I’m doing something lately that I never thought I would do in The Lord of the Rings Online: power leveling. That is, ignoring most of the normal narrative quest content in favor of whatever will level me the fastest. LOTRO isn’t one of those WoW-style “blitz to endgame” types of games, but is rather more about the storytelling and existing in Tolkien’s rich world. So why would I intentionally skip over a lot of that content? 

Because I’m cheap.

Let me back up. The new River-Hobbit race came out recently, and with it, the ability to make a Ribbit Rune Keeper. RK is probably my favorite class in this game (perhaps tied with Beorning). It’s just so fun and versatile: Rooted AoE/DoT damage with the fire spec, super mobile instant damage and crowd control with lightning, and some of the best healing in the game. I had been itching to play this class again, and I have always found that I am happiest when playing this game as a Hobbit, so I looked into the race change token I remember them adding to the game a few years ago. Some cursory research tells me that race changes don’t come with name changes, and the name that my current Dwarf RK has simply wouldn’t fit with the curly-haired Hobbit lass I was envisioning, so I would need to buy a name change token as well. I totalled it up and… well, let’s just say that I could buy a whole game or two on Steam for the price of those two database entry updates. I considered buying a level boost for a fresh character — they sell boosts as low as 50, which is far from the cap, surely those are reasonably priced? — but no, that came out to about the same price. In a year when money is already tight, this isn’t how I wanted to spend my entertainment budget. I’m grumpy, because we all know that this kind of change is only slightly harder than the in-game barber that’s practically free, but I guess as cash extraction methods go, it could be a lot worse, so I will try to not complain too much. 

In the midst of all of this, I was also reminded of one of the problems with my existing RK: His virtues are sadly underleveled. You see, I didn’t think I liked the Rune Keeper class at first — it doesn’t really get a lot of its fun abilities until circa level 25 or 30, which no one had told me at the time, so that’s unsurprising — so I relegated my original RK to a crafting alt, so most of his early levels came exclusively from processing materials. At the time, you had to get to a certain level to use superior crafting stations for higher level crafting, so when he hit that crafting tier, I did a little questing just to get him up, and quickly fell in love with the class. But he had a good 20 or 30-some levels with no deeding whatsoever, which left him not very virtuous. Plus, even after I started playing him seriously, this was in the days before virtue XP, so the virtues he did end up with weren’t very conducive to his role. So if I’m going to have to grind for virtues anyway, I want it to be on a character I like. 

So I decided the only reasonable(?) course of action was to just retire my old dwarf Rune Keeper in favor of a new River Hobbit one. Rather than spending money, I would spend time to get her up to the level of my old RK, who was in his mid 60s (a good time to retire, I suppose), stalled out in Mirkwood as I so often do, but oh-so-close to Dunland, content that I realize is super old now, but is still new to me, because I keep doing stuff like this and starting new alts, oops. 

My power leveling method of choice is one I’ve seen thrown around in chat and on forums: The (relatively) recently added mission system. These are repeatable daily quests found in a few hubs in the last few zones that were added that, more importantly, scale to your level. The idea is to do all of the missions you have access to but not turn them in as you go, then pop an XP booster scroll and turn them all in at once. One of the boxes from some of the weekly meta gives a +100% scroll, so they shouldn’t be in short supply. Since missions are always on-level, it’s better than regular quests, which can have reduced rewards as you outlevel them, plus since you can save them all up, you can be sure to turn them all in while under the double XP buff. Once that’s done, to use the rest of the XP booster time wisely, I either run a few skirmishes, or log out until tomorrow’s missions, trying to start with the most combat-intensive ones first, to boost my XP from those enemies.

So there you have it, LOTRO power leveling. It’s a thing I’m doing, even though I don’t generally recommend it. But only because I am vain and wanted a character who looks pretty, but also cheap and I don’t want to pay for a pricey race and name change. 

Last time I talked about my excitement for LotRO’s Shadowfax progression server, with its faster leveling and fast expansion release cadence, and pondered what class to play. I still hadn’t decided by the time the new servers went up, so I ended up just rolling a bunch of characters and seeing which one stuck.

After a lot of waffling and self-induced anxiety and an existential crisis or two, I ended up maining a Captain. A High Elf, believe it or not. I’m not a big Elf person (they’re kind of jerks in every universe) but they have some cool animations and a unique shout, and I have the High Elf race, so why not? Captain is just such a comfortable class for me. While I played one a bunch back in my early days with LotRO, I hadn’t played one seriously in years, but it all came back to me very quickly. I’ve been leveling in tank spec, just because I was previously DPS. Cappy DPS isn’t that great to begin with, so I can’t say I felt a lot of difference in TTK, but the extra survivability is definitely noticeable. 

