What Was I Saying...?

I'm starting to see why so many people are dismayed about the current state of LotRO-- not even counting the "hardcores," who are never happy with anything but keep playing anyway. Rohan is a mess.

Having gotten a fairly good handle on war-steeds, I still think those are pretty well handled overall, except that the landscape is more full of bugs than an insect zoo, and the mob difficulty is set all over the map-- a critter who is trivial when you're on a war-steed is devastating on foot. When you add to this the fact that creatures are constantly spawning and instantly re-spawing all over the place, landscape quests quickly become an exercise in learning to avoid any monsters because Eru-forbid, if you start fighting with one, you'll be fighting all day just so you can click on a stupid macguffin and move on. I like that situational awareness is important when you're riding all over the landscape and that mobs are smart enough to run for reinforcements-- that part is cool. What I don't like is seeing the glowy thing across the room I have to click on and just watching the mobs stack up in front of it, knowing that the moment I kill them all, they'll be right back there.

The mobs also appear to have a "soft aggro" mechanic going on. I first spotted this in Moria, but in Rohan it seems to have been cranked up to obnoxious levels. "Soft aggro" is mobs in your general vicinity which have theoretically not become aware of you, still moving in a more-or-less beeline fashion towards you, or towards your goal. Warbands are particularly bad about this-- they have a preprogrammed path they follow across the landscape, until there is a player character within a certain distance (200m maybe?), at which point their path immediately alters specifically to take them towards that character. When you're already questing in a mob-heavy area, having the same warband molest you two or three times when all you want to do is collect two more hides and GTFO gets really, really old.

As I've already alluded to, Rohan is also full of crazy difficulty spikes. I am currently level 87, with the best bartered gear I can find, working on quests in the level 83-85 range. Most content for me should be a cakewalk. But Rohan is liberally sprinkled with elite mobs, many of which spawn right on top of you while you're walking by, and like I say, these mobs are designed with the assumption that you're riding a war-steed. If you are on foot, and especially if you get more than one at a time, you're screwed. Even if you're not screwed, you're still stuck grinding your way through a fight with an elite, which is generally not hard, just takes forever.

Well, except for the elites with broken abilities. Such as the half-orc in Thornhope who sets you on fire for 300-500 points of damage per second, so you have to use a potion immediately, then sets you on fire again before your potion cooldown expires. Or the ghost-dwarf-thing in Wildermore who reflects more damage back at you than you inflicted on him-- on top the normal pounding on you a boss does. (Dear LotRO devs: STOP GIVING MONSTERS REFLECT. IT IS ANTI-FUN. Especially when that reflect lasts longer than the fight. At least the daywalker berserkers, you can stop attacking for the 45 seconds they reflect the damage back at you.)

And then there's Hytbold. I can see Hytbold looking really good on paper-- it's a burned-out town in Rohan that your character is tasked with fixing up, leading to you eventually being named Thane (and finishing off a murder-mystery storyline in another town). It's intended to be endgame content for solo/casual players who don't like raiding or whatever, consisting of a variety of daily quests around different parts of Rohan that give you the resources to rebuild.

That's cool, I can get behind that idea. But like so many other things in LotRO, the implementation of the idea has issues. First off, some of the quests are just damned annoying. LotRO is pretty weak at jump puzzles, because the movement controls are wibbly-wobbly positioney-witioney. So naturally, they put jump puzzles into the Hytbold quests. Another one has, through an extremely circuitous set of reasoning, you walking across a tightrope carrying a bundle of arrows, which you have to time right or a circling crow will fly into you and knock you off.

A crow. Really. I HAVE A BOW. What possible reason could I have for not shooting the crow and THEN walking across the tightrope, other than that the quest won't let me? I've faced down Nazgul! I've slain a dragon-wight and defeated the Steward of Angmar! But man, have a crow circling my intended path, and I'm out of luck.

