1621

The faction… houses, or whatever they are called, also tend to have a few special cosmetics for sale. They require you to be an ally (or maybe just friend?) of the faction in question to wear them though.

1622

I think I’m fizzing out now Nimrodel way. Other games are calling to me. I’ll log Brombor in on occasion but the schwerpunkt is gone. Mass Effect 2 PS3. Several PSP games. Achtung Panzer on the PC. Must be gaming elsewhere.

1623

Aw. You burned out chasing Rudo, didn’t you. :P At least stop by to play a ditty from time to time.

I think I’m about to hit a small, Bree-shaped block where my 3 new alts converge (from Shire, Ered Luin, and Lesser Bree-land, so I’ve been varied so far) and might have to focus on my Hunter who’s now in the North Downs to avoid burnout through repetition. That alone is making me start glancing at other games because otherwise I’ve been having a blast with all of my characters.

1624

Dammit I re-VIP’d again. Just didn’t want to hassle paying separately for Skirmishes and the rest of the area quests >:(

1625

I am still playing this game… on Nimrodel. Going to roll a warden soon.

1626

I’m thinking of doing the same myself soon to break up going through Moria shortly. Seems like a lot of fun to play. We can take on the barrow downs together.

1627

I rolled one last night and, holy shit, Warden’s are fun.

Behold Babur!

babur01.JPG669×719

babur02.JPG741×715

1628

I just rolled a champion a few nights ago to play with my brother who just signed up for an account (hunter), we are lvl 9 and 11 respectively, looking forward to the barrows again, love that zone. Id also love to get some lvl~50 qt3 folks together for a urugarth and carn dum run sometime, I need some drops for the class quest, plus they sound like a lot of fun.

Francis, aka Nybbles

1629

I just got to Moria a few days ago, and it is indeed vast and dwarfish. But man, does the area scream out for some WoW-style phasing. Entering the mines I got the feeling the dwarves were already everywhere, and I was just cleaning up behind them. There’s no real sense of gradually expanding from the initial foothold.

And for as much as the dwarves like mining and engineering, they designed a lackluster public transportation system.

1630

The Quarter To Three Minecraft server is an unreasonable standard to hold mine-related content to!

1631

Wow, so I remember people saying the level 45 class quests were annoying, but I didn’t get the full picture until working on them a little over the weekend. Fetch and collect quests! Such bliss, and at this point (level 51) there isn’t much point for the rewards now that I already have my first LI.

I also officially started up an alt this weekend with my Warden (Cindamir of Gondor) and have been having a blast with him so far.

1632

There’s one reason to do class quests now: to get a legendary trait, one of seven total per class is only available by finishing the class quests.

I can’t recall what legendary is unlocked by each class. These range from must-have to meh, depending on the state of the game and how you play. Examples:
Minstrel gets Fellowship’s Heart (30 seconds of a super-strong heal going off, excellent to fire off just before you die), which I’ve permanently slotted. Especially useful in raids or 6-man groups, as it’s a group (not raid-wide) heal. Was essential for most Nornuan raid groups (the big Turtle in the Waterworks late in MoM-era) and especially in early SoA 6-man groups for Carn Dum and the Rift. Hasn’t scaled well with the inflated morale pools since launch, but still an essential tool for group healing.

Burglars get stick-and-move (evades open your crit chain now, which basically permanently keeps it open if solo). Much better back when you could get 25% evade as a base, but it synergizes well with touch-n’-go’s 50% evade for 30 seconds when you solo a tough enemy. Mostly useless in groups as the burglar isn’t the main or off-tank class of choice (back when you could get 25% evade, 25% parry back in SoA days plus 50% evade from touch-n’-go, burglars were the supreme off-tanking class to pick up unexpected adds until the guardian could grab aggro, but have a strict, short time limit on how long they can stay alive without heals, unlike guardians).

Champions get Controlled Burn, an improved fervour stance. Nerfed over the years, was best back at the MoM launch where ‘fervour tanking’ really meant controlled burn tanking. You get to B/P/E while getting the DPS of fervour stance; duration has been cut severely, used to last as long as you were in combat.

Captains get In Defense of Middle Earth. +50 to all stats. Again, less good now vs. launch as it hasn’t scaled with level inflation (should be +N for level N of the captain to scale…).

Hunters get Bow of the Righteous: you get power back every bow shot. It’s a super-important legendary for hunters, especially in strength stance, or you will run out of power in no time flat.

Guardians: To The King. Potential FM starter, good damage, never leave home without it.

Loremasters get the Eagle pet. Was best in SoA, now rarely seen due to the introduction of the new pets. Has a chance to rez you if you die and it’s still alive, but only a chance.

Warden/RK: NO CLUE.

tl;dr: it’s worth doing the level 45 class quests for most classes in lotro, and you can just run skirmishes to buy (all of?) the items now, so no excuse not to.

tl;tl;dr;dr: oh god I didn’t have to look any of that up, and I haven’t really played in a year. Shoot me now.

1633

I’m picking up my Legendary now for my 47 Hunter and it’s not very horrible at all to be honest, even if I’m just starting Phase 2. As dwolfe says, Bow of the Righteous seems to be pretty durn crucial and as I’m STILL missing one gorram page for two of my three books I just want to get something to put in that empty slot. Plus, Hunters are pretty much made to airdrop into a zone, pick off a specific target or ten and then just leave unnoticed so it’s actually kinda fun.

That said, getting that bow would have been awesome, had it not been for the fact that I’ve been using my LI since lvl 45.

Speaking of which. I got my LI bow at 45, it zoomed up to lvl 10 in no time at all, I “reforged” or whatever I was supposed to do and it’s now lvl 13. Seeing as I won’t get another LI bow at least until I enter Moria, is there anything I should be aware of here? I remember seeing advice to deconstruct or reforge once it reaches lvl 20, but what if I’m still to enter Moria at that point?

