The best solo class is the Warden. I have successfully take on mobs which are 2 to 3 levels higher than me using lots of 2332 and 3223 combos, and I was just level 40+. The Loremaster is good for soloing too, but his DPS is way to low (and you compromise his CC skills by equipping too many of his DPS traits).
I haven’t tried the new Minstrel yet, so that may be a valid option now.
There’s different ‘paperdolls’, called cosmetics, which you can just drag your items over. You will take on the appearance, but not the stat. I haven’t tried the costume wardrobe introduced by the F2P yet.
As far as I know, you can only dye your stuff.
As for the riddles, I only know the reference to #2. It’s referring to
how the first Took routed the goblins. It’s a reference to the Hobbit. In the battle of Greenfields, I think
Pretty sure it’s been in since the wardrobe existed, but it’s not super obvious. There’s a little “color” drop down in the corner of the window that lists all the colors you’ve put in a given item with, and you can select one before withdrawing a copy of the item.
Yes, totally would like out-of-game store access. This seems like a totally obvious choice too. (Rule #1 of ecommerce! Make it easy for people to give you money!)
LotRO is, as you may have noticed, super solo friendly overall. While Crowbar is correct that the warden is probably the “strongest” solo class, his examples aren’t particularly impressive - pretty much any class should be able to take on singles of up to 4 levels higher than them at most points during the levelling process.
That said, you’re not defining “best” for us, so it’s going to be hard to give you a good answer. Wardens are SUPER hard to kill, but are stronger against multiple targets than they are against singles, and their DPS is tepid at best, so if you’re looking for a class that can solo elites easily, you might be better served by a guardian, and if you’re looking for a class that can really rip through normals, a hunter/champion/the class that shall not be named would be better. Burglars can cherry pick their targets as no other class can, Captains are almost guardian/warden level tough, and are very unique, etc, etc.
Oh, and if you want maximum travel convenience, hunter, followed by warden, though if you have friends, guardians with their summon whistle are pretty convenient too (You can make an item that you can give to people, and they can then use it to summon you to wherever.).
There’s a “Cosmetic outfits” section of the character panel, which has “outfit” slots (not sure how many you get by default as a F2P player). Each outfit has slots for all your visible gear. You can put gear or “cosmetic” (i.e. statless) gear in those slots, then you click on the “show this outfit” button (something like that, anyway, I forget exactly what it’s called) and your appearance changes to reflect the items “equipped” in that outfit. Slots for which you don’t have an item equipped in the outfit will show up as whatever your normal gear is. Your stats do not change.
Items are dyed by purchasing dye, right clicking it, and then clicking on the item you want to dye. If you have access to the wardrobe, you can put an item in the wardrobe, then dye it, and put it in again and the wardrobe will save the fact that you have two (or more) different colors of that item available.
Uh, got nothing for you here, don’t even know what the question means.
I suppose I should have said that I like Soloing and being undefeated - though this last is very tricky to achieve…
I found the Hunters ‘instant flight’ power tremendously useful (though I still managed to die by riding a horse off a cliff :smack:)
Do any other classes have anything like that?
I might well give the Warden a try.
As a VIP, I have access to that class and also the Rune-Keeper, correct?
Berenin’s three Riddles (which come up on a Loremaster Quest) are much more obscure than others within the game.
They are:
She runs through the blue, the shadow of passage falls over her. On one hand, a silent guardian
Fierce goblins are remembered, but better still: a mighty swing! No Man, he.
-The man left his horse so he could walk half a day towards the sun and half a day away from the sun. When he arrived, they couldn’t close the window.
The first refers to a statue beside a river (I don’t know why it’s that particular river.)
The second (as Crowbar of Irony +3 said) must refer to Bullroarer Took inventing golf (as in The Hobbit), since you find the answer beneath his statue.
The third is the Forsaken Inn in the Lonelands, but I have no idea why.
I’ve still got nothing for you on the riddles. @_@
Re:
“I found the Hunters ‘instant flight’ power tremendously useful (though I still managed to die by riding a horse off a cliff )
Do any other classes have anything like that?”
