Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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Pre-Order Incentives

The Rise of Isengard will be available for Turbine Points sometime, so as a lifetimer, I can just wait and get it for free. They are encouraging you not to do that with pre-order incentives including a pocket item that gives +25% xp on monster kills. They are also heaping on variations on a small set of cosmetics. If you are not a subscriber, the “Legendary Edition” is a pretty nice deal, coming with quest packs for the Trollshaws, Eregion, Moria, Lothlorien, and Mirkwood. That is just short of getting all three expansions for $50, plus $10 worth of Turbine points and all the cosmetic candy. Player-compiled Q&A here.

A +25% item seems pretty big to me. It works up to level 65, so for every character you make until they reach expansion pack levels.

: Zubon

Apparently On Break

Noticing that I was on my 3rd or 4th flash game of the weekend, I concluded that I was probably about done with The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for a while. I lack that urge to log in and play, and I wonder if I would have made it this far without the motivation of an alt. That alt is at 58.95 or so, just about through Moria except that her epic book is starting 2.5.5, which is rather good these days what with the new skirmishes. Highly enjoyable and recommended, although the 21st Hall was the least exciting of the three. This is also the point at which I burned out the last time I used an alt to keep me going in-game: I finished pushing that Minstrel to 60 and have rarely taken him outside the 21st Hall since.

I won one of the lotteries from my.lotro.com this week, but the prize never arrived in the character’s mail. Then I did not feel like bothering to pursue it. Then I realized that I must really be ready for a break.

: Zubon

Pet Upgrade

“Swedish flamingoes massacred in frenzied anteater attack”. Beyond your inability to top that headline, it makes me wonder when I will get an anteater pet. A combat pet.

Relatedly, LotRO loves its giant turtles of doom, but badgers and wolverines are almost always swarm-class (trash) enemies rather than serious threats (Cracked link, not necessarily fully work-safe but very good). We have a turtle as a raid boss, a turtle as the end boss for one of the more difficult mid-level instances, and where are my badgers of doom?

: Zubon

On Wisconsin.
hat tip

Guild in Transition

I never fell into a guild that worked well for me in WoW, which is one of several reasons I played for only a few months. I have friends across many servers, which severely limited the network effect, and my refer-a-friend buddy had a busy semester, leaving me mostly alone.

I joined a guild with friendly people I met along the way, but that was just moments before they decided to transition from a family guild to a serious raiding guild. This is possibly the worst of all possible states to be in, neither here nor there. Events were scheduled and failed to happen. Guild leaders angrily reminded people to show up if you sign up (and RSVP “no” on the required plug-in if not). Raid organizers would angrily wonder why they were bothering if people were not going to sign up. And then there were the new people…

You need a certain number of raiders (more if casual, fewer if hardcore) to ensure that you will have your 10 or 25. Getting to that threshold involves recruitment. I recognize that if you are not growing, you’re dying, but rapid growth is not only disruptive but also involves delving deeper into the barrel. I could politely refer to some as jerks with delusions of grandeur. I recall one fellow in particular who immediately announced his intention to be server- or world-first on clearing ICC (said ICC having just been announced). He was the sort to go on at great length about his awesome DPS and how horrible everyone else in all his groups was. Will the copy-and-paste from the DPS meter come before or after the stream of profanity?

My current LotRO guild is flirting with transition. It has absorbed another couple of guilds. The guild raid corps is hardcore and just the right size, which makes it difficult to cycle in folks who are not serious raiders while vulnerable to having a couple of people unsubscribe. Having a core group of just the right size, any second group active in a week is worse than your average PUG, a casual mix of the undergeared and inexperienced. We lack a farm team, but everything is okay so long as nothing ever changes.

: Zubon

Entering Moria Again

When last we saw my Warden, she was hitting the mid-40s. I ran most of the quests one conveniently could in all the zones I listed. I never found groups for the Angmar instances, but I did solo the rest of Volume 1.

That puts you at 55, with no skirmishes, instances, or grinding. That is your measure of how much 45-50 content there is in LotRO: it lasts you until 55. The 30 seconds I spent in Moria were to drop off Book 1 of Volume II (unlock legendary items, so I could start earning IXP).

Also on the “with no grinding” note, I finished my legendary trait pages at level 53. You can start finding those pages at level 39, so that is how long it took with no effort devoted to farming. I can only imagine how horrible those pages were in the very beginning when only one type of monster dropped each set of four. That grew to humanoids in two zones (half of each book in each), then humanoids in four zones (half of each book in each pair), and I am told that any humanoid in Moria could drop any page if I still needed them.

If I wanted to, I could skip Moria entirely by running/riding the entire length and starting on Lothlorien reputation. But that would be silly.

: Zubon

Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

This week’s update to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ brings with it a new instance cluster: 2 small fellowship, 2 full fellowship, and 1 raid. My first partaking was one of the full fellowship dungeons, Sari-Surma, and let me compliment the developers on using new abilities and mechanics in a way that feels fresh, difficult, but not unfair.

We have previously cited problems with puzzle bosses in MMOs and the particular difficulty with that given LotRO’s icons. I must admit to paying a fair amount of attention to icons, but the fights in Sari-Surma had several elements that made their use of both new and old mechanics fair, challenging, and mostly entertaining. This is especially important when they are bragging about adding hundreds of new abilities to the enemies.

First, the trash preceding a boss uses the same/similar abilities, or the boss will summon those trash as minions. This makes the trash fights a learning opportunity, not a waste of time. Continue reading Sari-Surma: An Example of Reasonable Puzzle Bosses

Blogworthiness

Would anyone want to read the story of your life? On a gaming scale, would recounting your adventures of the day sound like an adventure? For we the bloggers, one way of measuring how interesting a play session was is whether there was anything worth blogging. If you did not do anything worth speaking of, why did you do it?

Contrast: Ravious is blogging daily about his adventures in Rift, while I mentally summarized my weekend play as “I did two quest hubs worth of Forochel on my new Warden.” New and exciting tends towards extremes of good and bad, with new insights to be had, while my third trip through Forochel yields nothing new. A strong argument against the twentieth day of running dailies plus an instance is that your only likely story is that someone you grouped with was brilliant/awful.

If your story is not growing, you are not growing.

: Zubon

Character Log

LotRO character log One neat toy at My LotRO is a character log that tracks when you complete quests, level up, finish a crafting tier, buy a house, finish deeds, etc. The game remembers it, so Turbine makes that available to you. The game does not remember when you get loot, which I suppose is something most people would like to track; a future game or implementation could track armor sets the way the Warhammer Online Tome of Knowledge does, which I think would combine brilliantly with the cosmetic armor system (making them unlocks, not (just) inventory items).

I am shaky on the practical uses for this log, other than gazing in wonder at what you were doing in-game on this date in 2008, but then toys don’t need uses.

: Zubon