The other thing with Hytbold is that, being endgame content, it has daily locks. Once you do five Hytbold quests, you're prevented from doing any more until 3 a.m. the next morning-- this is on top of the individual 24-hr timer each quest also has. It doesn't matter if you did all five on one day, or did one per day for five days, or whatever. I've been doing two or three in a day as I come upon them instead of chasing them down, 'cos I've still got a lot of Rohan to get through, but that leads to finishing one right off the bat one day and being locked out on doing any more that day.

Oh, did I mention that the story quest goes off on one direction while the landscape quests go off in another? 'cos there's that problem, too.

So, yeah. Rohan has issues. :-`

-The Gneech

"Yeah, yeah, fine, go kill the warg pack-leader, I'll do it in a minute. But can we PLEASE talk about getting me a boat to go up the Anduin?"

Lachwen decided today that she'd backfilled enough of her Volume I story quests, after one too many "ride halfway across Middle-earth to talk to X, who just sends you right back to the other end of Middle-earth to talk to the person who just sent you there" quests. Unfortunately, most of the latter half of Volume I is like this, and when she got a request to go down, down to Goblin Town to grab a bag of gems in the middle of what's supposed to be a time-sensitive chase after a magic ring, she just said, "You know what? To heck with this."

I then tried going back to Enedwaith, a zone which she only stayed in long enough to outlevel, but only a few of the quests awarded enough XP to justify the time investment and none of them particularly interested her (or me-- Enedwaith was a fun zone the first time around, but only that), and there were no deeds there worth the doing. Looking at both her quest and deed log, it turns out she'd be better served by going back to Southern Mirkwood and finishing it off. There are multiple explorer deeds there, the warg-slayer deed gives her a useful virtue point, and there are a fair number of green quests and mobs, so she can actually earn some XP and do some combat with things that actually fight back.

So I figure, what the hay, I'll pick up the "Tales of the Fire Maiden" thread pretty much where I left it, with Lachwen stuck in southern Mirkwood and trying to get back to the northern part of the forest, just in time for her sister Rufaniel to come tromping up out of Moria and drag her off to Rohan.

...which of course means I need to get busy on levelling up Rufaniel as well. Oops.

-The Gneech

Last time I played Lachwen I decided that as I was re-learning the class it would be a good time to backfill some of the stuff she skipped, especially in Mirkwood, given that she did once have a character story that specifically involved being in Mirkwood for a reason-- and the Mirkwood quests, while still well below level, are still green to her and therefore worth some XP.

Today, sneaking in a few minutes of LotRO on my lunch break, I foolishly tried to level up some of her crafting skills-- only to discover that she had never gained mastery two tiers back, and therefore will not be able to gain mastery for her current tier either and will be throwing away craft XP if she makes guild rep items. Of course, the tier she's missing? Angmar.

Siiiiigh. WHY does this game keep trying to force me to go to Angmar? -.- Does it WANT to give me headaches?

Well, I have to finish off the Book I epic line with her anyway, and she does have a lot of junk cluttering up her quest log. When I was first playing her I was trying to get her to the level cap for the Enedwaith release over the course of a month, so whenever she out-leveled a zone, she simply abandoned it. So to start cleaning things up, I pulled out the lowest level solo quest I still had, and pointed her at it.

Turns out it's in Forochel, so there's a possibility that she might find the right level mats there, too, so that's where she is now. Gonna grind up some deeds too while I'm at it (Hooray for deed accelerator tomes!) and just get the whole zone banged out. Shouldn't take very long, but it also means she'll be sitting on level 71 for that much longer as everything there is gray to her. Then it's off to Angmar to finish off Book I and collect whatever other mats she still needs.

Rufaniel, on the other hand, continues to slosh around in the Waterworks of Moria. My favorite zone down there, so I'm not really in a hurry to leave, but I think Ruf herself is probably getting pretty tired of the smell.

-The Gneech

It may seem hard to believe given all the other things going on with me lately, but I have actually been poking around looking for a game that would catch my attention. Unable to face another night of slogging around Moria with my under-construction champion, I went back to my blue space-goat from World of Warcraft, I installed and poked around in Dungeons and Dragons Online, and I did the same in the new Neverwinter. I've also tried and failed to be excited by Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep... all with no success.