The answer is, some classes do, others don’t.
I don’t think Wardens do, but I’ve never played one. >looks around< Looks like they have a proactive 50% heal skill, where you hit it, and the next time in five minutes you go below 10% morale, you get a 50% heal.
Guardians don’t, but have a number of skills that can make themselves a LOT tougher for a short span of time.
Burglars get Hide in Plain Sight, which basically causes them to disappear from combat and immediately stealth, much like similar “rogue” skills from other MMOs
Captains get Last Stand, which basically prevents them from going below 1 morale for 15 seconds. (You can still DIE if you are hit by some sort of instant kill effect, but damage can’t kill you. You still TAKE damage - at least, if you have more than 1 morale - but you can’t be defeated while the skill is active.)
Champions are like Guardians - they don’t really have an strong panic button skill (I guess the closest is Time of Need, which eats 50% of your remaining power and heals you for twice what it consumed.)
None of those actually remove you from danger the way Desperate Flight does, though HIPS comes close.
I played it way back during the beta and into launch. Eventually the stock game play got a little tired for me (not much different from EQ or WoW) but I fell in love with the PvP subgame and had my cherished little spider. Dragged her up to Rank 3 during a time when few people played them at all, much less bothered leveling them up.
Then Turbine increasingly displayed that they had no clue how to balance the PvP game and it all started going to hell. More and more players hit the PC level cap and would get bored and flood the PvP region and dominate the map leading to the number of Creeps drying up since getting pinned in camp night after night is no fun. I eventually gave up on it and didn’t feel inclined to return to the base game and just dropped my subscription.
I will never, EVER understand why people play gear-based MMOs for PvP. It’s just setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak. The only way it can ever possibly come close to working is if you basically make two completely different games - that is to say, if nothing you achieve in PvE (except for levelling, I suppose) works in PvP. Otherwise, you inevitably get the guy in raid gear who stomps on everyone because of the gear he got killing some PvE dragon countless times.
This is why games like League of Legends were born - to get an experience like MMO PvP WITHOUT having to deal with the PvE of an MMO.
So yeah, if you’re seriously thinking about playing LotRO for PvP, I suggest you not do so.
(Aside: If you seriously think LotRO plays anything like EQ, you haven’t played much EQ.)
I didn’t. I played it for the PvE. Which wasn’t all that enthralling so I tried the PvP subgame. If your argument is that I should have cut my losses and wrote off LoTRO a few months earlier, I completely agree.
Then I am curious as to what you think the similarities are, besides the fact that they are both PvE MMOs, because I’m really not finding many. It’s easy enough to draw paralells with WoW, on a number of levels - UI and general quest-based game flow in particular - but EQ predates non terrible UIs and quest-based gameflow.
Given that WoW drew heavily off of EQ, you shouldn’t really be surprised. It’s another fantasy world Tank-DPS-Healer based MMORPG with a heavy grind aspect. It’s not a bad game but, after grinding out a bunch of AAXP in Everquest for a small stat boost, killing a bajillion wargs for a small stat boost isn’t anything new and exciting.
Regardless of how convinced you are, I played LoTRO for the better part of a year and eventually said “Meh, done this before”. I guess it’s hard to innovate on hitting goblins with a stick; WoW gave me the same “Done that” feeling.
I have a level 57 Warden, and a level 59 Guardian. Both are fine for solo play (PvE). I think the Warden probably does slightly more DPS. I don’t mind taking a few seconds longer to kill mooks, especially if I don’t have to go through much food.
Warden is slightly more complex, as you must learn the “combos” to unlock a desired finishing move.
I don’t really see that much similarity between WoW and EQ either, honestly. Certainly no more than would be expected in two games of the same genre. Certainly, they play far less alike than, say, most FPS games.
Also, I am baffled that anyone who played EQ for as long as you did can view LotRO as anything other than grind light. You practically fly through content in LotRO, whereas, good lord, EQ I remember spending WEEKS hunting the SAME dungeon before levelling sufficiently to go on to somewhere else. And heaven forfend that you get some sort of meaningful XP bonus from… completing a quest.
