Category: Gameplay

I haven’t actually been doing any online gaming in the interval — travel, illness, more travel, holidays, just not been in a gaming sort of mood.

Margie has been plugging away solo in both systems in the interval, though. Her Hobbit thief is up to 26.

My play drought might be shifting, though. Margie and I did some LotRO last night (let me say, I think Weathertop is faboo, visually), and I’m feeling a yen for some CoX building up in me (esp. to do some of the new I12 power combos and see what they’ve done in the Hollows — except that I12 isn’t in beta yet).

Chatting with Margie yesterday, she opined that one of the frustrations she finds is that you really need to stop active adventuring about an hour before you need to get away from the keyboard — since it take that long to (a) get someplace safe, (b) check mail, (c) hit up contacts you need to hit up, (d) sell stuff that you want to sell (to get things out of your pack, and to earn enough to spend on needful activities), (e) craft stuff you need to craft (to get things out of your pack), (f) put things up for auction that you’ve acquired or crafted (again, to get things out of your pack and to earn vital money).

While the same is true to a lesser degree in CoX (Wentworths can easily be a half hour visit every session), it’s less so because (a) you don’t really have to craft in CoX if you don’t want to, and (b) encumbrance / pack overflow is far less of an issue in CoX than in LotRO.

And, yeah, that is a bit annoying.

More as I ponder it.

Played a few hours of LotRO last night with our elf Huntesses and a Captain/Minstrel duo that Doyce and Kate were running. Amazing how, in non-scaled missions, having twice the members, a melee guy (plus pet), ranged-attack folks who get to attack at range, and a healer/buffer, can make a difference in mission success …

Plus it was fun hearing a musical coda to each battle.

Cleared some brigand and barrow missions which would have been tough on our own (as we’d already discovered on one mish). And it was fun to do some more group stuff. Thanks, guys — let’s do it again some time soon.

Been sort of slowly getting into the groove of LotRO, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, learning how much crafting / auctioning drives me nuts and how much just adds some change to my pocket. Becoming comfortable with death defeat and figuring out how much we can bite off to chew and all that.

Our Loremaster duo is up to 13, which is where our original Cap/Champ pair were when we got tired of them. I feel like the LMs are a lot more enjoyable (in a game with excessive running around, ranged attacks are da bomb). Our Hunter duo is at 19 now, and doing well, too (see previous note).

Margie is doing a fair amount of solo play; I occasionally get on for that, but it’s really about fourth on my list of things to burn my spare time.

I remain fairly happy with the game — not obsessive, but it makes for a pleasant passtime to leaven the TV schedule (or vice-versa).

Took the Elfgirls off to the Lone-Lands. One of the things I love about LotRO is just the richness of the terrain. In LotR, we catch just glimpses, the major stopping points and places of battle and the camps where dialog occurs. Part of that is that Tolkien portrayed much of the North as desolate wasteland after the fall of Arnor, but part is just the result of any novel — you don’t see what you don’t need to see.

Here, instead, off east of Bree, we have a semi-ruined inn, the fringes of a society being slowly pushed back by incursions of goblins. We have the remains of a fortress (complete with a “Minas” name), and backstory, and a combination of both the epic and the mundane, hints of what’s happening in the big picture even as we help Joe Yokel reestablish his supply chain back go Bree.

We went to the Forsaken Inn simply to close off a quest, but it’s hard not to click on all those shiny ring contacts, and, hey, we can do these three or four things all together without any trouble, right, and that would let us do this and that, and, wait, they want us to also go back and collect …

So we visited Minas Eriol a couple of times, only getting defeated once. We’ve learned to go slow and steady, and Hunters rock in terms of being able to (usually) pick the field of combat, which is fine until the little goblin bastards repop on top of you. 

