LOTRO rides to Rohan

I've decided it's about impossible to join an endgame-related kinship on Silverlode. I'd rather not have to transfer somewhere just to see what the instances look like (and I won't.)

I've been in Sons of Durin on Nimrodel for almost three years now. It's a large, fairly casual guild that for me has the right level of organization. They're not hardcore, they prefer members to sign up for scheduled raids, but not a big deal if someone doesn't show, not a big deal if the raid wipes, and no mandatory this or that. And no hardcore raid leader acting like someone's life hangs in the balance (we've all encountered the type). I enjoy raiding once or twice a week, and getting a /roll crack at the good stuff is always fun, but the guild's relaxed attitude fits my attitude toward MMOs really well.

I've got my main on Nimrodel in Sons of Durin as well. Joined it after leaving the (totally dead) QT3 kin. Seems like a pretty chill, if a bit anonymous, kinship. Definitely better than some of the other mega-guilds. One of my other toons is in a kinship called "Flock of Moosen"...I don't recommend it. Buncha freaking drama queens.

"Flock of Smeagols" is, of course, the best guild name in the history of guild names everywhere. Don't recall which server that was on though.

Hunter hit 85 earlier today. Had 6-7 pieces of jewelry waiting in my vault, equipped a 85 3rd age bow that has induction and focus crit multipliers, induction and focus power reductions, mercy shot cooldown reduction, and crit %+ on swift bow. I'm almost afraid to go for a 2nd age bow, its dps will only be 150 vs 143 of my current and no way I'll get as lucky with its legacies.

Now I'm cooking with gas. Found a Kinship that seems like good people, halfway through 84 and should be 85 tomorrow with a little work, finished up the epic quest for the 2nd age bridle, caught up with woodworking, it's smooth sailing now. Until I level my mini too. Ugh.

Heh, I got some exceedingly bad advice from a guildie yesterday. Was talking about how my hunter hit 85 and my mini is still grinding the Hytbold rebuild stuff, but the end is in sight. And then after that another 5-6 days of those 5 daily quests to have the tokens to buy my hunter a new armor set. So a guildie told me to buy the premium wallet, which would allow my two 85s to do the 5 dailies each and thus earn 50 tokens instead of 25. But I didn't have 995 store points, so I loaded my cc and bought like 1100 for $10. And then bought the wallet and immediately noticed that the 5 tokens my mini had in her inventory got sucked into the wallet was visible only to my mini and not my other 85. The guildie told me maybe it bugged, maybe my hunter wasn't ready to earn/see these tokens (despite being 85). So I asked in glff and immediately got like a half-dozen replies that no, Hytbold tokens are landscape items and thus cannot be shared between toons.

Kind of annoying, though I'll get some practical mileage out of the wallet since it frees up quite a bit of storage space on all of my toons. But a lesson learned, one I thought I'd share.

One a somewhat more positive note I bought a tarnished symbol for 135 gold on the AH and turned around and sold it for 150. . .should've priced the buyout at 175-190.

Apparently Middle-earth is caught in the middle of upgrade hell. The servers have been down for roughly 40 hours now and the most recent official update is that they might remain down throughout the rest of the day. On the plus side Turbine is crediting premium/vip players who've logged in during the last 30 days 250 store points and subscribers 1 day for each lost day due to server maintenance.

Wow. As a lifetimer, guess I'll go see my bonus points after it all settles out. It's been a while since they broke something that good...

Arrrrgh still down. And here I just bought a skirmish pack and never got to play all 4 of the defensive ones.

Looking forward to the 3 man legendary item skirmishes though.

DDO has been down since Thursday too. Just ducked my head in over here to see if LOTRO was having the same problem.

Something bad is happening over at Turbine in the server room. Or something...

Game is back up but not the store, oh well.

I got to 42- so close to legendary weapons!

LIs make me sad. They are the worst game mechanic.

The thing they did with combat mounts is, IMO, somewhat better. If they threw the whole LI mechanic in the trash can and started over i would cry no tears.

Gave up the day before the downtime. The kin I finally managed to join was 90% hunters. Then I looked around Snowbourn for a while and realized all of Silverlode is 90% hunters. There's no way I was progressing unless I leveled my mini to 85 too...and just no thanks. Uninstalled. Only regret is dropped enough for three months of VIP and used less than one.

Why are hunters so popular?

and because I can ask 2 questions due to the dearth of traffic in this thread

Why are legendary weapons so bad?