1634

The warden legendary is pretty worthless, unfortunately. It’s supposed to give us an uber attack style that combines all of the advantages of our other styles (we have 3 and have to pick one to be up any given time). Unfortunately it can only be up some of the time (it has a cooldown) and it doesn’t benefit from any of our LI Legacies that buff those abilities. :-( Warden traits aren’t that amazing in general (there are very few “must haves”, if any) but this still isn’t worth it.

I still got it just to get the quests done but … yeah.

1635

Actually, the advice was NOT to reforge it at lvl 20 ;-) The idea is, if you reforge it, you’ll loose out on the slotted relics and cant get them out until the weapon is lvl 30 which will take quite a while.

As for the class quest, I sincerely hate them…I just want to move forward and enter Moria, instead of having to spend time in the Cauldron of Timewasting that the Class quest is.

Also, to get the final class quest part done, I need either to run a 6 man instance, or to buy it off the skirmish trainer for like 4000 Skirmish marks, which will take forever to get.

Frankly, as a guardian, I’ll let this one go.

1636

Doing some research myself into my RK’s final series of quests, I realized the same thing. As much fun as it is trying to coral 5 other people into an instance they don’t need or probably don’t want to do just for my benefit, maybe I can see if I can get it from the AH, or just someday when I’m bored in the future grind out skirmishes for the items.

Onwards to Moria! (Sorry Volume 1. I’m really tired of Angmar and all the fetch quests sending me everywhere. I enjoy the story, but I hate Angmar. Don’t worry! I’ll come back and do you someday!)

1637

I actually have a few major items for class quests taking up space in my inventory. Which ones do you need? (Having to do deeds in CD/Uru managed to build my stockpile up). Getting the major items on-level is a task but at level 65 I was able to duo Helchgam.

1638

Generally speaking you either want to deconstruct at level 2 (to maximize runes received if you have a good supply of trash LI’s) or you want to get to some level that is divisible by 10, reforge to get back your runes, then level it once more before deconstructing. Do the latter if you want to maximize the XP item you get and other rewards as there is a big jump at every N*10+1 levels (11, 21, 31, etc.). Eventually you’ll want to do that with level 60+ LI’s, taking them to 31+ in order to start getting some Legendary Fragments for creating 2nd Age LI’s.

edit: reading your original post it sounds like you know this but I’ll leave it posted in case someone else is interested.

1639

Aha. Thanks for the reply Razgon, I’ll make sure to not reforge it then. In fact, I just checked and it seems that I also need to run those two lvl 50 instances (Carn Dûm and Urugarth) to fulfill my class quest. Which leads me to this rather silly question; why? It’s a class quest I undertake to “prove” that I, ME, am a Legendary Hunter, not that I have good social skills.

I don’t know. Sometimes I think this game doesn’t want me to play it.
There is simply no, I repeat no, chance in hell I’ll ever get 5 others to complete those quests with me on Withywindle. So many other really cool quests that I won’t finish just because I’m not playing with lots of friends or a big Kinship.
The Seven Swords. The Sword That Was Broken and a few others I’ve had to cancel. And now I won’t be able to get the must-have Legendary Trait unless I grind out a gazillion Skirmish Marks which I don’t enjoy. At all.
And the main quest - I’m on-level and have been careful with not jumping ahead (other than the LI) and am at the end of Book 7. Out of 15! So, at lvl 48 and with a gazillion hours played I’m halfway to Moria when it comes to moving the story forward as intended/designed?
I don’t know. Sometimes I think this game doesn’t want me to play it.

1640

Go to Goblin Town in MM, and anywhere with humanoids in West Angmar and just grind some kill deeds and you’ll get that last page within the hour, and have made a ton of $ for your level.

Start scouting your Auction House now for level 51 bows and main-hand weapons. It will take a fair bit of time to level them to be better than your starter LI (most of a level while questing normally, less if you have some ixp pills saved up).

The class-quest items were probably in the top half-dozen weapons for each class at launch, and have sadly never been upgraded. I’d love to see them altered to be an alternate ‘starter’ LI with even better stats than the current starter one (maybe level 51 DPS stats, but with an extra guaranteed legacy over normal third-age LI’s).

<old>Itemization ever since MoM launched LI’s has been screwy, doubly so with how trivial it is to craft critted one-shot items for every slot with the introduction of crafting guilds and mithril flakes dropping from ore nodes. Getting the item for a single chance at maybe critting a one-shot recipe (oh, you need to get that recipe as a rare world drop, too!) was a morale-building exercise where kinds would have to group up and earn the items

On pages: back in SoA launch era, rather than dropping zone-wide, pages for each class dropped from a specific group of no more than 20 mobs in a small subsection of a zone. And that’s just for four of the eight pages you need, each zone. The drop rate was also atrocious. I spent about 8 hours total in a full fellowship killing the morrivals in that one canyon in southwest Angmar (being the only high level Minstrel in the kin, which meant I was the only healer they had, period).

Note: not solo, this was a full 6-man group killing each spawn as it came up (I couldn’t solo even a single one with a launch-era minstrel…oh, WarSpeech, how do I love thee!). This was EQ1-level grinding.</old>

PS: I hope I’m not annoying anyone with the talk of various eras of lotro; I’m trying to share some perspective of how things have changed and the consequences on some of the wonkiness of the game system that resulted.

EDIT: Once they add CD and Uru to the classic instance join, that will help a lot in revisiting those dungeons for class quests. They are really fun, excellent instances. The Rift is the best raid in the game still afaik, and can be six-manned by level 65’s currently. Don’t ignore the old content because it makes you play with other people!