Category: LotRO

Yeah, it’s been a couple of weeks

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.

 

LotRO – In Dwimmerdelf …

Volume II of LotRO is coming this Fall — Mines of Moria.

Speak Friend, and Enter – Moria, called Khazad-dûm by the dwarves, was their capital and the grandest of cities. This enormous underground cavern in north-western Middle-earth, comprises an immense network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls that run beneath and ultimately through the Misty Mountains. For the first time, players of The Lord of the Rings Online will enter this ancient city which has served as the foundation for the modern-day dungeon-crawling adventures to battle the hordes of goblins and the Nameless of the Deep and journey through hundreds of new quests within six new kinds of stunning environments.

 

Cooooool … new quests, new environments, new niftiness.

The Epic Continues! — The Mines of Moria represents the beginning of Volume II of The Lord of the Rings Online. Players can experience six new books as part of this update and participate in the release of Durin’s Bane, battle the Watcher, aid Galadriel and more!

 

Sounds keen!

Increased Level Cap — Players will be able advance their characters up to level 60, gaining access to new traits, virtues, skills and class quests. The crafting system will also expand, giving players the ability to craft even more powerful items.

 

 

Increased level cap good!

Discover Two New Classes — The Rune-keeper and the Warden, the first new classes to be introduced since the launch of the game, allow players to build exciting and powerful new characters in The Lord of the Rings Online in diverse new ways.

 

Interesting. Not clear (by name) what they new classes do, actually. But new classes are a good way to enable replayability, even of the older content.

Forge Legendary Items – The Mines of Moria will introduce Turbine’s new item advancement system to The Lord of the Rings Online. Players will be able to forge weapons and class-related equipment and evolve them to build a legacy the likes of Bilbo’s Sting and Gandalf’s Glamdring. These legendary weapons will level-up along with the player, allowing customization by advancing the item’s virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying its titles and forming fables.

 

Oh, spiffy. I love the idea of items that level up with you.

I’m new enough to the game to not quite understand why this is a new “volume” / “expansion” vs. being another “Book.”

There’s also some contest site to learn more and unlock this and that.   I will have to look at it.

LotRO: Fellowshipment

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.

LotRO: Getting the hang of things

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).

 

LotRO – Making life easier

Finally read through the Release Notes for Book 12, and discovered something I’d not read before.

  • Many Fellowship and Small Fellowship quests downgraded in difficulty to be Solo or Small Fellowship.
  • Several Instance and Escort quests reviewed and modified to be less difficult for solo players

    •  

    • Reading on, I saw that — as Margie had noticed last night when we finally went back to do it — the “Rescue by Moonlight” (rescue Avorthal from the boat in Khelondim, I believe it is) mission is among them (it’s now classifiable as doing by a solo level). “Hey,” she said, “they’re showing up as Normals, not Elites.”

    We rocked.

    Other nice QoL in the new Book is an option in the UI to “Always Loot All.” It makes the visibility of looted treasure a bit less — no icons, just text in the General tab — but it certainly speeds thing up.

    Other things worth noting (or that I’m taking particular note of):

    1. Reorg of the costume screen to support the new costume slot options — but with nice new buttons to allow toggling bits on and off.
    2. You can ranged auto-attack while moving (just at a hit minus). Hunters can move slightly further with reduced focus cost (1 focus per 3 seconds instead of per 1 second).
    3. Hunter melee skills damage up. yay! 
    4. Lots of Scholar recipes moved from Loot to Novice Scholar trainers. Hrm. Oh, and there are now difference sizes of Glass Phial (which I noticed inadvertently the other night).
    5. Lots of stat increases on quest reward items.

    Thirty-odd pages of release notes (though a lot of that is long lists of items). Worth reading if you’re a player.

    Jogging about Eriador

    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.

     

    GAME EXPERIENCE MAY CHANGE DURING ONLINE PLAY

    Weirdest splash screen message evah.

    Never saw this on CoX, but it shows up prominently in LotRO, and, gauging from Google, it shows up various other games. 

    My initial thought was that it was a warning about variable game performance, but evidently it’s an ESRB stock warning.

    Online games that include user-generated content (e.g., chat, maps, skins) carry the notice “Game Experience May Change During Online Play” to warn consumers that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB.

     

    I.e., LotRO is rated T-for-Teens …

    Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.

    … but some yahoo may come up with a character name or shout something on the Chat channel that is inappropriate for that rating (if it were part of the game content).  I guess.

    Seems weird — I mean, I’d assume that’s the case — but I suppose some folks need that warning.

    Money makes the world go around

    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.

    Meanwhile, back in Eriador …

    Though we keep talking about doing up some other duos (including reimagining Rita and Runt — Mistral/Guardian? Burglar/Champion? Elf/Dwarf? (“An elf?  Where?  Where?  Where’s the elf?”)), we continued moving along with Frelliel and Frellien, our elvish hunters — now around … 13? … and finally moving into Shire after waaaaaay too many unsuccessful attempts to duo a fellowship mish, even at teal.

