There is no rush. A good game will be around for many years. The longer you wait, the more content gets added. A lot of folks are getting worked up about Age of Conan’s early access program. They have a limited number of slots and they can’t handle more, because they are not prepared. You do not want to be a part of that. Besides, what is the rush? Seriously, it’s not that important.

Relax.

- Ethic

If you can, save caffeine use for when you need it. Complete tolerance develops somewhere in the neighborhood of 1g per day. At that point, you need the caffeine to function properly, and you will go into withdrawal without it. Mild overdose begins around 300mg (remember that it wears off and no longer “counts” after four hours), and 10g is the average amount to kill a human. That is about five liters of espresso, so you are unlikely to reach 10g without pills.

If you are staying up late playing, make sure that you are not too drowsy to tank. Caffeine does not counteract the effects of alcohol. An awake drunk is still drunk, and if you are too drunk to drive, you are too drunk to heal me.

: Zubon

Information taken from Alertness Solutions, Wikipedia, and reading the sides of cans.

Ah, long has passed since I last had enough time to post here, and much has happened. In a good and bad way, perhaps, most of this has been out in Real Life ™, and has kept me from playing. Now that I have a few moments here and there to play, I’m not looking as much to WoW as I used to. I have a good raiding guild there to work with, but the Sunwell content seems fairly flat, and I’ve not seen one thing coming in the expansion that interests me at all. So on the suggestion of a friend, I took my precious few hours of free time last week to an old place I’d been before, Middle-Earth.

I left Middle Earth before Book 11, which introduced a lot of changes to the game, and they are now on Book 13, which means 3 major content patches have dropped since I left. I had a lot to keep me busy. Not to mention patching. A lot of it.

One of the biggest changes in the game to me is housing. I realize players of EQ2 find housing well known, but as I came from EQ1, DAoC, AO, and a dozen other games to WoW, I’d never had “a place of my own”. Finding myself with still 3 gold to my name (a small fortune in LoTRO for the level, for WoW I’d say it’s a 1g=1000g ratio), I bought myself a nice little house in the elf grounds next to a lake with my own gazebo. Well, the neighbors probably consider it theirs, or all of ours, but as the bridge to it is at the end of my walk, I consider it mine. Like it or lump it, elves! I spent the next few hours first desperately trying to figure out how to decorate my house - no information on how to turn decorating mode on is available anywhere - after which I turned in the half dozen “Yay, new houses!” quests I had and got a bunch of free stuff to fill my house with. A short trip to the AH and Bree vendors and another gold later I had a new bed, some bookshelves, and an assortment of rug recipes. Sadly, I failed to notice the lack of a ceiling spot in my house - that costs 6g more - so my star chandelier would have to go into my personal house bank. Inter-character storage! Great!

After spending many hours on this, I headed off to the trainer to train my bevy of new skills. Loremasters received a series of boosts in Book 11, and I had to learn them all. It would be nearly the end of the weekend before I happily found out that Loremasters are no longer completely wiped out by nearly any undead (who are heavily resistant to the class’ assortment of stuns) and now have skills that fill in the big gaps in their armor. After only a few hours of play, my faithful raven Quoth, who’d been my main companion for nearly 40 levels, was sidetracked for my new best friend, the dark lynx Sombra. The new pet is a DPS machine, and as I prefer to tank my targets, the right choice for me. While before a lot of my damage was based off of praying for a Flank proc, I could now simply burn stuff down. Much more of a fun style.

After training my new skills, I realized I would have to adventure somewhere. After pondering it a bit, I decided to journey back to the formerly fatalistic Angmar area. This was the area that made me stop wanting to hunt. Back when I played, it was so packed with monsters that you’d get adds constantly. Add to this roaming elites, quests that were extreme undercons, and lackluster quest results and the zone was more “necessary evil” than anything else. Not so anymore. When logging in, my quest log was nearly erased by all the quests that were removed. Angmar has been completely reworked in Book 12 to be more solo and small group friendly, and the rewards are now useful. Better quest descriptions, planning on NPC placement, and progression that makes sense really show that the developers learned from the Evendim deployment. Evendim was a massive success, and was packed when released as it was a fairly well designed area. The new Angmar really plays this out. But that was not my biggest nor most pleasant surprise.

One of the changes in Book 10, the last major release I saw, was making the final 2 legendary traits of all classes have 8 bind on acquire pages (collection parts), thus preventing you from getting all 4 traits from the AH. While I can understand the need to have people work for instead of buy their skills, and think it was a good thought, it was implemented poorly for the non-fulltime-group player. These pages were dropped from elites, or from extremely specific monsters in Angmar and Misty Mountains, with a painful grind, sometimes requiring stages of quests completed to even reach. Knowing I’d never be able to do them, I’d mentally written them off and forgotten about them. Until, while smacking down some evil bandits of some sort I looted a page of Lore of the Blade and got the message about my deed being updated. I actually stopped playing and said “what?” out loud. A bit of research turned up that these now drop off appropriate leveled humanoids in each zone. Needless to say this was a home run for me. In my exit survey I specifically mentioned this, and seeing it there did more for my enjoyment of the game thus far.

