. Props to Turbine for a viable hybrid melee buffer.
: Zubon
In the spirit of Shiny Happy Week, we encourage only happy comments about good things on this post. Saying nice things about other games under the heading, “You know who else does that well?” is allowed.
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
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.