    Still having fun.  And now that I’ve finally gotten to an auction house and see how it works — I seriously just need to sell a bunch of stuff I’ve been lugging around rather than wait to auction it.  I am strawberries-rich and silver-poor, such that I am behind on picking up some very valuable skills from the trainer (well, all those repair costs didn’t help, either).

    Costuming Options in LotRO

    One of CoX’s rightfully renowned strengths is its costume creator, with zillions of combos of outfts, accessories, body types, features, etc.  While there’s always “just one more thing” every player wants, it’s without a doubt one of the gems in CoX’s crown.

    LotRO is very pretty in many ways, but character customization is limited.   You have control over hair style and color, complexion, eye color, a couple of other things, but after that, the only variations are … what adventures you have.  Every class/race/gender starts off looking exactly alike, and based on the gear you pick up (or buy), you can change that.

    But it’s more complicated.  My elvish hunter, Frelliel, picked up a lovely plumed hat somewhere.  Loved it.  But eventually I had to give it up because, well, I picked up a stupid kind of hat that had much better armor rating.  Good-bye, plumed hat.

    Things get found of different colors, too.  Margie notes the “clown” effect — “why the heck am I wearing these purple shoes with this outfit.  Oh, yeah, they have a nice armor class and Agility bonus.”

    You do get one other level of customization — you can turn off helmets/hats (so that your bare hair is shown), cloaks (to admire your outfit), or boots (if you’re a hobbit) in the UI, which lets you keep the bonus, but tune the look just a bit.  It’s an imperfect solution, but that’s what you got.

    Enter Book 12, and Outfits.

    The goal of The Outfit System is fairly simple: Give players complete control over how they look in the game, without impacting the gameplay benefits they gain from their currently equipped items.  […] Now, as of Book 11 you already have your first Outfit. The Outfit System refers to that set of items you currently have equipped. That won’t be changing at all.

    What we’re unveiling in Book 12 is the ability for you to define two additional cosmetic appearances, called Outfits, for your character. These Outfits will override the visual appearance of your base Equipment.

    Now, it’s important to emphasize that these additional inventories are only cosmetic, and that your Equipment will continue to be the only items affecting your stats. With that said, once Book 12 goes live it’s really up to you as to how you want yourself to look in Middle-earth.

    Spiffy!

    Two extra outfit slots open at level 20.  If you pick it up (or buy it), you can make it part of an alternate outfit.  There will be some (reasonable) restrictions, but also the adding of a lot of various non-combat-related clothing items.  Excellent.

    Also being introduced is the Barber Shop, which lets you change some physical appearances — hair styles, facial details, etc., with various new ones of these also being added in.

    It doesn’t look nearly up to CoX level yet, but it’s a welcome addition to a good game.

    Other Book 12 patch notes info is here.

    (via Doyce)

    Fellowship of Three

    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.

    LotRO Playtest Continues

    Continued grinding things out wiith our human Cap/Champ combo.  Finished a big brigand finale (despite it being a Fellowship quest) through an effective combination of (a) reading a guide that noted a shortcut past some bad groups of bad guys, (b) following someone else in (inadvertently) who cleared a lot of the riff-raff, and (c) using the Map to exit after finishing off the head bad guy.

    Then ended up in another climactic brigand mission, this one an annoying combination of story-driven railroading (“Can’t act now — have to wait for NPCs to emote) and the opposite of our berserker Ranger from the other night — a very slow-moving lady who, once rescued, insisted on snail-pacing her way through various caverns of bad guys, just in time for them to wake up (“Lady, listen, I’ll bloody carry you, okay?”).

    When we picked up again last night, we were starting a new duo to see how it went — a pair of Elvish Hunters.  Got through the 1-5 content with no problem, and were making decent progress with the 6-10.  Hunters are fun — if nothing else, they let you be lazy and draw the bad guys to you, often with entertaining results.  And they’re not quite as squishy as blasters are, either, which was my initial impression.

    I’m enjoying the elvish content, even if is relentlessly depressing (these guys could teach Marvin the Robot a lesson or two about wistful moroseness).  And, of course, it occurs to me that I found the Shire bits of LotR to be the least interesting in the books, too, so maybe that’s a clue I should pick up.

    We have a couple more days on the trial accounts, and I’m not sure we’re hooked enough to go for it.  I find the story-driven missions to be pretty keen, though that isn’t grabbing Margie the same way at all.  We’re probably spending more time kvetching over things than waxing enthusiastic over them.  I’m enjoying it more than Margie, but it’s not yet grabbing us by the noses and making us want to play it full-time.

    We’ll see.

    Meanwhile, back in Combe …

    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.”