So Frelliel and Frellien finally got to Michael Delving and learned the wonders of (a) auction houses and (b) farming (as in, y’know, actuall growing-seeds farming).
A good thing, too, because we were all full up on swag that we figured could be auction for Big Silver, which we desperately needed, having had to basically rebuild our active inventory from scratch due to major repairs (shakes fists at dwarves).
The auction house mechanism is pretty decent — a minimum price based on what you could sell it for directly, a chance to see what things are going for, etc. Using the mailboxes is a clever way of delivering the results.
Margie observed that LotRO is all about the money. Everything costs money (except getting missions). It costs money to buy things, it costs money to level (slot talents, etc.), it costs money to travel (except by foot), it costs money to put things up for auctions and it costs money to mail them to other folks. It even costs money to die, indirectly, due to repair costs.
It’s a restraining mechanism, to be sure, so I understand why it’s there. But it does lend a mercenary air to the whole enterprise which I find sometimes a scosh jarring (though not necessarily incompatible with Tolkien’s world).
Which brings me to farming, and crafting in general.
So not my bag, baby.
“Here, let me plant some of these onion seeds I found. Oh, wait, need to get some water (and water for farming, not water for cooking, can’t get those mixed up). Okay, I’ve found a field I can plant in. I’m planting now. Now things are growing. Now I’m harvesting. Okay, got a few good onions out of that — but some poor ones, too. Oh, wait, I can go back to the workbench and turn the poor ones into more onion seeds. Great. No, wait, I also need to buy more water. Okay, now back into the field to plant more onion seeds. Cool! More onions!”
I’d rather be battling orcs.
So I need to find (for me) the right balance between direct sale of swag, auctioning of swag, and using of swag to grow (craft) more swag. Which is a bit more logistics than I really care for, though I’m sure there’s a sweet spot that will satisfy me. We’ll see.
And off to Bree.
I only played lotr for a short time but i recall there being a ‘explorer’ skill or something like that. The skill helped you find stuff easier as you adventured. Might be better option as you will be moving about the countryside anyway.
And this is EXACTLY why so many people were opposed to adding swag to CoH. So far, though, that mechanic is still optional for the average player . .
Ahh, so it’s WoW.
I tried farming in Beta. For about 5 minutes. Then I dropped it for good.
Well, until I got a cook. Now my farmer grows stuff for my cook. It’s still a pain.
First, it’s tedious.
Second, your pack fills up with too much stuff really quickly. You buy seeds, fertilizer, and water (!?!). Then you harvest the crops, and get two kinds of plants, which you turn into the final crop and more seeds. When you finally have enough of the end product for your cook, you still have fertilizer, water, seeds, fair plants, and poor plants in your pack. Increase the slots for the last three if your cook needed more than one type of crop.
Third,it’s expensive to buy all the recipes. There are virtually no dropped recipes for farming (and I believe they’re about to change those few to purchased items). Almost each type of crop requires three recipes. That’s 18 recipes for Tier 1, 23 for T2, 20 for T3, 17 for T4, and 7 for T5. Total expenditure: 1 gold, 8 silver, 4 copper (or 1008.04 silver). That’s a lot of money when starting quests reward you with 90 copper (or .9 silver).
Cook is almost as much of a pain, at least as far as my second point goes. An additional irritation for this trade is that they gave the ability to track crops, which are used by cooks, to the farming profession, which cannot use them! All a farmer can do is pick a cabbage or onion he finds and add it to the stack he farmed for the cook. The cook has to depend on the farmer, or spend his own hard-earned silver buying from a vendor.
Dave, if you do decide to actually do some crafting, I’d recommend armoursmith for a Guardian or explorer for anyone else. The armourer can make the heavy armour that a guardian needs, and the explorer can make light and medium armour for everyone else.
If you don’t want to craft, I’d suggest (again) that you still pick up explorer. You can harvest wood and ore and sell it for a profit. If you’re selling to a vendor, don’t bother to treat the wood or smelt the ore once you no longer need the crafting xp; you’ll maximize profits that way.