In the closing hours of my weekend spare time, I managed to rejoin my old Kinship, which I was happy to find was still around, and thriving, and just as nice of a place as it was when I left. I found out about Outfits and managed to get myself some good looking adventuring clothes, which prevents the “you look like me!” syndrome, and I tamed my new bunny pet. I also wandered to the new continent of Forochel, and I really like it. It is VERY solo friendly, which is what I look for. It can also be done very well with a killing group, and you’ll not only tear through the content, but also have no problems with the few signature monsters tossed in to challenge you. In fact, I’d recommend taking a hunting buddy on these - it really makes the time go nicely.

The reputation system is one of the last things I tried to figure out. It seems like a massive time and resource sink. While there are some items I’d like to get from it, simple math showed me that I would be waiting for some time to unlock anything. While I need to play with it more to truly understand it, this seems like a treadmill for people who really need something to do.

In closing, LotRO is not the game it was eight months ago when I left. When I left, it was a WoW clone with Frodo on top and a side order of half-implemented ideas. Today, the game stands alone, although the housing idea may be copied from elsewhere, I’m not sure, but since everyone does it I wouldn’t be surprised. Even if they did, they are not LotWoW anymore. The game feels more fun, more in its own style, and looks visually different. If you have an itch for something new, and you haven’t been around old Middle-Earth for a while, you may want to give it a try. I’m glad I did, and I think I’ll be splitting my time between two worlds for a bit.

FAQ

Q: How about WTT STICKS 4 STONES? That’s “four” not “for,” so it means I have the rocks, right?
A: I will end you and all you love.

: Zubon

While I don’t think we’ve been Flagshipped, we’ve definitely been Vanguarded.
…
The very first thing is that you will need a Crysis capable system to play this game as you see it in the nice videos and screenshots. My friend has a Crysis capable system and he says the game is gorgeous. I don’t, and it looks like [oh yeah, there is some harsh language in his comments].
…
So there are level 20 guards in this city. You can attack them, and they will kill you. This is not necessarily a problem by itself. However, combine that with the fact that there are quests that spawn hostile NPCs in the city who attack you AND the fact that all melee attacks are little AoE attacks and we have a problem. … a drunk pirate jumps my friend, and in defending himself, he clips a wandering guard with one of his swings. After my friend rezzes, we head off to do our first quest together.

I trust his opinion on PvP games, but this one died for him long before PvP became an issue. You can check out the full thing here.

: Zubon

The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ has no loading screens between zones. You just walk from The Shire into Evendim. This means that you are running past level 10 bears and goblins, which were formidable at the time, and then into a field with stealthed level 28 wolves. Ouch. (The Bree/Lone Lands border has a similar effect, where the level 10 goblins mix with the level 20s.) There is also a herd of elk around town, using the same model as the level 1 deer. They are herd animals, so aggroing one can lead to a very messy incident with a lot of very angry elk. This is not a threat I expected amongst the minions of Mordor.

: Zubon

Look, I understand that I am doing the Epic Side Quest while Frodo carries The One Ring, and I get to maintain the home front and be a distraction from the real battlefront. Fine. But I am repeatedly being sent on quests for food, including one hobbit who sent me a zone-and-a-half for oatmeal. Oatmeal! The woman next him wants me to slaughter evil birds so that she can stuff pillows with their feathers. First, are craban feathers really the best substitute for fluffy down; more importantly, has she not heard about The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™’s famous chickens? I vaguely worry that I am missing some good and interesting writing when I skip through it, but I see a title (”Thin the Wolf Pack”), an objective (”bring 8 wolf teeth”), and I know the pattern. Orcs or bears attacked you, spiders at your dog, I get it.

Please let me know if there is quest text really worth reading beyond the epics (and I have my questions there).

: Zubon

• All 5-man dungeons will have a Heroic mode
• Heroic dungeons will have a separate loot table than non-Heroics
• A new token system will be used, similar to the Badge of Justice one used now (*)
• The 5-man instances are designed to not take more than an hour (*)

• All raid dungeons will have both 10-man and 25-man versions (*)
• The 10 and 25-man progressions will not depend on each other (*)
• There will be no attunements or keys necessary for any raid (*)
• The 25-man loot will be a tier higher than the 10-man loot
• The 10 and 25-man versions of the same raid will be on different timers so that each can be attempted on the same day by the same people (*)

I know a couple hundred people that will be happy.

(*): A lot of people (myself included) have been asking for something like this - or very, very similar - for two years now. This is Bliz, opening the cage of raiding and letting it out to play with everybody. Designing for the 1% was, and is, just bull. Grats on this one go to Irvine.

P.S.: Tempted to explain why each of those points is a very good thing, but I trust our readers don’t really need any explanation. Plus, people always tell me I type and talk too much.