1801

I never managed to get a character past Evendim :(
I always get bored and end up playing a different game at that point. Then when I return after a few months I load in my characters one by one, see they are all in Evendim, half-heartedly do a quest or two on one of them… after which I roll an alt instead because the starter areas are so much more fun. I then play until that alt gets to Evendim… then the whole cycle repeats itself.

1802

You don’t have to do all of Evendim. My main basically did all of North Downs, just some of the starting quests of Evendim then moved on to Angmar. I’m running my alt through Lone Lands and Evendim now.

1803

I just started up in this a couple of days ago. I’m up to lvl 10 now.

But I’m having a heck of a time finding my way around. The ingame minimap isn’t cutting it (and the large map isn’t doing much better). Any plug-ins or tips that can help me find out where the heck I need to go to complete my quests?

1804

The problem is North Downs -> Angmar. You’re probably in your low/mid 30’s when you clean up ND and the epics there. Even the “kill spiders/blade thingy” beginner Angmar quests will chew you up and spit you out. At that point, you’ve got the puzzlingly-low-on-quests Trollshaws, or the quest factory in Tinnundir. And it’s really not the lake that’s the problem (except toward the last half of Elendil), it’s that the Evendim quests have you doing loops between Ost Forod and Tinnundir endlessly…or you have to swing WAAAAY south to get to the salamander beach quests.

My main is an L39 and I’ve pretty much left Evendim forever (cleaning up epic chapter 4 in the Trollshaws).

1805

Thinking about giving this a try as a healer class. Are any of them significantly more viable while soloing than others (might join a guild or regular group later on, but until then…)?

1806

I found my Mines of Moria box the other day, but I’m not 100% sure what that means… Do I get to keep the little baubles and doodads even if I drop back down to the regular free-to-pay model after the 30 days of VIP access, or whatever I get?

The game is installed, but I’ve only spent all of, um… 30 minutes or so with it. The tutorial didn’t really catch my interest and then I got busy with other stuff.

1807

From what I understand,

Moria gives you all Moria quest content, legendary weapons and skirmishes. Activating VIP gives you bags, gold cap removal and traits for the characters you use during the VIP time. That stuff doesn’t go away.

1808

lotro-wiki lists a Grand Forge as a large lawn decoration but doesn’t have any information on where it can be obtained. Google is failing me as well. Does anyone know anything about this item? Is it actually a usable forge? It would be nice to be able to craft at my house.

1809

I did a lot of deed and rep grinding so I think I tended to be slightly over the level of the area I entered. It just depends on your play style. I didn’t cross the lake at all with my main, I think I did Tinnudir and then Ost Forod but then left Evendim.

1810

At the moment the game is unplayable to me due to some weird lag issues (other MMOs play fine so it seems to be LOTRO related) but when I return I think I’ll rep grind/scirmish my way to level 40 or so instead, perhaps even use up some Destiny points and cash shop points on double XP buffs while I go along. That seems a better option then getting stuck in Everswim again.

1811

Is your lag issue the brief lag every 30 seconds? They claim to have fixed that today, but I’m not home yet to check it out.

1812

I don’t really know what my issue is, but I’ve had it for months now. It used to run fine, and then I got this unbearable stutter effect. Like a movie skipping frames every now and again, the world seems to stutter past me while my character moves fine.
I’ve upgraded my PC with a new motherboard, videocard and processor (all signifcantly better) and wiped the whole system and reinstalled everything, but the problem has gotten worse.
I get a steady FPS, ranging from 30 to 60 depending on the settings, but no matter how low I set the settings, the game stutters for me.

I tried again this week, and now after playing for 15-30 minutes I get an issue where the game won’t refresh what I’m doing on the screen, even though there does seem to be some communication with the server. All my skills light up when I use them (as they do when you queue them) and stay lit, but I can keep using them. Enemy health bars stay at 100%, until I defeat them and then they drop dead. My XP bar does not go up until I relog into the game, then the XP gets added to my bar. Some of my characters won’t load at all, others can take up to 20 minutes to load in.
They load in fine on my husband’s PC though, and he has no lag, so it’s not a connection issue.

I’ve spent hours tweaking with the various settings, and reading the trouble shooting forums, but nothing I do seems to make a difference. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the game, but that didn’t help either.

I have a lifetime sub so at least I’m not wasting any subscription money on trying, I’m hoping some patch will fix this for me because I have no clue anymore how to fix it myself.It’s a shame though, it’s a fun game (besides Evendim ).

I’ll try again and see if the new patch went in on the EU servers as well, who knows, it might have solved my problem.

1813

I had this problem too. I solved it by going to the troubleshooting pane in options and moving the slider down from max framerate to 30fps. Also helpful was turning off DX10 dynamic shadows. This problem was most noticeable for me in an area with a lot of trees and/or ground clutter.

1814

I did the framerate thing and slowed the engine speed, also turned of all ground clutter and distance rendering of the landscape. I’m still on windows XP and don’t have DX10, but I turned the shadows off as well just in case.

I can’t even log my characters in now anymore, I just get suck on the loading screen after selecting them in the character selection screen. It’s like my client is deteriorating or something.
I know LOTRO has an issue with becoming really fragmented over time, but since it’s a clean install that can’t be the problem.

Thanks for trying to help though.

Edit: Wow, so I’m reading the forums a bit more, and it turns out this is a known problem at the moment for Irish customers who use Eircom for their broadband. :(
There’s an 35 page thread of Irish people experiencing the same problem that I missed the first time I went looking. I hope it will get fixed soon…

1815

The lag problem of the last couple of weeks has been caused by issues with Turbine’s central servers. They posted a notice about this a couple of days ago. This is a different issue to problems with running LOTRO in DX10 and DX11 modes.

The DX10/11 code is very buggy and many people have problems running it especially if you want to run LOTRO in a window rather than fullscreen. Luckily DX9 mode is very stable and still looks great at the ultra detail setting.

1816

I was crashing every time I tried swift travel, and frequently just out of the blue. And I’d often get stuttering. This was going on for the past few months.

I found that turning my texture detail from “very high” to “high” solved it. I didn’t even think of it until some update a couple of weeks ago warned me that “very high” was unstable when I restarted. Running DX10.

I usually switch back to “very high” textures if I’m going to stay in one area for a while, and have had no problems.

1817

The new choices while crafting armor are an embarrassment of riches. I lost a few recipes that I did not have the standard version of but having everything else become three output recipes more than makes up for it. Under the new system, you can pick armor at every level that has optimal stats for your class. I will be making major upgrades to every one of my character’s armor this week.

Also, the Spring festival starts today.

1818

After taking a bit of a break (mostly because The Crippled God and Wise Man’s Fear both came out at the beginning of the month) I’m ready to dive back in tonight and experience the new changes wrought by Update 2.

1819

Oh awesome! I’ll have to see if there’s a new horse available. My ISP finally got their problems with LOTRO sorted and it plays fine now, so I’ll have to go in and do some horse-racing.

1820

Dammit, I could have used the Evendim revamp a couple of weeks ago – I’ve always wanted to clear out South Evendim (Angmarims used to be 50s, they’re 40’s now) but my 43 guard is pretty much stuck in MM for now, although I will probably wander off to Angmar soon.