Here’s me: “Whatever you do on Crafts, do f***ing do farming. It f***ing sucks, and it’s boring and it’s a pain.”
Here’s you, in a post: “Which brings me to farming…”
Here’s me: *looks heavenward* Why do I even f***ing talk?
———-
Farming is in the game, and some people are very very good at it. I am not one of those people. I know you well enough to know that YOU are not one of those people. If this were WoW, I would say “avoid f***ing fishing,” and I would be right to do so.
I’m not randomly spouting LotRO truisms; I’m tailoring my advice to the audience.
FOR DAVE:
1. Avoid farming.
2. Avoid cooking, not because it’s useless, but because it’s annoying and you almost need a farmer to supply it well.
3. Explorer gives you two easy gathering skills to use, so that no matter what Margie does, you can collect the OTHER thing, and Tailor lets you make light and medium armors for all your other toons.
4. You might enjoy Scholar, because it is a history-geek kind of skill and, USING THE SAME SKILL FOR GATHERING, (plus a few common items from your other characters), you can make cool things like potions, combat-buffing scrolls, and dyes. It is, personally, my favorite skill set.
FOR MARGIE:
1. Avoid farming.
2. Avoid cooking, until you have have a wealthy character to bankroll your cook.
3. You will DEFINITELY like Tinker — making magic jewelry is fun. You might very well enjoy Weapon or Metal smithing. Woodcrafting is also nice, but of more limited use to all characters, whereas most characters use weapons you’ll make, and several wear heavy armors.
4. Don’t try to have a weaponsmith, metalsmith, and jewelcrafter going all at the same time — you won’t have enough ore to go around.
5. Tell Dave the stuff you need and let him use Explorer in the way it was intended: getting other people stuff they need. Send ALL your raw leather to him, so that his Forestry and Tailor can go up. Unless he decides to love Scholar, that will be his go-to Skill set.
Also:
Whenever I roll my eyes, thinking of Farming and Cooking as it’s implemented in the game, I think of Sam.
Sam is a Yeoman. The heart and soul of the Lord of the Rings is a Farmer and a Cook. They’re right to have it in there, and I have a lot of respect for those “master artisan cook” titles that people have.
Been away from the comments a bit. (In point of fact, I missed that there had been comments added to this post, my bad).
I’ll confess I picked up farming — um, because Margie suggested it, because it would add to her cooking things. That said, not planning on doing anything with it again any time soon, if ever.
(Margie, bless her soul, has been hopping on and doing crafty bits with both our characters whilst I’m vegetating with other passtimes.)
I do have Scholar, and have indeed made some magical potions and scrolls and the like. I have problems remember to cast the scrolls before what looks like a big battle. And, that said, creating scrolls and the like always the most boringest bits of tabletop D&D, so even that’s annoying. We’ll see.
And … we’ll see. I might actually get on and do some playing this week. 😛
So Dave has farming because he is a scholar. I have cooking because I am a Tinker. I want to cook because it irks me to have skill and not uses them. I am astounds at the difference in cash on hand between my solo hobbit with explorer and the elves. In part because there are no auction houses in the starting lands for the elves, thus no opportunity to sell for anything over cost. But also because the hobbit has been selling all those excess resources in the auction house for big bucks where the elves use most of their raw materials.
I am just starting to shift resources around between characters. It is annoying that you can only do that for characters on the same server. With the low characters per server limit and our alt habit I have been reluctant to put solo characters on our “main” server – Landroval.
My characters on my solo server – Brandywine are fairing better. My money-bag hobbit can bankroll the lot. I also feels like there is less competition for raw resources on Brandywine or maybe less competition in the Shire.
So … optimal strategy (most bucks for the bang, minimal screwing about) would seem to be auction what you can, sell the rest, unless there’s some very specific item you want to craft. Be aware that you can get more at auction for a crafted item than its components, but that depends on the grind of actually buying/finding the components and doing the crafting.
