LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
Archive for April, 2010
Volume 3 patch notes and other assorted news
03 years ago
My apologies for the lack of activity of late, I blame it on a number of things but hopefully I should be back to a more normal schedule. And most importantly I should hopefully get back to being in game more!
First up are the Volume 3 Book 1 patch notes that are currently up on Bullroarer. This is mainly a patch of bug fixes, but one thing of special notice for me was the new meta deeds for Angmar, Moria, and Lothlorien. Thanks to LOTRO Weekly for the snaps and details of the deeds! I really like this idea for a couple of reasons. First off, who doesn’t want more horses and goats! Secondly this gives people more incentives to do other dungeons and quests that they might not have normally done.  It will also provide more options for people leveling to run group content before hitting the Moria and Mirkwood instances.  I remember when they added a bunch of deeds to all the Angmar instances and those dungeons were PACKED for a significant period of time so hopefully this addition will do the same thing for all these instances. The other interesting item from Bullroarer is a new Bard discount of 20% which (details of acquiring said reward is still TBD) will be really handy for all of us who swap traits depending on the content being run.
In addition to the patch notes, there’s also been a bunch of news over on the My.LOTRO site as Duwis points out and clarifies. The first post confirms and explains how to access the My.LOTRO side from the in-game browser. I really like this idea as the in-game browser always bugged me as it was more of an annoyance and not terribly useful. Now it seems like it will be quite handy! Duwis has another post with suggestions for how to properly maintain and update the Lorebook, so make sure to check that out if you’re interested or frustrated with the Lorebook.
For those of you who follow the lore but every once in a while get tripped up, Snowlock from the forums has posted a pretty short guide on the back-story for LOTRO and the history of Middle-Earth. Some good tidbits (and maps) in there with a lot of information that either I didn’t know or had forgotten 
In addition to the LOTRO Weekly blog I mentioned before, the folks over at MMORSEL.com have put up a number of cool updates. For those of you struggling with the idea of radiance they have a nice write-up as well as detailed descriptions for all the various armor sets. They’ve also built a pretty slick utility for planning out and spending points on your Legendary items such that you can see how high you can level them without having to waste any scrolls. They were also nice enough to post the instructions as well as the handy tool.
This last piece doesn’t really impact me, but I thought it was pretty cool so I wanted to share with those who might be helped by it. I first saw this over at Mordor of Bust where they’ve posted a good walkthrough and explanation of the LOTRO Flashboost utility. Now sadly it only works on Windows 7 (well sad for me as I’m on XP) but it appears pretty helpful in increasing performance or LOTRO. In the post are links to not only the official Lorebook page for this utility but also the forum post with more discussion and support. If you’re running Windows 7, it looks like it would be worth at least checking it out to see if you would benefit.
That’s all for now, I actually decided mid-post to hold some things for a bit later so I didn’t have a 14 page post…
Back from a crazy couple of weeks
23 years ago
So things have been pretty quiet here for a bit with a combination of work travel and some actual vacation time as well. I have a bunch of things to catch up on and I’ll have a few posts coming out this weekend but I figured I’d update on a few things first.
Aside from the travel craziness I have been playing some but just not nearly as much as would warrant writing about. I’ve been working on the Ale Association quests and I’m intrigued by not only the titles but what they might put on that vendor  This new quest line seems to have drawn some comments from folks that they feel bad doing bad things in the Shire and I’ve actually taken a bit of a different slant on it. I’m looking at it more like a friendly rivalry between two bars (ala Cheers) and the Ale Association is just launching the first line of the pranks 
 Now if they continue this, I’d love to see the hobbit retaliation! I do like the upcoming changes coming that will put negative reputation for the opposite faction. This makes sense as we’re really not all that sneaky when poking holes in the kegs and stealing recipes  I am enjoying this festival as they are pretty quick things I can do and I still always enjoy running through the Shire as it is so beautiful and relaxing.
In addition to the festival I have been doing some SG and SH runs on my Warden and am one piece away (16 tokens) from the full set such that I can actually run the BG raid. They have made some subtle changes to SG and I like the pace of that dungeon. With a decent group, it is around an hour or so which really isn’t all that bad and you can reasonably do a couple runs in a row. I have my pseudo static group I run with late at night but in addition I really don’t have any issues finding groups (and successful ones too) for both SG and SH. I still haven’t run the other dungeons yet and do want to check them out at some point. I did also run SG on my Captain (only 62) which was quite stressful as I so didn’t want to mess things up for the group. The good news for these runs is that I’ve seen 2 Symbols drop (lost both) so maybe I’m just lucky or maybe they did tweak things a bit.
I also stuck my neck out into the moors a bit on my Warden and holy cow was that a blast. I started off soloing and got stomped on by a Warg/Warleader duo – which wasn’t surprising. Wargs are really annoying with all their stuns and I’m also REALLY rusty out there  I then ended up running with a small group and we didn’t do all that bad in the grand scheme of things. I really need to get out there more as I found myself falling into my tanking rotation which is just bad.  I re-spec’d full fist line with the 2 additional masteries as I think the fears could be more useful down the line then possible additional DPS. The pace out there really is MUCH faster and it will certainly help overall to make me a better and more dynamic player. The moors always has been a good fit for me as when I don’t have much time I can just run around solo but can also hop in groups when I have more time available and you’ll probably hear and see more from me from the moors.  I also need to keep my eyes open for other weapons with better PvP legacies…