Author: Zubon

My latest adventure involved standing around The Shire. One of my farmers unlocked Supreme Farming (tier 6), and my cook unlocked Supreme Cooking.

Farming in Middle-earth is pretty dull. It involves lots of time chatting or going AFK. I read about 200 blog posts from my RSS feeds, made and ate dinner, had sex, did a load of laundry, and was still processing seeds. I ended up with a lot of berries and green onions.

Tier 6 cooking is odd. Tier 4, the Artisan tier, has things that sound like what a master chef would make. You brew fine ales, make Shire Rations (“While hobbits think of them as travel rations, the rest of the races of Middle-earth think of these as a mobile picnic.” Before being made cheaper, this included an entire roasted chicken as one ingredient.), the Stew of Kings, Marinated Chicken Cutlets, Honey-roasted Chicken, and Salted Beef Delights, to say nothing of preparing a full Large Feasting Table for your kin hall. Tier 5 goes further, with Ultimate Honeybrew, Lembas (elven waybread), Perfect Pies, Masterful Mash, and the Feast of Rohan.

Tier 6 cooking includes Bread and Jam, Dough, Cup of Red Tea, and Buttered Scone and Jam. I note that Buttered Scone and Jam is defined as “Trail Food,” can be prepared only over a campfire, and is the most powerful Might food in the game. Real Men eat scones. “Rack of Lamb with Mint Sauce” sounds suitably impressive, but you make hundreds of cakes and roast chickens to learn… Bread and Jam?

: Zubon

A week after having bought The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢, I spent some time in the Mines of Moria. Fun! Big! New!

Finishing up Eregion, I respect how things are ordered within it, even if it works poorly for an existing level 80. It is a textbook example of sending people between quest hubs, quests that lead you through the deeds, and all that jazz. The only error in it is having quest chains from two hubs send you to Pembar. Either you are running both hubs at once, in which case all the “go to the next hub” quest chain caps are pointless, or you are making a LOT of trips to Pembar. I have the School instance and one other quest (chain?) left in Eregion, plus deeds if I feel like killing about 1200 enemies to finish them all.

On to Moria! I stepped inside when I finished Volume 2, Book 1. There is a dwarf camp there, with the usual “go talk to a couple people” and “find the lost dwarf” quests. Going back, I ran past that bit and up the stairs into Moria. And kept going. And kept going. Moria gives you a good idea of its scale by starting out with a staircase that takes 10 to 20 seconds to climb. That would get annoying if I did it a lot, but it makes a good introduction.

Those bridge-like banners up on the balconies at the top of those stairs? You cannot jump far enough to land on them, even if you could land on them. It takes less than 10 to 20 seconds to hit the ground.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 6: Soaking in Novelty

I did a few quest chains from Echad Dunann. Yeah, not too exciting, but there are a bunch of quests and someone asked about Day 5.

I mostly spent time crafting, on my main and alts. There is a lot to pick up in Eregion, and I am finding myself with stacks of (processed) ancient iron, ancient silver, and black ash for my alts. None of them are using those materials yet, but it will be waiting when they get there. My real bottleneck is silver for my jeweler, which seems to be more expensive on the AH than ancient silver. I may finish mastering a tier by polishing gems.

Oh, and Ethic found me for the COW static group. Once I de-mule my Loremaster, I will join that party.

: Zubon

Nope, not in the Mines yet. I have been working the two northern quest hubs in Eregion, and I finished Volume 1.

I have one quest left in Gwingris, maybe more if it is a chain. There is also the tea daily; the last quest is where the leaves spawn, so I may go back for it. The Gwingris quests are pretty typical Volume 1 stuff, for all the reasons I discussed on days one and two.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 4: Cleanup

The new stuff picks up south of Echad Eregion. This will be a happier post. You may have noticed that the last two posts showed severe underwhelmedness, which is like a word. Seeing new things is whelming, which actually is a word, even if none of the definitions are quite what I am looking for. Maybe I should have gone with “neat” or “novel.” Oh well, too late now. The previous posts had two points. One is to chronicle: humans tend to remember the extreme events and think of them as typical, forgetting conflicting evidence or whether they really were happy/sad for most of the moments. Going through those moments provides point two, which I will let Yeebo explain:

I’m not really sure what Turbine was thinking with the lead in to the mines. You show up at the north end of a new zone, and it’s not even remotely obvious that the best thing to do is run ahead. I guess they figured everyone would see Moria on the map and head straight there (that’s what I did).

In southern Eregion, the landscape changes. The scrub plain looks a bit like the Lone Lands, adding large furrows of dried-up rivers. The ruin architecture also feels different, although I do not study ruins enough to speak intelligently there. It is not like walking into one of WoW’s zones with an entirely different color palette, but it was striking enough for me to notice as a very non-visual person. Around Mirobel is where it really kicked in: enemies above level 50, a new monster type, legendary items, and all that jazz. Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 3: At the Gates

Volume 1, Book 15 is horrible. Absolutely terrible. I am still not even close to Moria itself.

Taking Andrew’s advice, I started toward The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume 2: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ epic quest. The best way to approach this, I thought, would be finishing The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume 1: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Volume 1 has 15 Books, of which I had completed 14, so I looked up where to start 15 (Elrond) and headed out. Book 15 is another epic travel quest. I spent more than two hours getting through the first ten chapters. Almost all of this time was spent traveling back and forth between two points.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 2: Travel Agent of the Realm

I bought the expansion pack. So far, no real changes except in the numbers.

The level cap is higher, and it is neat to see experience on my level 50. My characters have new deeds, which will alter their numbers after I do certain things 100-1000 times. The deeds combine to other things that alter my numbers. All the defense numbers were moved to a different scale, which may have been meant to hide the nerf to all defenses; if you already blocked, parried, and evaded most attacks, you could not get much higher without breaking the game, so now you can earn your way back to where you were (at level 60).

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 1: Same Thing, Bigger Numbers