If I never farm (as in “in a field”) again, I will be content. Doing little scholarly bits, though, is kind of fun … in moderation. I’d still rather be plonking bad guys.
I strongly suggest picking like… two things from a profession “set” of three that your character has, and focusing on those. If you really truly want to max out all three, go back LATER and do the third one.
Examples:
– Tinker: Do jeweler and mining.
– Arms: do weaponmaking and mining.
There are exceptions:
– Explorer: you can do all three without crafting getting in the way of the adventuring too much.
– Historian: I’d personally just do Scholar and ignore the other two.
——
Dave: yeah, I like doing a profession that I don’t have to think about too much. Scholar appeals to me because (a) most of the stuff you need to gather is in ruins that I go to anyway (b) UNLIKE any other crafting skill, I can make stuff from the things I’m gathering WHEREEVER. I. AM. (c) If I want to make dyes and the like, it’s easy to accumulate massive stacks of the stuff I want to make and pound them all out at once while I’m afk, without taking up too much space in my bags.
Margie: There really aren’t any AHs in Thorin’s Gate or Celondim? How very very odd.
Can’t speak for Thorins Gate, but there are none in Celondim (or the next couple of burgs up the road).
Actually, even for humans, there aren’t auction halls until you get up to Bree.
(Hmmm. I suppose, knowing what I now know, I could take the fast-horse from Celondim to Bree for a silver.)
AHs are in Bree-town, Michael Delving, and Thorin’s Hall. Guess the elves are too depressed to get into all that money thing.
There’s also an AH in Rivendell.
Coming in Book 12: a vault in Esteldin! Hurrah!
Ahh. The Thorin’s Gate AH is the one I used when we were doing the Eren Luid sites, since I was on a dwarf and Kate on an else, it was no big problem. Again, of course, it’s one of those cheapo, 1 silver rides.
And I stand both corrected and too lazy to fix it — it’s Michel Delving, not Michael Delving.
I have a friend who pronounces it “mickle.” Drives me crazy.
I can tolerate misspellings and mispronunciations of elvish names, to a degree (I understand that few players will have read Appendix E of The Return of the King). In fact, the only other ones that really get to me are seeing/hearing Rivendell called “Rivendale” (that sounds like the place where Archie and Jughead went to school) and hearing my dwarf Avoin’s name rhymed with “groin” (I really wish we could use the diacritical marks Tolkien was fond of).
Actually, what *is* the correct pronunciation of “Michel” in this case? Why not “mickle”?
Well, Tolkien says of the Hobbit language only that it “has been entirely translated into English equivalents” and that all Hobbit “names and special words are to be pronounced accordingly” (in the aforementioned Appendix E).
The English surname “Michels” is pronounced, to the best of my knowledge, exactly as “Michaels” is. From this, I infer that “Michel Delving” is pronounced exactly as “Michael Delving” would be.
I have yet to hear a compelling argument for the “mickle” pronunciation (which is used by only one person, as far as I know).
Makes enough sense. There *is* an (archaic) English word, “mickle,” which argues the pronunciation could be legit (it means, as it seems to mean here, great, as in Ben Franklin’s thriftiness aphorism that “Many a nickel makes a mickle.”)
A quick googling:
http://community.codemasters.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-174196.html
http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Lore:Michel_Delving
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Journals/Journal/540676&caldate=2005-04-17%2023:00:00
Sentiment (and argument) seems split between “Mickle” (or perhaps “Michel” with a Scottish “ch”) and “Michael,” with a few “Meeshell” Francophones just to mess things up.
Ah! Very interesting!
I guess I’ll go with the Lorebook and pronounce it “Mitchell.”
After a bit of grinding, I have a Grand Master Farmer and a Grand Master Cook. It was tedious and expensive, but easy.
Now to start making pies for the Pie Maven title!
“MORE HOT PIES!”