Hunters are so popular because they can port, and are the highest DPS (usually) class. And they're ridiculously easy to play. Legendary weapons are no fun because you have to grind levels on them with XP, they have random legacies (skill boosts) on them, and are a chore and half to maintain and keep track of.

Personally I think the legacies are the main problem with LIs, just too random. I wouldn't mind seeing something like 3rd age ones being entirely random and then 2nd age LIs letting you pick the majors and 1st age letting you pick all legacies.

My RK hit 75 today, upgraded my lightning rune-stone, Electric Bugaloo, with a 2nd age I named Ride the Lightning. Got very lucky and have damn near perfect legacies at tier 4+ on all of them and it's not yet lvl 70.

Turbine has wonderful timing for me. The latest update nerfed the Hytbold armor sets a bit, and of course this week I'd finally finished the Hytbold rebuild grind and another 11 days of dailies to have the tokens for two alts. So 55 days of doing the same quests over and over. But I still picked up the armor for my hunter and RK, though I can't get the pieces to them yet because Turbine hasn't dropped my monthly 500 pts for Feb I need to buy shared storage (account cycle is the 24th of each month, so they're over two weeks late). Checking in glff gets lots of responses from other VIP/premium players too. Thought about putting a ticket in but Turbine's website wants cc info just to submit an account/store ticket. F*ck that noise, they've been hacked more times than I can count (and the card info I fed them in 07 is long expired).

A new expansion on the way: Helm's Deep, with no specific release date yet (just 'Fall 2013')

Highlights:
- Level cap raised to 95
- What sounds like skirmish-like battles in Helm's Deep starting around level 10
- New zones in western Rohan

I came back to do the anniversary quests and managed to push through the vague dissatisfaction I had with the higher-end Moria stuff, so now I'm finally able to get out and start looking around Lothlorien. Finally, fresh air...

New content dropped today, new quest area with new rep faction and some other goodies. Currently down though. As if I didn't already have enough toons I started a hobbit guardian a few months ago and got him to 34th level over the weekend.

Finally managed to make my way into Rohan proper and the latest expansion. I've been distracted by other games and decided to get back into Middle Earth and wander a bit again. Enjoying the new content so far, but I'm just at the beginning of it all. Go war horse. Could you be any less fun to control? Possibly it could be me that's just doing it wrong though, but in the meantime it's fun to have something else to level up I guess.

When you start levelling up the war horse and get some points into whatever skill(s) that make for tighter turning it becomes a lot more fun. I still get stuck nose first into cliffs and walls and such from time to time - there's something wrong with the way that's implemented, the horse turns really slowly against a barrier.

I'm running my LM through Wildermore right now - seems like more of the same old thing, though.

So I decided to check LOTRO again, my first time I grew bored after seeing nobody for like 7 hours. Figured there are many BF peeps playing so might try your server.

First, I installed the game from the main site. Gave me all kinds of errors and eventually found some posts saying it was better to uninstall and re-install from steam.
So I did that.

Now, the launcher goes all blinky and crazy, the turbine invoker looks like a command prompt box jumping all over my screen, can´t kill the process have to restart. After checking the forums, it seems no solution to this NEW problem has been found yet. Man, the game just doesn´t want me to play. Someone in the forums described exactly what happens: "Task Manager showed TurbineInstaller and TurbineInvoker calling copies of each other and themselves at a frantic pace, but as they kept opening and closing, it was impossible to kill them -- in the time it took to select one and hit Del, it would be gone and a new one in its place once or twice over."

Edit: hahah, Steam says I "played for 12 minutes" today :)

Edit: Managed to get further into the launcher! (that sounds so sad) Anyways, it´s now doing the "applying 12200 forward iterations" think, something I hand´t seen before. Maybe it´s fixed! what I did (as per some posts in the forums) is copy the invoker and the launcher from backup to the main folder and restarted with Steam. Crossing fingers...

Alright! after a seemingly eternal installation process I´m in. Went with a Hunter (not very original, but it seemed like an easy class to start the game with) and I¨m already sporting a kick ass feathered hat. Abused some dwarfs during the intro quest and I´m about to take the final one, after that it´ll be the open world and huge cities (which normally confuse the CRAP out of me when I first visit, used to get lost all the time in Ogrimmar) and joining the kinship, yay!

Juanrayogal, at your service.

Edit: actually, this starting area doesn´t seem TOO overwhelming. Picked up 5 quests so better get to running them. A few questions for you vets:

1. What does exactly Landroval´s "RP-EN" mean? Edit: ah! Roleplay encouraged? mmm how´s that work?
2. Which crafts would complement each other nicely? would the kinship, very active or not, require help in the form of a particular craft?
3. How DOES one get into a Kinship? when I press "O" the only thing related I can see is about creating kinships, not about joining them.

Thanks in advance!

1. From what I gather, it means more trying to roleplay as your character in chats and in your interactions with others in the world.

2. For a Hunter I'd take a look at either Woodworker or Explorer. With Woodworker you're self sufficient in finding your own materials to make some great new bows and weapons for yourself as you go along, and if you chose to farm with your third skill, you'll create materials for either the kin or can easily sell on the auction house potentially. Explorer you'll be doing something similar, but on the armor side, instead of weapons. You'll be able to craft your own armor as you progress, and have the tertiary skill of being able to prospect ore, which can be resold again in the auction house for funds.

To give you an example of a non-synergy, I ended up choosing Armsman for my Rune Keeper, back when I didn't know what I was doing with the game really, and was having fun building blade weapons, but quickly realized I was never going to make anything my RK could use. But I was far enough along that I didn't want to switch. Now I have a crafting RK to make sweet weapons for my alts at least!

3. Someone has to invite you. Try adding people from the BF kin to your friends list, and if you see them online you can send them a message and they can work to invite you to the kinship.

Thanks Nixon66! will follow your advice. I really don´t care about leveling up too fast, I´ll try to enjoy the world. During my (brief) WoW stint I had a couple friends wanted me to lvl up fast to go in adventures with them and sure that´s fun, but sometimes I just wanted to fish :)

Edit: wow, the music in this game is beautiful.

Hey I got a deed for getting to lvl5 without dying and said to myself "this is easy baby, let´s see if they give you a deed for getting to lvl 50 without dying".

And then I got killed by what I can only describe (I think) as a pack of invisible wolves slowly gnawing at me while I tried to collect wood.

At lvl 15 I´m a little meh on where to go. Wanted to do the hunter´s quest, but it entails killing a big bad wolf. Problem is: for whatever reason wolves are invisible to me in LOTRO, and I really can´t be arsed to re-install a third time just for that. Been traveling all over (on foot) and made it to Bree, Michael Delvin and Hobbiton. A very pretty world, this Lotro world.

Bree is THE hub in the area, but as a good general rule, when in doubt, follow the Epic Storyline and it will usually guide you or have you go to the next quest area.

Hmm. Level 15. There should be a number of quest chains that will take you North and South along the the road West of Bree, and West along the road to the Shire if you so desire. When you hit 18-20 there you can start working on the Barrow Downs quest lines, and also start doing some group dungeon there as well. They are a ton of fun early in the game!

Gracias de nuevo!

Picked up a lot of quests in Bree and kinda deciding where to go next. Earlier on I somehow ended at a dwarf town where I was asked to do some intro quests I guess? I enjoyed the feeling of one-shooting the poor mobs in the silver mine for a while and I´m back on the open world. Another question (and tx for taking the time really). Is there a way to get a mount before lvl20? I figure I have enough points for the skill (100 and it costs 95 I think) and should have enough money at lvl20 to buy me a new horse but in the meantime (15 to 20) no way?

I know about paying 1 silver to rent a horse to travel from town to town of course, but I enjoy just getting out into the wild and traveling around (would love to be able to make my own campfire) and while the world is very pretty sometimes I could use with a bit more speed :)

Finally (for now) talked to Strider (yay? he looked a bit under the weather :) and have a chance to go into this instance. Is this something for solo or should I look for a fellowship? I´m not sure which ones are meant to be group and which ones solo (besides the wolf thing, which irks me to no end).

It's been a while since I played, but I think just about everything is soloable up to a point now.

The entire "Epic" story line is soloable now, as are most quests. When you talk with a quest give you'll see a little symbol somewhere on the quest screen, and I think a bit of text that will indicate if it's a solo quest, small fellowship (3) or fellowship (6) level quest. Not too many of those left at the moment, so you can accept with abandon most quests, and sometimes you can solo small fellowship quests with some luck or careful pulling of enemies.

I think some of the book-ending epic quests still need a group (I still have a couple that I had to leave unfinished), but they don't block you from picking up the starting quest of the next book. And some of the mid-book quests put you up against tougher enemies that would normally need a group, but they give you the option of either getting a group or using an item that temporarily makes you powerful enough to solo them.

