Tell me about LOTR Online

The Game Room
41

It’s been a long time since I have played at lvl 14, so please forgive me for suggesting you use skills that you don’t quite have yet.

The LM is one of the classes with several crowd control skills. You just don’t have enough levels to have many of them yet. You also don’t really need them all that much at lower levels. Blinding Flash is useful the moment you get it, and Light of the Rising Dawn is more useful as a nuke than a CC skill early on. You are not a cc-exclusive class: LMs have several other niches and when properly played, can output very respectable DPS. If anything, you can think of your LM as a tank mage.

Your strategy above will definitely work, but I would suggest that it might not be the most fun way to play a LM even at low levels. The LM is not a tactical nuke class: at the early levels, you should get roughly 50% of your DPS from hitting things with your staff. The proportion of DPS you inflict in melee will go up once you begin to dual wield a sword and staff. If you stand back blasting from a distance, you are not going to make the most efficient use of your capabilities.

You may justifiably worry about your squishiness: after all, your only armor is your bathrobe. Loremasters have a tool for this, which you happened to get at lvl 14 already. It is the inestimable Sign of Power: Wizardry. From its text, you might think it sucks. It takes a little more explanation, so please bear with me.

Your pet is not a tank, it is a melee DoT. Every time it attacks, there is a chance it will proc a condition called Flanked!. You will hear a tone, see purple arrows pointing to the flanked mob, and will see a jaws-looking debuff in the mob’s debuff row. This condition lasts about five seconds or so. Flanking has nothing to do with position, it just happens randomly with each pet attack. When a mob is flanked, you can do two special things. If you have Staff Strike traited (which you simply must do ASAP), you can do an Improved Staff Strike into a flank that does massive light damage and can proc a stun (you don’t need the trait to Staff Strike into a flank but it is more devastating by far). You will hit something fierce this way. But if you are hurting or your Staff Strike is cooling down, then you use your wonderful SoP: Wizardry. This will give you a robust self-heal.

So your strategy at low levels goes something like this. Use the Raven, not the bear, and keep him perma-Enraged. I also bind pet keys to my hotbar because using the mouse is annoying and because I micr0and will see a jaws-looking debuff in the mob’s debuff row. This condition lasts about five seconds or so. Flanking has nothing to do with position, it just happens randomly with each pet attack. When a mob is flanked, you can do two special things. If you have Staff Strike traited (which you simply must do ASAP), you can do an Improved Staff Strike into a flank that does massive light damage and can proc a stun (you don’t need the trait to Staff Strike into a flank but it is more devastating by far). You will hit something fierce this way. But if you are hurting or your Staff Strike is cooling down, then you use your wonderful SoP: Wizardry. This will give you a robust self-heal.

So your strategy at low levels goes something like this. Use the Raven, not the bear, and keep him perma-Enraged. I also bind pet keys to my hotbar because using the mouse is annoying and because I micro-manage my pets a lot. Even at low levels, you will have no problem catching flanks every 10-20s or so.

  1. Sign of Power: Command. This always goes first. It’s a wonderful debuff and does not pull.

  2. Burning Embers. You can send the pet in here, but if there are nearby mobs, you do not want the pet to pull them accidentally. Burning embers will also lay down a nice slow, giving you time to move into position.

  3. If you have enough room, now it’s time to Gust of Wind. If this is a multi-mob situation, consider Fire Lore. Otherwise you probably won’t even need it.

  4. Charge your ass in and hit things with your paddle while your bird hammers away. Always give yourself an auto-attack in between your skill chains. Here you can just repeat Burning Embers, Gust of Wind, and Staff Strike. When you get a flank, either self-heal or lay down an Improved Staff Strike.

When you get Light of the Rising Dawn, you might want to pull with it. The nuke is large and the stun gives you enough time to fire off some other skills in the chain. By the time the mob gets to you, half his morale is gone and you’ve debuffed him into the stone age. The rest is staff city.

Two mob situations are easy. Keep one mob mezzed with Blinding Flash while you work on the the other with your pet. Three mob situations are not difficult: keep one mob mezzed, debuff the other two, keep your bird on one with his Evasion and Distraction powers chained, and you han

42

I haven’t been to the boards in a long, long time. But there were once stickied threads that had basic strategy guides for each class and FAQs. I can try to dig up something for you if you have trouble locating them.

43

Sorry about the duplicative crap in that last post. I must have C&Ped by accident. Damn tiny keyboard.

44

Thanks. I’ll go take a look again.

45

Since some people were so angry with my dismissal, I decided I would give LOTRO another chance. Here are my ntoes so far.

