Category: Lord of the Rings Online

Life differs as a creep. Instead of starting against level 1 rats that have no chance of killing you, you start against level 50 freeps, any of which can kill you. And yet kill them you must, because your only way to advance as a creep is through infamy, from defeating players. You have all your basic skills at rank 3, start getting racial toys at rank 5, and are about equal to a level 50 freep at rank 7. (Unless it is a Burglar, who you can only beat one-on-one if you are rank 7+ and he is lousy, poorly equipped, drunk, and AFK.) And then the freeps can add raid gear and consumable buffs.

An odd thing is that some abilities seem to be balanced for the long-term. If a rank 0 skill has a rank 2 upgrade, you pre-nerf the rank 0 skill so that it is not overpowered at rank 2. After all, you can hit rank 2 in less than a week, and you never go down. But the same is in effect when the upgrade is at rank 7 or 11. I have been told, but not confirmed, that when Reavers got their high-rank critical upgrades, their low-rank critical ability was downgraded. Maybe they come out ahead, but consider:

Assume that you get 500 infamy per night. Some people do far better, but some people play a lot or are very good. I would be happy with 500. (Freeps tend to do far better, for the first paragraph’s reasons. If you always win with equal numbers, you tend to get a lot of kills.) That puts you at rank 1 at the end of your first night and rank 3 at the end of your first week. You hit rank 5 a month after that. Rank 7, when my Blackarrow gets the “heartseeker” shot that every level 50 Hunter has, comes at 94,500 infamy, more than 6 months of doing this every night. This is also when Reavers get that critical upgrade I mentioned, but they have a second one (to finish it out) at 11. That is 4.6 years at 500 infamy a night. Based on the infamy-rank pattern, I estimate that puts rank 15 (final) past the two decade point.

One Stalker has been hardcore enough to hit rank 10 in a year. Several freeps are also there (nom nom nom on those newb creeps!). It is probably a mistake to balance creeps around the assumption that they will all be high rank someday. A few will play the game long enough to be really high rank, and I think we are okay with having a few really powerful monsters running around. Considering spider nerfs in Book 13, there is obviously no problem with gutting them further down the line.

(Estimated time to level 50, past your first character: one month. The (f-ing constant) goldspammers in Bree advertise level 50 in 10 days.)

: Zubon

I mentioned fellowship maneuvers yesterday. Do you know what these things are? They’re pretty sweet, one of the neatest reasons to team in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢.

At random against elite foes or when a Burglar starts one, everyone on your team can pick one of four colors, which stand for damage, healing, damage-over-time, and mana recovery. This is a nice bonus, lowering the boom on them or picking you back up. But scroll down the page to combinations. Some combinations of colors give bigger bonuses, mostly poker hands of flushes, straights, and full houses. If you can get people to do the right colors in the right order, the fight is pretty much over right then.

And that’s the hard part: getting people to do the right colors in the right order. Even getting people to stick to a flush other than “go red!” seems to be very hard.

: Zubon

This is Zubon at level 29. I have run out of solo content in the Lone Lands, with a big stack of remaining quests in Agamaur and GA. No, you’re not expected to know what that means; it means that I need a group because all the enemies in my Lone Lands quest line now have three to five times as many hit points as I do, not to mention that some of them are invisible. So my play is at a wall until I can get a group there. Since I never played EQ, I am not willing to stand at the zone wall and broadcast “LFF: Agamaur and GA” for 45 minutes hoping for a Minstrel and a Guardian. So I can log in, wait some amount of time, then get bored and leave. Maybe I can do some fishing or deed grinding to entertain myself.

Yes, I could hit North Downs, since I still have solo quests there and maybe folks who want to do the group content, but I really want to see what is going on in that big red swamp. I don’t hear people looking for GA groups two zones over, and the global channels I joined are not having much activity. I think I spelled one wrong when joining, so I’ll keep trying variations until I get a populated one.