If I have a criticism of the evening, it’s the necessity to allocate time at the end of the evening to go sell, level, auction, craft, etc. That’s true in CoX, too, of course — even moreso since the auction houses opened — but it seems moreso here. That said, I am sort of working my way to a sweet spot with what I want to be bothered with, and what I don’t. (Margie’s comment, dragging herself up to bed a bit after I was up there, was that she either had to spend an hour doing all the logiistics/management stuff at the end, or spend an hour in bed thinking about what she was going to do when she got back on next).

Overall, a good time. And beginning to think, parenthetically, of the whole Kinship schtick, and to what degree I might have an interest in our characters getting involved in something a bit bigger than the two of us. There would certainly be times when it would be convenient, or a break from our (very effective and enjoyable) duoing.

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.

Got an invitation last night by e-mail to do some fellowshippy stuff in LotRO with Doyce and Kate, so made preps to do so.  Kate, alas, suffered from technical difficulties, but Doyce got on and he brought an added Champ of the same level to join our Cap/Champ combo.

And, yes, it was a lot of fun.  We had to backtrack one mish in the epic storyline, but that wasn’t that big a deal, then we proceeded with it, and eventually it brought us to the “berserker Ranger you have to run ahead of to keep safe” mish, which we managed to pull off with only a minor misstep or two.

In the meantime, we were picking Doyce’s brains for gameplay advice, tips of this and that sort, and so forth.  We had the voice chat enabled, which made that a lot easier.

We played around three hours or so, then called it a night.  Many thanks to Doyce for the drive-along.

Tonight’s the last full night of the trial period.  Still not sure what we’re doing, but I feel like we’ve given it a good try-out.  We’ll see.

Finally got back to LotRO yesterday, after a few day of conflicting evening activities.  In the afternoon I did some solo play, learning about things on the short, stocky side with a dwarf named Frellin.

In the evening, Margie and I continued our Rohirrim Champ/Cap combo.  Not quite as easy in the 10-11 range.  First we decided to thrash out the crafting system to fulfill a couple of crafting missions we’d picked up (I was tempted to shout “Wood for Sheep” several times). 

After that, we had a big mission up dealing with brigands in the northern Chetwoods.  And … hit a wall.  Or, rather, the ground, being defeated something like four times.  Ugh.  We’re still dealing with “scaling” problems with LotRO vs CoX — a group of four opponents, even blue ones, can be a serious threat, my healing morale abilities are fairly limited, and it’s way too easy to draw a crowd, with less-than-salutary results.

*sigh*

I note that, unlike an instanced mission setting (like CoX), the mobs don’t scale except to the general level of the population in the area.  So a duo is under definite disadvantages vs. a larger fellowship.

Anyhow, decided to come back a level later, and instead pursued some mishes on the other end of town, including one that took us down toward Bree.  Bree!  Huzzah!  The Big City!  Garsh!

Found trainers.  Hey!  I have one of those goofy Heralds now!  Yay!

Wandered about there a bit and … yow, the Prancing Pony!  And … tucked in a back room, it’s Strider!  Zowee!  And he’s sending us on a mission (that we seem to have missed some prereqs to, but never mind).  Investigate the brigand’s castle and find the source of terror!  Protect the insane Ranger assigned to us as he lunges from mob to mob at full tilt and is immune to my morale powres!  Rerun the mission multiple times trying to get him alive through the fearful brigands!  Make some great progress, then during one of the Ranger’s few resting moments wander about to clean up the courtyard and get mobbed by a dozen brigands!  Discover yourself outside Bree again and with the mission restarted.

*sigh*

Seemed a good time to call it an evening.  Or, rather, I did while Margie did some quick research on the quests we’d been flubbing.

Frustrating, but good times.

I don’t know which was the most amusing online chatter we saw — the guy asking “Where are the trinkets in the Barrow Downs” (which just made me giggle — “Hey, let’s go to the Barrow Downs and pick up some trinkets, maybe a snow globe or a charm for my braclet, or even a ‘We broke into Barrow and lost half our party and all I got was this rotting t-shirt” t-shirt), or the folks who were consistently challenged spelling “Minstrel” and “Guardian.”