I suppose if you are a compulsive consumer of grind content, then LotRO offers plenty in the form of the various kill deeds, but grinding through all of those is a sign of a personality disorder as far as I’m concerned. Do a few as you need them, but since many of them don’t even produce rewards worth having, and many of the remainder produce rewards that are only relevant to some classes.
Any of these games can be made to be all about making the numbers go up. I could say that City of Heroes is a Tank/DPS/Healer grindfest too, but that doesn’t make it like EQ.
Well, obviously if you played WoW previously, you might well have done that before, if you stick the superficial grind and gameplay mechanics.
You didn’t like the game. We get it. However, I don’t think this debate is contributing much to this thread at this point.
You could but I’m certain I’d be able to refute it much more capably than one would refute the same claim about LoTRO.
Shrug You asked. Here I thought this was a thread for talking about LoTRO.
If you like Middle Earth, you’ll probably like this game if for nothing beyond the initial experience of wandering the land and saying “Hey, there’s [landmark]!”
If you like fantasy MMORPGs, you’ll likely find this to be a well made game although one that doesn’t break any new ground. Nothing wrong with that and I’m sure a lot of people enjoy it.
If you don’t have any special love for Middle Earth and want something more innovative than the stock fantasy MMORPGs, you’ll probably find yourself thankful that LoTRO is F2P.
And I pretty much agree with all of the above. Nice game, but the real draw is the location. Lots of stuff added to fill out the game world, but even so, it important places are there and done pretty well.
If you are doing instances/raids, you may have to grind for virtues. Some people can be rather snobbish about that (from some guides I have read anyway). Now you have Turbine Points to help with the grinding, so it may not be that big of a deal anymore.
Recent stat consolidation has cut into the need for this a LOT; Since they changed resisting stuff from Resist Poison/Disease/Fear/Wound to just “Resistance”, you no longer need to cap out different virtues for each resist, you can just do a couple of good “Resistance” ones and have done. Same thing for mitigations.
Consolidation has helped but medium and light armour users get hit a lot harder and we all take a lot more damage that needs mitigating. That makes having maxxed out virtues all the more important. And as you need to swap them in and out depending on what you’re going up against you need a larger maxxed set to choose from.
I’ve played a hunter for years but the last lot of changes have left hunters glass cannons and I’m not playing so much any more. That and the ridiculous grind for armour. And the fact that LOTRO is now a Store with a game attached rather than the other way round.
It simply isn’t acceptable to remove game functions and make them store items like relic removal.
I can understand them being more important, but needing to max more of them? How do you need to have any more virtues maxxed now that there are fewer stats that need maxing?
I know this is a dumb question, but isn’t that exactly what hunters are supposed to be?
I agree with this. This was dirty and bad. If they had ACTUALLY made it easy enough to get good relics that someone would remotely consider actually destroying their relics when they changed LIs, that would be one thing, but the massive number of relics and SHARDS needed to get high end relics makes that absurd.
Situations are now more varied. If you are going up against tactical damage bosses you load up on maxxed virtues giving tactical mitigation. Other times you might want to go for more Agility for the dps. And sometimes you want raw morale. I find I use swap virtues in and out a lot more than I ever did. Just like I now carry around multiple jewellery, cloaks and off-hand weapons to help adjust to the tactical situation.
Hunters are not meant to be anything. They were not glass cannons before. Now they are. Just like Wardens were once tankers and now are not and Minstrels/Champions weren’t god-like Super-classes and now are.
I sort of resent paying a lot of cash and playing hundreds of hours to develop a toon’s capabilities only to have the very nature of the class changed by fiat.
I have no idea, but if I had to take an educated guess based on my history of reading comments like that in threads related to MMOs, probably because at the bleeding edge of content, they’re not durable enough to tank the bossiest of bosses, and therefore their entire existance is invalidated. :smack:
Apologies if this is snippy or inaccurate, but at my level of play (Level 75, moderately well geared, but not raiding.) Wardens absolutely are still tanks, so I don’t really know what else to say. Unless of course there’s some alternate meaning to the word “tanker” in play here.