This is Zubon at level 21. I have another alt at the start of the Lone Lands quests. Around level 20 is when players start learning how to group in this game. You might be able to guess who is on a first character/first MMO. They don’t know what fellowship skills are or why you should not attack the mesmerized enemies in the back. Explaining does not seem to help. They vary between unrealistic optimism after the inevitable wipe or just leaving. Actually, those are the good ones. Some people do have the patience to broadcast for 15 minutes for a group, but then they quit 1/3 of the way through the quest because they did not have that much time. They see three elite enemies and panic, when fights with five are coming up. Did these people do their Great Barrows quests? They must be the ones bringing along level 40 Guardians and Minstrels, which is helpful but keeps folks from learning how to play in these slightly difficult situations.

Can I go back to “they can’t be taught”? As a Burglar, I explain fellowship skills to literally every group I join. If we do not have a Minstrel, I say, “just click green.” This isn’t that complex a plan, is it? Where do those reds and yellows come from? Or did you think that two greens was enough, so now it’s time to pick at random?

Oh, and the holy trinity exists. Working without a Minstrel is hard, when not suicidal. I was proud of myself for playing something other than a healer, and now I want to make one just so that I can find one for a team. That’s okay though, since the teams without Minstrels usually lack Guardians as well. I assume they’re all off in better-organized guilds than the random ones I connected with.

: Zubon

Update: since first writing this, the upper level character got her group for the GA half of that list, complete with Guardian, Minstrel, and the Minstrel’s level 50 friend. Fishing while waiting seems to be key.

– Ethic

Ethic already posted about fishing in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Its implementation smoothly and brilliantly slows advancement as you get further along, effectively creating a leveling curve from a system that looks like a simple 1-200 scale. The key is this: you never lose the ability to catch small fish.

When you start out, you have a half-dozen things that you can catch: weeds, rusty dagger, goldfish, giant goldfish, two-pound salmon, ball of gunk. On that list, three are trash, two are rare trophy fish, and one is the oh-so-common goldfish. I don’t know the real ratio, but let’s say early fishing without bait is 50-50 fish to trash. You get a point for each fish you catch, so 10 spins of the reel and you are at 6 (from your free 1).

You are now too experienced for goldfish to be worth anything. They are effectively gray. Conveniently, minnows are now available, along with trophy minnows, quickly followed by bitterlings, and so on. New fish become available every few points, and only the latest few fish (and their trophy versions) give you a new point of fishing. By the time you pass 100, you can catch two dozen different things. You cannot prevent this by seeking high-level ponds; every body of water is the same, from lakes to puddles. This is nice if you want to catch dace for the low-level cooking recipe, but it means that you want two empty packs when you pull out your reel for the fishing “late game.”

: Zubon

(I was so tempted to make a “Return of the King” rhyme, but managed to hold back. Thank me later)

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.

Continue reading Hobbits on Parade

The Shire juts into the next zone. Oatbarton is on the Evendim map but counts as The Shire, a little agricultural village on the edge of danger. It explains so much. Back south, there is a deed with the Crop Saviour title for killing oversized flies. I see why that could be an issue for a farming community. Then you cross the zone border and see a farm swarming with level 28 locusts. “Kill them while they’re young” may not have been fully effective.

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ 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

I am enjoying The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, but I find myself not reading all the quest text. At first this was because I had read it during beta, and I needed to consciously remind myself to stop and read new stuff. Habit is a great deadener. Then I stopped caring about why this particular person needed me to kill ten boars. And it usually is boars, sometimes wolves or birds.

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 Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢’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 ate 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

Playing The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, I have really been enjoying the PvP content. This is unusual for me, as I am not a big PvPer. Maybe it will fade, but let me tell you about it.

There is one The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ zone in which people play the monsters. Human-played orcs, uruks, wargs, and spiders (“creeps”) work with similar NPCs and huge trolls to control five keeps. Any player can hit a button to get a level 50 monster. The opposing forces are the normal PCs, the Free People (“freeps”) who unite to dethrone the tyrants of each keep and claim them for the light. This is Player vs. Monster Player (“PvMP”), The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢’s answer to PvP.

Continue reading PvMP