Having been utterly disgusted by the humans, I tried a dwarf again. Well, actually, I tried an Elf Champion (the one class I never tried before), but I was bored his awesomely slender skillset. I guess they are good at what they do, but kinda boring. Like playing a WoW warrior with every move the same and only 5 points of rage, so few hard choices. I considered that it might change as I levelled up. I then considered that it still wasn’t worth it and rolled a Minstrel. I guess Turbine wasn’t joking when they called the Champion “Basic”.

The Minstrel is fun. I enjoy-

Dear freaking God what is that THING?!

Oh, that’s my character. He sort of looks like somebody crossed an lowland mountain gorilla with Robin Williams. I tweak things so that he would not, in fact, be cast out of hell by Satan for being too hideous.

Ahem. The MInstrelis fun. You build up song levels to unleash more powerful songs. It’s fairly steady, and it mostly revolves around picking which bonuses you want, and maybe having a few extras to fill up your hotbar with stuff to hit on cooldown. You also get an attack where you kill the enemy by shouting at them.

Yes, you heard that right. Plus, there’s Herald’s strike. Although I’m sure I’ve ever actually hit with that one. It seems to get wasted a lot, much like my dwarf.

I recommend the Elf/Dwarf starting zone because it’s less stupid than the human/hobbit one. In the Humbit zone, you basically walk around doing odd jobs for people, and ultimately nothing changes because of your actions. You eventually save a pointless moron from his own stupidity, while ignoring any useful action you could otherwise take. I particularly enjoyed taking a stupidly roundabout method of defending against the invading bandits by waiting until they already succeeded before trying to awkwardly save something. EVen then, we find out mostly because the bandits are too dim to

The Elf/Dwarf zones, also known as Dwelf zones, only involve mild stupidity, in which the villains, for some reason, hand out their own personal-forged weapons bearing marks that identify the makers to goblins. Since the goblins really dont’ do anything for them, I’ve never been all that sure why they’d go for it. Sure, Sauron probably wants his minions cooperating for properly good, err, evil, goals. But I don’t see why the Dourhands care.

Anyway, the forces of good go through a tutorial, kill some hapless woodland creatures, and eventually partly triumph. Of course, we failed completely in the primary point of this mission, so that’s a bust. And it’s not really very impressive when the forces of evil are beaten by a dwarf so feeble he has to take rest breaks while assaulting the villains. Ah well.

The little cave claws are cute. I want a pet cave claw!

I finally realized what bothers me about the graphics. Texture. I’m not at all sure the designers understood that there are materials other than (badly textured) stone and plastic. Everything looks very off in this game. It doens’t help that the clothing is… odd. And not like WoW, where the armor design has basically achieved a nirvanic pinnacle of absurdity.

I also noted that the character models have their chests sticking out too far. It’s not that the characters are exactly misshapen. They just stand in a weird manner

Right, join the Dwarf Minstrel in part 2 for “Grinding Deeds and Virtues!”

46

The armor looks crappy, especially the lower level stuff.

You can buy “costume” items from various vendors arouns the towns, as well as possibly on the auction house. All of my toons have “costumes” enabled (and some helms turned “off”) to cover up the otherwise unattractive mish mash of gear.

47

I don’t think anyone was angry at your dismissal. Just perplexed, since your criticisms were (and continue to be) so odd. It’s like you are playing a bizarro world LOTRO that none of the rest of us are playing.

Your remarks on the textures are perhaps the most bizarre. Dare I ask, what graphics setting do you play on and what kind of hardware are you running?

48

Amusing description smiling bandit :slight_smile:

I agree, there is just something off about the figure modeling. The elves and humans are all swaybacked, barrel chested, and pigeon toed. I tried posing like them and developed back cramps and charlie horses in under a minute. I’ve played Guild Wars and, in spite of being a much older game, it blows the doors off of LOTRO in terms of character models and textures.

I’ve been playing a hobbit burglar (if the game won’t let me have a beautiful heroic figure, then I’ll be really ugly) and have been having fun with the combat style of that class. The environments are lovely and you can run around and explore without drawing too much aggro, though I did see a guy running from a train of about twenty bears. It’s a shame about the character and armor modeling though, I’ve seen a bunch of muddled fuzzy armor sets but nothing that has made me go “wow!” on myself or any others I’ve seen. I saw a level 40-something guy slumming in the newbie zones and he still looked like he’d stolen his clothes off of Farmer Maggot’s clothesline. Oh well.

And why the hell is Strider hiding in some unmarked little room at the end of some unmarked hallway in a tiny little instance? It’s like the jock ringwraiths shoved him into a gym locker.

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Pretty much high and very high across the board. I’m sorry, but even the snow looks plastic. The light reflection on it says “slick plastic” to me. And so does everything which isn’t stone, basically. Cloth, metal, skin - shiny plastic.