They all have the same problem: they're all made to highlight the part of the RPG experience I'm least interested in, to wit: wandering around killing random monsters. There's a terrible crushing sameness to it all that leads me to despair. We have the technology to create stunning worlds-within-the-machine, and this is what we do with it? Kill 10 skeletons and return to the quest NPC for the task to kill 10 giant spiders?

Speaking of sameness, how many of these games open with you on the beach after a shipwreck? At least two of the ones I tried recently did; my memory is that Age of Conan did as well, and I think one of the Elder Scrolls games I tried did.

I want cool and interesting people to talk to! I want to see amazing things that I've never seen before! I want to be astounded by magic altering the fabric of the universe! I sure as hell don't want to compare whether this sword has a 0.5% better chance of hitting an orc than that one does.

Lord I miss you, Quest For Glory series... I remember when CRPGs were awesome and fueled by imagination. It's been a long time.

-The Gneech

It was a productive weekend on LotRO (in as much as any time spent in a video game can be called "productive"): Rufaniel reached level 50, got to Vol 1 Book 8, finished the Vol 2 prologue, finished several class deeds and ground up seven virtue deeds. She's done just about all I can stomach to do in Angmar for now (although I have to go back for the second phase of her "Implements of Daring" items, boo), finished about half of Forochel (I'll be back for the book quests eventually, so no rush), and I decided to reward her by sending her back to Eregion to continue with that for a while.

As part of finishing the Vol II prologue, she stepped briefly into Moria, and I was surprised at how happy I actually was to see the place. It says a lot about my feelings towards Angmar that Moria feels like being welcomed home by an old friend, and admittedly there are parts of Moria I actually quite like. This is a good thing, because looking ahead at my virtues, there are a ton of deeds in Moria I'm going to need to do, which means Rufaniel is going to end up spending a lot of time there.

So her plan for the immediate future: Eregion, phase II, plus going back to Angmar sometime later this week probably (certainly before she finishes level 52) to get those stupid barghest tails and corrosive droplets. When the time comes to finish off that quest line, she'll probably just buy the implements with skirmish marks so I don't have to spam LFF for help polishing off the quest in the depths of Carn Dum or wherever.

I suppose I should start putting some serious effort into finding a kinship to run with on Rufaniel, 'cos it is getting a tad lonely. There are a couple of kins that I've run with in the past and would probably welcome her in, but there is drama and baggage there that I'm not sure I wouldn't rather just leave behind. Unfortunately, that means making a whole slew of new friends, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing if I could find the right ones.

Problem is, kinships in LotRO seem to run to such extremes: some are uber-casual, to the point of being sloppy and shapeless; others are hardcore-endgame-instances-are-all and quit trying to RP at us, please; others still are "full immersion, slow-leveling, RP on at all times, WHY ARE YOU RUNNING IN TOWN, TOGGLE YOUR WALK MODE OR GET OUT!" ... and a few are even "Wheee! I'm naming my dwarf Dildo Faggins, bwahahahaha!" Granted, this last category tends to get shouted down quickly.

So what would I want in a kinship? I think something like, "RP by default, but OOC okay as needed; caring about the lore or at the very least playing the game straight required; serious enough players to do instances and do them well without being gear-auditing trolls about it; willing to help with whatever's needed or just run with each other for the fun of it." I don't know if any such kinships actually exist, and I don't know if the vagaries of human interaction would allow such a kinship to continue for more than a few months at a time. But it's a nice dream, anyhow.

-The Gneech

It's time to do some thinking about Rufaniel's long-term plans. What do I -want- from this character?

With Maedhroc, for a long time I was something of a completionist-- do ALL the instances! Get ALL the mounts! etc. With Rufaniel, I'm sorta "been there, done that" about a lot of things. Not that she would refuse to go back to whoop Thaurlach or Thorog... again... but she's not going to seek out those particular adventures. She (and I) are looking to see new things! Or at least, things that are new to me. Which at this stage includes:

• Isengard! I have never done an Isengard instance. What the heck is in there?