Thank you all for putting up with the newbie questions.

I discovered "tasks" today, and spent some time collecting filthy dirt and squishy goo, which doesn´t sound too glamorous but hey it´s a living. I used the opportunity to just run around the mountains and passages gawking at the world and killing low level critters, until I ran into some goblins which despite being level 10 ended up kicking the ever loving crap out of my lvl 16 hunter. I suspect I am seriously undergeared.

I am loving the passage of nature skills, which allows me to zero in the critters I¨m looking to kill for the tasks. Occasionally I run into lower level guys fighting some beasties and I do my best to help them, so far nobody has said even "hi". People are grim in middle earth!

I´ve got a horse now :)



Actually, I´ve got four since I discovered I have a wallet cap (which I really, really hate) so I went on a horse buying frenzy to spend my TWO GOLD COINS JEEZ TURBINE. Anyways, I´m lvl 20 now and kicking ass, ready to try skirmishes (whatever those are) and maybe taking a break from leveling to start working on my crafting.

I was invited to a Kinship (well, actually, I convoed the guy who kept announcing his kinship the last couple days. He´s the only one I´ve seen doing that!) so unless Broken Forge is active at all I´ll join it tomorrow just to have someone to talk to :)

Edit: If I ever fix this "invisible wolves" problem, it´s gonna be a massacre. Seriously, damn mutts will go extinct, the amount of wolves-related quests I´m saving.

I solved (kinda, not really) my wolf problem. There´s an attack that can be performed by Hunters, the only one that doesn´t need to have a target locked. A low sweep with both blades. So I went back to the very first quest location where the invisible wolves first showed up, used passage of nature, tracked a signature and went there and started swinging at the wind. After a while I had killed 3 mutts.

Then a newbie showed up and I asked him, like and old, blind elf, to direct me towards the wolves. He did and I was able to swing at the wind with enough luck to kill the remaining 3 wolves and complete that pesky quest :)

Also, I have a house now (Chesnut street, Bree homestead)


It´s small and humble, as befits a hunter. Has a nice view tho:



Last night a random players asked me if I wanted to do a skirmish with him, it was fun!

Okay. We got to get this fixed. You can't wander through Middle Earth as an old blind elf. That's just unseemly.

Try this. Lower your graphics settings, or if you are already at the lowest, raise them a notch. See if that brings them in view. Also, are your Video drivers up to date?

Also I take it that you can't target them by TABbing enemy targets? They are completely invisible to you?

No luck. Video is up to date and all. Something corrupted while downloading the client? had so many problems during the first 2 re-installs that I´m wary of doing it again but I might have to.

Hilariously, I did the Hunter quest (defeat Yellowfang) using the "blind elf" strategy. Kept tracking, getting a somewhat accurate idea of where the invisible critters were and wailing at the wind until they died. Very Satoichi. This would be great for a role playing character hehe. Of course this only works if the critters are low level enough that I can kill them with the low-dps attack (low cut). As I said, whenever I run into some invisible critter they can´t be targeted, nor tab-target nor x (to look towards current target). Completely invisible.

Yeah, you got something corrupted somewhere. Either a bad download or, what is worse, a defective hard drive. Or about a dozen other things. Are you running the High Res Client or the Low Texture? What resolution are you running in normally and what Texture level?

There is a High Texture Client repair tool, but I wouldn't run it until we're sure that is the problem. How computer savvy are you? Comfortable digging around in folders messing with particular files?

Also, a full virus scan might be a good idea. Just to rule it out.

I reverted back to default settings so not sure what I was using, wolves are still invisible tho :) I could go mess with some files provided I had some direction on it, not really afraid of it. Might help fix this! full virus scan completed, drivers up to date.

Anyways, I joined a Kinship (Rechazar Nahzgul) last night and they have already fitted me with much better gear and weapons than what I was using. Plus my elf looked like he was using clothes that Krusty discarded, and with the new stuff I´m a badass looking hunter. All the stuff they gave me was crafted by people in kinship, which I find amazing. While it´s fun to solo, after EVE I´m very much a social player and just having people to talk to while in game has been a big plus in my enjoyment of LOTRO.
I´m a bit spoiled by Eve in some things (kept looking for a kinship chat window) and I miss the pvp but this is not bad for playing in short bursts.

Now that I saw how awesome crafting can be, I plan on getting back to my starter area and just go for minerals and wood until I lvl up and so on and maybe I can be of some help to the Kinship by providing materials.