I was a beta player, and subscribed/paid/played for the first 5 or 7 years (always regretted not jumping on the lifetime deal). I stopped playing for a few years, back when level cap was 85 pre-Rohan. I jumped back in about a year ago, and leveled my toons up to 105 and grinded out the Skoironk/Towers of Teeth daily instances for a couple of months before I realized I wasn’t really getting anywhere, and I wasn’t really having fun anymore.
I’ve uninstalled the game, and jumped into my Steam backlog, starting with Shadow of Mordor. I will probably get sucked back into LOTRO again, but not for 40 bucks. And definitely not for $130.
Turbine typically discounted the expansions quite a bit on Black Friday. I’ll check back then,
I’ve been VIP since 2007. I’m another one who regretted not dropping $200 for lifetime 6 or so years ago.
I’ve never had to pay extra for quest packs, but I did buy the main expansions (Moria, Rohan, Helm’s Deep), and usually I bought the special editions.
But the prices beyond the Standard Edition for this are ridiculous. I’ll just get that.
For an extra $40, you get
A new race…at this point I have no interest in starting a new character…I already have 8 (including mules).
Cosmetics…I’ve never had an interest in those, except for those I got in-game (Grey Company, Prisoner of Isengard)
Title…who cares ?
Mount … Does it go 5x as fast ? No info given. If not, just another cosmetic.
And for an extra $80. you get the above worthless (to me) stuff plus more junk I’ve never cared about. I’m already VIP, so a month of that is nothing. 10 extra shared storage is nice, but it’s not $80 worth of points. 3 relics is meaningless after years of deconstructing legendary items, and they don’t even say what level they are. Housing teleport…don’t we already have that?. XP accelerator…I usually have my XP disabler equipped so that I don’t out-level my zone, even with my lvl 100 characters.
Throw 1000 to 2000 points into the mix and THEN maybe it starts to make sense.
Just re-installed and hopped in… have nearly 30K turbine points to spend. Hmmm…
However, I had previously moved my toons to a different server after consolidation and I can’t remember which one. I jumped into the first server listed, Gladdon, and had none there. Is there any way to see what I have on the various servers?
EDIT: Nevermind, I found them on Landroval. Where do folks here play?
Many of us are now on Arkenstone. The QT3 Kinship was ported there as well, so you can port over your characters (I’m pretty sure you can still do this for free) and post their names here and any of us who are online can toss a kinship invite out to you.
As much as I’d like to see Mordor someday, I know it’s going to take me 3 years to get there so there’s no hurry in buying the expansion. I still don’t have any character over 100 (my highest is like 95), and the really awful performance of the client once you get to those higher-level areas keeps dulling my enthusiasm. I just can’t stand rubberbanding around the landscape. It’s killing my mimesis.
[quote=“charmtrap, post:3345, topic:59553”]
I just can’t stand rubberbanding around the landscape
[/quote]Charm, the rubberbanding is, as far as I can tell, pretty much restricted to the warsteed. The speed of that mount is just a bit too fast for the engine to keep up. I suspect that’s the reason why the fastest regular mount is only +68%.
The “workaround” for that is to get the hell through Rohan as quickly as you can, get yourself a 68% mount and really only use the warsteed for long travels across open terrain.
Remember, this game – and the codebase supporting it – is 10 years old. Truly, it looks and runs amazing, considering.
Been playing again lately. This past week I finally finished all the remaining Books/Chapters for the Shadows of Angmar Part 2 Epic line. Woohoo! As a reward, I received a bunch of nice items, including the Gray Steed mount. Thanks to the quests (and loot gathered while performing them), I also obtained Kindred with Council of the North, and was able to add both their reputation mounts to my stable as well. Sadly all three mounts were 62%, so I’ll still be riding my 10th Anniversary mount for the foreseeable future as it’s the only 68% mount I own.
Tons of Legendary Item experience is gained doing those later epic quests as well, which means my LIs are progressing nicely. At level 57 with decently leveled equipment, I’m ready to burn a path through Moria. But first I am going to clean up a dozen or so loose end quests and slayer deeds in places like Evendim, Misty Mountains, Forochel, Angmar and Eregion. That will keep me on my goal of “turning the lights out” on old zones as I move forward, and grant me hundreds more LOTRO points towards the purchase of quest packs for zones I still need beyond Rohan.
I still haven’t managed to figure out how to find the path to The Rift, the only Stablemaster I still need to unlock in the original SoA world. I also need to figure out where to kill the undead needed for the Evendim slayer deed. The only places that seem to contain them are Annuminas instances, and that will require a group even at 57 I’d imagine. I’ll have to check it out and see what happens. Everything else is just a numbers game, made easier by popping a reputation accelerator, a couple of which I’ve been hanging onto for just this occasion.
It’s going to be a fun weekend of slaying things and cleaning up the quest/deed log. =)
Afraid I am off on holiday this weekend, otherwise I would see if I could join you to hammer out some of those deeds.
Just skipped Mirkwood to follow and help the grey company on their journey to join Aragorn. I am enjoying the set of support quests, and that zone, much more than I did the dark and depressing forest my warden is stuck in.
Kindred with all of the Eriador factions also gets you a 68% steed Item:Steed of Eriador - Lotro-Wiki.com
But you won’t see that until you wander pretty far past Moria. It’s good that they provided a fast steed for long-time players who haven’t gone deeper into the game yet. Just because one has played for 10 years doesn’t mean that one has played nonstop for those 10 years.
I’m also a 10-year player, and I’m only at lvl 100 …very recently… in Western Gondor. Unfortunately on Gladden, to where I transferred from Nimroedel when it closed because I didn’t know better.
My highest level is 62, and I’ve been a player for a little over 9 years by now, so yeah - that IS great. A shame the expansion is delayed, but then again, better to get all the details in proper places!
SSG is just squashing all the micro-bugs and updating some scripts they haven’t touched since 2005. Tomorrow morning they will do the final compile, write the manual and it should be good to go!
Sorry…Grimoire humor, I couldn’t resist.
Oh, and over the weekend I ended up with far less playtime than I’d originally planned, so I only managed to get about halfway through the slayer deeds in Misty Mountains. It’s a little nuts that half of them are for 150 (total) Elite level mobs, and the other half are for 300 (total) regular mobs. I hope the deeds in Moria and beyond don’t increase exponentially like the old world deeds. I don’t want to kill 1000 of something for 10 lousy LOTRO Points!
So the Mordor update went live yesterday. I couldn’t tell you anything about the new content since my highest level character is only 57, but I can say I had a good laugh at the new avatar models on the character select screen.
My Hunter looks like he just finished a 30-day cleanse diet. His head is narrower, cheeks sunken and neck slimmer. Clicking the avatar models on and off was like “before! after! before! after!”. The Champion, my main character, didn’t lose any weight, but has a very nice beach tan now and somehow his eyes are sunken in more and closer together, giving him a permanent “angry” appearance. I’m not really sure what the main purpose behind the “improvement” was supposed to be, but it’s more comical than it is pretty.
They have also changed the theme music on the character select screen. Instead of rotating through the three original tunes, it now plays a single modified version of the last song from the previous trio. While the new version is very well produced, it’s also somewhat slow and melancholy. It’s a minor nitpick to be sure, but after 10 years I still would get an excited feeling logging in and hearing the rousing main theme strike up, and I’d often linger on the character select screen when logging in or out to hear the Tom Bombadil theme excerpt that would play after the main theme. Both are gone now, and I wish already that there was a way to bring them back.
Yeah, it sure ain’t Blizzard or ESO-level quality. They’re apparently focusing their limited resources on the game, not ad videos. Which makes sense… I doubt they’re drawing many new players regardless of what expansion videos they make. I figure they just felt they had to put something out.
But if they are focusing resources, messing around with avatar models seems to me to be a waste of them. I haven’t noticed that since I’ve only been playing a hobbit and I don’t think they’ve changed those.
Ah, whatever. As long as the game stays alive, I’ll keep paying.
If you got the Mordor expansion, you get a level boost, but it looks like they aren’t necessarily being delivered… no rush, here, but probably a bummer for folks looking to skip to the new stuff.
Turned the lights out on Misty Mountains over the weekend (good thing all those dwarves, goblins and wargs can see in the dark!). I had a pair of quests left in Goblintown to kill the Great Goblin (wasn’t that an unreleased Peanut’s special?) and his pet warg, and Rakothurz and his pet troll, Horm. I was able to solo them all finally, and thus finished off the last of my Misty Mountains quests. I then spent some time slicing my way through dozens of trolls, wargs and snow beasts to finish off slayer deeds, gain Slayer of the Misty Mountains which in turn finished off Deeds of the Misty Mountains. The end result was a ton of Marks, around 50 LOTRO points and a Dwarf-Steelbound Lootbox and Sturdy Steel Key to open it with.
I opened the Lootbox and discovered…some 5% attack damage temporary buffs and a Tome of Agility II. Even though they are common, I love the 5% attack damage buffs, as I combine them with the also common Scroll of Max Morale and Power pretty much any time I’m in an area with creatures that are at or around my level and the combination provides a noticeable boost to my combat abilities. Anytime I can add to my stock of either item I am pretty happy.
The Tome of Agility II is useless to me right now because I don’t have the Tome of Agility I and you need to use them in order. Into the bank it went until I find or purchase a Tome of Agility I. I did score 15 Mithril off another lootbox recently, so 15 more and I can simply purchase the Tome off a vendor. The only one available in the AH was 250 GP, which seems ridiculously overpriced.
Anyway, after some bank space rearranging and a quick stop at the barber to fix my perpetually petulant new face (since the avatar updates), it was off to Evendim and Annuminas to finish off my only two slayer deeds remaining there, Trolls and The Dead. Trolls are easy, but there are only a handful of them in Annuminas (outside the instances). The Dead only count when killed inside an Annuminas instance, so I delved into Haudh Valandil to hunt some Limrafn. You can’t let the Limrafn touch you, or they despawn into three Spectral Warriors which are Elites and much harder to kill (learned that the hard way, though I did survive, and the Warriors count towards the deed too). The end result is that next time I am going to need to pop a slayer acceleration tome and spend 90 minutes cleaning up trolls and Limrafn…after which I should be done or very close to done with Evendim as well.
You’re going to burn yourself out with completing all the deeds, especially once you get into Moria, Lothlorien, Rohan and beyond. I did…and I left for about 2 years as a result.
Playing styles vary I know… I am also a completionist. But like you I’m also not a 10-hr-per-day crazy MMORPG player. My advice is to follow the story and associated side-quests. If you’re good to go for Moria, go. Move forward. There are going to be opportunities to go back to the old places and finish deeds as you go forward (no spoilers).