• Finishing off some of those Mirkwood instances. I've never past the front door of the Warg Pens, for instance. These are old news for some players, I know, but I'd still like to actually see them.


• Dragioch! This raid had just showed up right about the time I wandered off from the game and had large broken bits last I heard. Assuming those have been fixed, I'd like to see it.

On the other hand, I don't particularly care about, say, the "In Their Absence..." stuff, which never really gripped me from a story/lore-monkey standpoint. Mounted combat seemed like fun, what little of it I did, so Rufaniel will probably try to get into that a bit, too.

In the more immediate future, she has to finish off Aughaire to grab those last bits of Armor of Fem. When that's done, she'll probably be right around 45, so I have to decide... go back to the Misty Mountains and finish off Book 1 Chapter 5... or rush ahead to Eregion? (Answer, I'll probably finish the book quest, that's just my nature. But Eregion is tempting.)

-The Gneech

So as I've mentioned I've been working up a new champy on LotRO. "Why," you may ask, "are you spending all of the time necessary to grind up a whole new character to level bazillion or whatever the cap is now, when you've already have a champy near the top who's got gear and deeds and emotes and is mechanically identical to what the new character will be when you're done?"

It's a fair question, for which I don't really have an answer any better than "Because I wanted an elf maid champion." The constant class-scrambling has put me off both wardens and rune-keepers, which knocks out Maedhroc and Lachwen; Galadhalion, although he has a special spot as my first character, has a ton of mental baggage associated with him that I'd rather leave behind. I also kinda need to train myself how to play the class again, and I'd rather start with a clean slate than try to untangle the mess of buttons that is Galadhalion's tool bars.

However, going through LotRO after having been more or less absent from it for half a year or more, I can feel a significant change in the atmosphere of the game. Many of the LotRO blogs/podcasts have gone dark; there's nowhere near as much chatter in the zone channels. The MMO business in general appears to be dwindling and LotRO is dwindling with it. It's not dead, not by a long shot, but it's also not, I dunno, trendy, any more? LotRO has gone from being the new hotness to an old warhorse somewhere along the way.

It's not entirely a bad thing; the people I encounter in-game are more likely to be hardcore LotRO fans, who are there because they love the setting of M-E or the gameplay or what-have-you, which means they tend to be a bit more level-headed, a bit more friendly, and a bit more knowledgeable than a lot of the problem players of days past. But it does leave the lower-level zones of LotRO much lonelier places than they once were.

However, I did encounter something last night that put a smile on my face: a pair of elves and a dwarf standing around the Last Homely House in Rivendell, chatting in-character by use of "/say" commands and emotes, discussing what had in mind to do. I eavesdropped on them a bit while inventory-managing at a vendor, and was entertained by the pure RP going on. On a meta level, the players were choosing an activity for their gaming session (deciding eventually to do some of the Mirkwood instances); in-game however, they described lightly taking a stroll through the warg-pens, for which the dwarf said he would have to go put on his helmet, and one of the elves advised him to make sure the eyeholes were lined up this time, causing a groan from the dwarf and chuckles from everyone else around, self included.

It was just a tiny little moment of RP, and I wasn't even involved, but I loved it. It's the exact sort of thing I always wanted from LotRO and have almost never found from the groups I've hung around with. It's also what I meant way back when, when I said I'd had more pure RP in six months of the #TwitterPonies than in five years of playing LotRO.

By way of thanks, I headed for the nearest mailbox and sent each of the three players a mug of Forsaken Inn Ale, with an apology for not having a better brew, offering each of them a toast. (As of the time I signed off, none had replied, but I imagine they were all in Mirkwood by then.) If nothing else, they did rekindle the hope I once had that there actually is RP to be found in LotRO, you just need to be looking in the right place for it.

-The Gneech