50

There must be something screwed up with your copy of the game or something. Maybe you got the low-res version of the game (there was one, at one point, not sure if it still exists) and it’s stretching textures badly? I really don’t know, because as Maeglin said, it’s like you’re playing the Bizarro World version of the game. Nothing you say remotely corresponds to what I would describe as my own real world experience. o.o Maybe I’ll post some screenshots of what the game is supposed to look like, but I’m not going to be able to do that until tomorrow evening earliest.

To answer another question… Strider is a small unmarked room because A) The people of Bree don’t like or trust him and B) He’s hiding from people who would inform the forces of Sauron that “Hey, Elendil’s Heir is just hanging out here, why don’t you off him?” I woulda figured that would be pretty obvious. Even in the books, he’s all skulking in corners when he’s in Bree and Barliman won’t even let him SEE the hobbits until he sneaks in on his own.

51

I THINK this should let people view a couple of screenshots:

I’m not the most visually coordinated hero out there, nor are my screenshot skills particularly good, but, well, it doesn’t look deformed to me.

52

Reminded by this thread that the game had gone free-to-play, I signed up to see if they had changed some of the things that annoyed me before. Having thereby established that I’m starting from a negative opinion of the game, I’ll chime in on the graphics.

I don’t really see the “plastic” environment complaint that smiling bandit has voiced. On the whole, the environmental graphics are decent, though not awe-inspiring. The standing water is quite good. Waterfalls are awful. About the worst I can say about it overall is that it suffers from real is brown syndrome.

The character models, on the other hand, make me very sad. I’m undoubtedly spoiled by the character creator in City of Heroes, but…ugh. Leaving aside costume elements–which work too differently in a game with wearable loot for a fair comparison–the models themselves allow almost no customization, and the base models are pretty unappealing. Even the elves are ugly, and there’s not much you can do about it.

All that said, I’m trying to give the game a fair shake. I made a hobbit burglar (Amaradoc) on Silverlode, and I’ve been playing around in the Shire. Some quests have definitely been improved. The intros to various game mechanics have been made a little clearer. Bears, while still overpopulated, no longer fall from the sky on your head. The “you are a pathetic weakling who will get pwned by ordinary mobs” element is still there, but maybe not as vicious as before. Escort quests still make me want to beat the developers with a blunt object. Mandatory “cut-scenes” in which you’re not allowed to intervene, despite being in a perfect position to stab someone in the back, seem to be new, and we hates them, Precioussss. (I don’t mean the “cowering” scenes, which are justifiable; I mean the ones where bad guys are standing there talking, and you can’t attack because they’re flagged as non-hostile.)

Overall, I have to say the game has gotten better. I still don’t find it gripping, but I’ll at least get out of the Shire (which logically ought to be dull) before I pass judgment.

53

Wait. You’re in The Shire and you think the textures are too brown? That whole area looks like it’s been slathered with a big can of Green. Overall I find this complain as baffling as the “plastic” terrain. What zone is brown? I guess Angmar is brown, but you know, it’s a blighted landscape. I’m deeply confused as to what areas you think are excessively brown.

And yeah, fine, the faces of the characters aren’t the most attractive things ever, but you know what? No one, including you after character selection, is going to get a decent view of them EVER, so I really wouldn’t worry about it too much. Pick a skin and hair color, a hair style, and beard if you need one, and get out there. That’s all anyone’s ever going to see on you anyway.

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Don’t blow it out of proportion. It’s not overwhelming, and I’m not bashing the game for it. Like I said, overall, the environmental graphics are pretty good, and the Shire does have a lot of green. Also, a lot of the brown in the Shire makes sense, given the farms, the house style, and so forth (and even more so in areas like Angmar, which I have no complaints about). The towns just look a bit more drab than I would prefer.

I prefaced my comments with background. My main online game is City of Heroes, in which other players not only pay attention to your character’s appearance, they actually hold player-sponsored costume/beauty contests with substantial prizes, based on overall look, originality, and themes. It has 21 sliders for adjusting size and shape of facial characteristics, and another 7 for tweaking body proportions. That sets the bar really high for customization, and LotRO suffers by comparison (as do most games, actually). Inevitably, that colors my assessment.

Again, I’m not attacking the game. I’m just offering my subjective impressions of it, which are somewhat mixed. There’s no question that it’s improved substantially from the state I last saw it in, but it’s still far from perfect. I need to see more of it to judge it fairly, and its F2P status makes it relatively easy to do so.

55

Okay; But when someone says something “suffers” from “real is brown” syndrome, I think THIS not THIS, you know?