As I was trying different alts, I tinkered with the new difficulty settings. I landed on Hard, mostly because that’s the minimum difficulty to get the account-wide title (which I will never use, because when you have the title “Walked Into Mordor” why would you ever use anything else?) and because it was just enough added challenge to be fun, but not enough to make killing every random mob feel like a chore. LotRO isn’t known for its difficult open world content, but I don’t think I realized just how weak it really is until I forgot that I was on hard mode, then went into a quest instance and was bewildered at how fast I was mowing down mobs above my level. Then I remembered that difficulty settings don’t work in instances. I would probably be playing on Deadly or higher difficulty on at least some of my tankier characters, just for the novelty of the challenge, but the random AoE nukes are more annoying than fun. The constant dread visual effect and the Eye of Sauron popping up over your head every few minutes were extremely distracting, which was a big turnoff initially, but fortunately SSG removed those after a few days. I wish I could talk my friends into playing on this server with me, because I think it would be a blast to get a party together and crank the difficulty up to max and play through the whole game like it was one giant dungeon. 

The culture of the Shadowfax server is interesting. I haven’t done a rigorous population study or anything, but from the frequency of chat and the number of people I bump into while leveling, it seems like there’s a decent population, comparable to maybe one of the smaller regular servers. Oddly enough, there aren’t really a lot of guilds. There’s one mega guild that I see recruiting pretty much every time I play, and apart from that, I’ve seen maybe one or two others. I know that there’s no real point in hitting the gear treadmill when it’s all going to be invalidated every two months when a new expansion gets added, but that’s not usually the main reason I join a guild anyway. I’m mostly there for the social aspect (the fellowship, if you will excuse the pun). Instance runs are just a convenient side effect. The LFF channel is pretty lively, though, with people PUGing dungeons and raids much more frequently than I usually see on my regular server. I saw some naysayers claiming that there wouldn’t be an economy on Shadowfax, but I’ve been making a pretty good living off of dyes so far. Maybe that means I’m the only one bothering with crafting? 

The biggest reason I didn’t stick around LotRO’s original progression server was that I fell behind the curve and couldn’t catch back up as new expansions unlocked. From what I’ve heard, it seems like it lost a lot of population because of this, and because speedier players drifted away waiting for content unlocks. In my view, Shadowfax has fixed this both problems speeding up leveling and speeding up expansion unlocks. I know most of LotRO’s population is more keen on Treebeard, and I may roll there after I get a character or two up to cap, but for now, Shadowfax is my LotRO home. 

Lord of the Rings Online announced its speed-leveling Shadowfax server and its slowmo-leveling Treebeard server just a few short weeks ago, and now we know they’re coming this Wednesday. As someone who has been playing LotRO for ages but has never made it past Mirkwood, I’m excited for the fast leveling server. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like if this game did what Star Wars the Old Republic did and upped the XP output of the main story quests so you can focus exclusively on those while leveling, choosing to do side quests only if you’re interested in them, not as a primary means to level. I’m not sure if Shadowfax will boost leveling speed quite that much, but since LotRO doesn’t have SWTOR’s level scaling, that’s probably for the best. Sorry, Treebeard, as much as I love you as a character, I felt like Arnor’s leveling was too slow, so I don’t think your even slower pace is for me. 

So the question is, what class do I want to level this time? I might still be on Arnor if I hadn’t started with Warden, realized that class wasn’t for me, rerolled, and then felt hopelessly behind. Ok, I probably would have ended up hopelessly behind anyway, because that’s how it goes with me and this game, but still, picking the right class the first time around is important with these limited time progression servers. 

I’ve never made a serious attempt at a Guardian. I know they’ve fallen out of favor as tanks, but I’m probably going to be playing mostly solo anyway, so DPS is fine. Besides, the health regen-focused red line and the melee AoE-focused yellow line both sound interesting. 

I’ve had a Minstrel for a long time, but I’ve never put serious time into him, which is something I regret. It’s a fun class, and I like healing. Besides, Bards are such an iconic RPG staple, and so many MMOs are missing them these days. 

I have a high level captain, but it has been years at this point since she was my main, and I kind of have the urge to level a new one. I always played in DPS spec, and I know captains are considered the best tanks right now, so I could always try leveling in tank spec. It might go a little slower, but the faster leveling speed should more than make up for that, right?

Finally, I rolled a new Hunter after their rework a while back, but honestly felt like it made everything a little too easy. Then again, I never made it out of Bree-Land, so maybe with faster leveling, I’ll get to more challenging content before I get too bored, and be glad for the extra power.

Right now I’m leaning toward one of the two tank classes. Logically, I feel like I should want to play the Guardian, since it’s new to me, but I’ve also been thinking about the Cappy a lot lately. We’ll see how I feel Wednesday!