Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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Shaman vs Rune-keeper

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

If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, At Least Do What You’re Told

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 Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ 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

How to Level Quickly in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢

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 Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢

Grouping as the Better Option

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.

Continue reading Grouping as the Better Option

Prices as Signals

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).

Continue reading Prices as Signals

Where I Am In-Game

Kind of burnt out.

I have a level-capped character with many hours logged past that cap. There are two instances I have yet to do, a few I have yet to complete (including the raids), and one part of a zone to visit. Other than that, I have done everything except grind deeds and PvP rank. I want to finish my Annuminas armor set, but I am below average on my rolls there: in 12-15 runs, I have won the piece at the end once. I repeated enough epic book instances to earn another piece (a wildcard barter piece), so I need to win any two rolls to finish the set. That could happen in 2 runs, it could happen in 30.

I have been leveling an alt, but my problem has been playing two of them. I got some levels on my Burglar while the “collect 70,000 lore” quest was up, because he was at the level minimum for it, so I finished a bunch of quests while doing that. My main non-crafting interest has been leveling my Minstrel, who has almost caught up to that Burglar. This means that I have already done almost all the content in his level range in the past few weeks.

I realized that what I am missing is what I am looking forward to in Warhammer: comity. I want to play with people I know. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ gample is, essentially, WoW, a good implementation of DikuMUD with graphics, but again strongly supportive of quest-based mostly solo leveling to the cap, then forced grouping for the endgame. I want to play differently (hey, a link to someone other than us). I don’t care if it is mostly solo content: I want to share it with a friend and laugh on voice chat while we get our dozen warg paws.

Together.

: Zubon

Update: The funny thing is, within an hour of having written this, I went in-game, got a group on my Minstrel, did a chain of group quests that my Burglar has not done, then switched to my Hunter to join a group with someone I vaguely know to grind a deed, in which we fought 36 elite masters. I also found the door to one of those two instances that I have never done.

Book 14.1

New patch notes

I note that the Summer Festival is being fixed. The Summer Festival ended Monday. So if you already bought the music boxes, you can now find out what they sound like. If you already bought the festival horse, you get the updated graphics (so we hope you like that more). If you already completed the Inn League quests, you get the reputation bonus. And if not, better luck next year!

On a more positive note, assuming the bug fixes work, those are good things. It will be nice not to have Helchgam break every day. The Weavers’ day will come.

: Zubon

Update! I can now get through the door requiring Friend reputation with the Inn League. There is a decorative room behind it where NPCs have lines about how great drinking and smoking are. The taxidermist/barter vendors were removed, so the only NPC to interact with is a barmaid that sells booze on the cheap. So if you need to get drunk quickly and cheaply, and don’t have access to a keg housing decoration, there you go.

Update 2! The Summer Festival is back for a week, in case you want things now that they work. Announcement.