With regard to character creation, I’ve never played City of Heroes, but I can’t see anyone agonizing of your choice of eye color in that game either. Let’s face it - these games are played from a 3rd person perspective with the camera pulled back to a distance of at least 20 feet and they move around rapidly. No one is counting the hairs on your chin under those circumstances. It’s far more important that you be able to make yourself look good with GEAR than it is to spend 30 minutes in the character creator tweaking your eyebrows. And the support for the cosmetic item system puts the game leagues ahead of the likes of WoW, where your character inevitably looks like raided the bargain bin at a costume shop that couldn’t quite figure out how to sort the “medieval fantasy” section from the “death metal” section.

Additionally, as criticism of an MMO goes, “character creation options compare unfavorably to City of Heroes” is pretty much up there with criticizing a corporation because they make less money than Exxon Mobil. :wink:

They probably could use a few more hairstyles though. Those are actually obvious enough to make a difference when you’re actually playing the game, and the selection is pretty slim.

56

The thing with CoH/V is that your look is completely customizable. You get to decide what your character wears, what colors, textures, etc. Every max level character has a pretty unique look if they wish. The guy wearing a pink tutu and heels may be the baddest raid tank on the server.

In WoW, there are no options. As noted, you aren’t looking at your toon’s face very often, but every raiding mage is going to be wearing the same T9/T10 gear. Same for tanks, rogues, druids, DK’s, etc. You get to where you can identify a character’s class–and thereby his abilities–based on what he’s wearing. The gnome is the purple dress is going to melt your face. Etc.

57

Full credit where it’s due:

This is certainly one thing LotRO does better than WoW*; it has a system for tweaking your appearance that lets you work around ugly (or otherwise undesirably distinctive) gear. I haven’t played with it much, but I gather you can color-coordinate your outfit, and even hide that hideous hat you wear for its stat bonuses. I should probably figure out how to use it, since my burglar currently looks like his clothes were picked out by a color-blind four-year-old. :smiley:

*Among many others. I am not what you’d call a WoW fan.

58

I had briefly wondered if the cosmetic item system was available to free players, but the webpage says it is, so yay! Basically, here’s how it works:

First you can show or hide your helm, cloak, boots (Some folks like hobbits to be shoeless) and uh… maybe some other gear (thought not all of it. No hiding your pants. :stuck_out_tongue: ) by just clicking the little “eye” icon next to it in your character sheet. That’s the simplest level of customization, also known as the “Holy crap is my hat stupid looking” system.

The outfit system uses the two tabs on the right side of the character sheet - they look like hats. When you select one of these, you get, essentially, another inventory window but with slots only for visible gear. You can drag and drop any gear item into here, and it’ll show you how it looks on your character (Aside: You can see how any piece of gear looks without having to buy/equip it by uh… I think it’s control right clicking on it, so if you’re shopping for cosmetics, that’s the way to go) - though it will also leave the item in your inventory. Outfit slots aren’t “real” inventory slots - you can’t store things in them, you just assign things to them for visual purposes - but at the same time, if you want, once you’ve equipped an item cosmetically, you can sell it, put it in the vault, or whatever. Once you have all the stuff you want for that outfit “equipped” you click the little circle that says “Show Outfit 1” (or 2, or whatever). And presto! Your character’s appearance changes to that outfit.

You can also get dyes (which are player made, except for dye wash, which is vendor sold.) in the auction house, to color coordinate your gear. Those you right click, and then click the item you want to dye, and the item’s color is permanently changed (though it won’t change the appearance of a copy of that item you have in an outfit. If you want to do that, dye the item and then drag it to that outfit slot again.) Though I strongly recommend using the dye-color dropdowns in the “dressing room” (the window accessed by control right clicking a piece of gear) because exactly which portions of a piece of gear change color when it dye it can…vary.

Edit: There’s also a “wardrobe” in the bank, which can be used, as I understand it, to store “cosmetic” copies of items so you don’t need to keep real copies. And you can even dye them different colors and store copies of them in each color. I’m not super familiar with it though, since it’s a new feature I haven’t really messed with yet.

59

Yes. I don’t recognise much about whatever version of LOTRO it is he’s playing.

60

I had my first experience with “session play” last night. I found it amusing, and it has definite similarities to a “challenge” character I have in City (a level 1 Defender whose purpose is to explore ridiculously dangerous places). I have a sinking feeling, however, that I’m eventually going to be asked to walk into Mordor* as a chicken in some insane scheme to protect the cluckers back in the Shire from wolves.

*Yes, yes, I know. I submit, however, that walking into Mordor as a chicken is not something one could plausibly call “simple”, so the rule does not apply. :slight_smile: