FYI, I also really liked the Wildermore zone that straddles the Rohan and Helm’s Deep expansions. That may have actually been responsible for keeping me in the game.
Yeah, that story line was entertaining.
Horse combat in LOTRO is a travesty… it is horrible and the reason I cant play it. So fucking laggy even on a ramdrive with 7GB/s transfer rate and 0ms latency.
Why the hell they are still in a 32-bit engine is beyond me.
If anyone from Turbine or wtf they call themselves now wonder why I’ve stopped playing
- Performance is shit when mounted
- There is 1000000000000 trash items to collect and my inventory (although upgraded to max) still doesn’t have room for all the task items and whatever, even with the 50 item “overflow” (great idea) thing.
Apparently Mounted Combat is only good for Hunters.
I got a Burglar and Minstrel up to over 100 and mounted combat wasn’t great. Although the Burg has a neat War steed utility ability to disguise as an enemy on horse-back. It made questing in heavily saturated enemy areas a lot easier.
I thought Captains had some advantage? I’ll be straight I always leveled to around Rohan back in the day and just left off at mounted combat. Though I miss lotro sometimes.
Hunter and Captain probably best for leveling due to all their travel skills, but Burglar is great for everything that isn’t a raid cause of Stealth. I miss our old Conjuction “exclusiveness”.
The Disguise as enemy on horseback is great on Burglar also, … only shame that mounted combat sucks due to the engine being terrible at asset loading/unloading or whatever the hell it is trying to do.
I should probably get back into LOTRO for a bit, but with Destiny 2 adding new events all the time I have no time for two “projects”.
I’ve still been playing this, to my embarrassment. An hour most days, occasionally two. And in the past 2 years it’s mainly been the burglar I started way back when QT3 had a short-term guild on Nimrodel. Now lvl 107 in The Wastes. As you note, it’s a great solo class since you can stealth past what you want to ignore.
I stand by my complaints about how the game is now pushing you toward unreasonable grind and/or store purchases. But one pleasant surprise…after reading the last few posts, I dusted off my maxed-out heavy steed after a year or two, and found that I could demolish on-level landscape elites with almost no damage even though they were a close fight when on foot.
I think the game peaked at Isengard. Flat out.
The areas are good. All the instances are interesting and really great. It pre-dates warsteeds.
It is only a shame that more people are not running that content. Also the burglars Conjuction “exclusiveness” is at its apex with that dragon boss.
I never got past Moria, and even then–10 years ago–there were parts of the game (e.g. Angmar) that were almost deserted because of new content. It’s amazing that the game is still going.
Moria, while being a huge grind, still is a testament to how well Turbine could design zones. The lack of mounted travel and the slow leveling pace was abysmal but my God the maps were beautiful.
I would say this is a big problem with MMOs like LOTRO. The most active player base is always just grinding the latest high level content while all the old stuff only has a trace amount of players. This is a particular problem with Angmar though because you can avoid the area entirely if you want to.
I’m now guessing that this may be SSG’s idea behind the legendary servers, even with their adoption of the most recent game mechanics.
It doesn’t appeal to me, as an 11-year vet who hasn’t even entered Mordor, because I’m still catching up to 2-year-old content… I don’t figure it will appeal to completely new players because I don’t think anyone who isn’t already playing it even knows it exists. Maybe old-timers with a nostalgia itch…but then I keep coming back to the fact that a group of like-minded nostalgia buffs can just choose to replay the old content on level with the existing servers.
Even when Moria is now pretty old I could still see people advertising groups to farm them for Deeds though, so I guess there is still a chance to get stuff done. Although it would’ve been even better if they added more incentives for highlevels to actually do these old dungeons just through a queue, maybe by giving them ‘their level’ mats/gear to “mentor” lower level players - Rift has had such a system in place for years and surprised not many others haven’t added it also.
Alternatively, the DDO route of offering 3 difficulty levels for instances, so you could solo, normal or hardcore stuff. LOTRO is best with a full group, but, if you cant find one, at least they should let you ‘get shit done’, like they did with a lot of the books.
This reminds me, I should get back into the game.
If you have a audio card with ‘loudness equalization’ or similar, I recommend you enable it before entering Moria, it changes the entire ‘feel’ of the place. - or just have it enabled always. A lot of sound effects (ambience in particular) seems to me to be way too quiet without it enabled.
And yea; get ReShade.
DTG I agree with you. I played up until horses. I do believe Moria was an epic achievement in an MMO as well.
Though I originally liked legendary weapons I think I have grown to dislike them. Just hard to keep track of and the constant inundation of them made it hard to believe in the fiction.
It seems to me that Guild Wars 2 has avoided this to a degree (granted, there is so much content in the game that I’m sure there are places where few people are around). Between daily quests and collections and zone completion rewards, it seems you can’t go many places in the world without running into at least a couple of other people.
Last time I “paused” I was nearly finished with Moria, which was an epic achievement that took me 11 years to finally get to that point. With all the changes to the game, I never once had any insurmountable issues soloing my way from the mid-30’s (which was the last time I adventured with a group) through the mid-60’s. Perhaps that changes in Rohan and Gondor, but from everything I’ve read it seems like they made the game very solo-friendly over time to compensate for the lack of people playing at lower levels. As my posts from earlier this year attest to, Moria has certainly become far more solo-friendly and just more fun overall than it was originally.
I think that LOTRO avoids some of the “empty areas” feeling present in other MMOs by virtue of it’s atmosphere. I’ve spent entire nights adventuring solo in regions and not minded one bit because I’m spending part of my time wandering and looking around all googly-eyed at people and places straight out of the LotR lore. There is a sense of immersion in much of LOTRO that doesn’t require anyone else to be there, and if you don’t need anyone else to complete your quests/tasks, then you don’t notice the absence of other folks quite so much. Of course, it’s no longer really an MMO at that point, more like an online single player RPG…but I don’t mind that so much.
Because I am a glutton for punishment I played this some over the weekend.
The quest line of Mirkwood broke. I entered Mirkwood and was given a quest to look for berries in bat shite for some reason. I did so and completed that quest. There was no other quest forthcoming and I could not find my way back to the original Ent who gave the quest because Mirkwood is confusing and difficult to navigate (as it should be). I saw Orc camps and other areas in there so I have to believe there was a whole quest line regarding the Ents. For anyone who has been in there, what happens after the bat shite?
Other notes:
- Bag space is still a big issue. This is a battle I am constantly fighting and that is with expansions purchased to the bank and bags.
- I have run across almost no one on Brandywine. In fact, it was actually startling to see another player in Snowbourn. If I port to Bree I see players but other than that I will often not see another player for hours.
- The world is still gorgeous. I particularly like the Sutcrofts for some majestic vistas. Mirkwood (from what I saw of it) was accurately represented. I did the book quest for Chapter 9 and got my first glimpse into Edoras and the Golden Hall was amazing.
- The map is overly large. I appreciate the attempt to size the zones accordingly but when one looks at the map for Ered Luin and then Rohan they are certainly not to scale.
- Mounted combat still sucks.
- It is strange that my Rohan expansion did not include Wildermore. But from what I have read I am not missing much so I will do the book quests there and move on.
Been a long time since I fired up LOTRO, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it and wish I could give it more time. The mounted combat really killed my drive to play the game. Not sure how much that still plays a role, but it’s what got me to stop and give other games like ESO a chance to creep in to the limited MMO time that I have.
When I think of my time playing LOTRO I just feel fatigued. It’s a hamster wheel IMO. Pointless effort with no real payoff. Meh.
Yak before you give up. Can we all agree? Lotto online was a great mmo/
Maybe I should guardian up and play until the finale?
Gywnahir Officer in runic knights in the old school way of playing. May be some fun left.