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!

Lord of the Rings Online’s latest update went live yesterday, and all of the players were super excited for it and pleased with the new content. That’s what the headline should have been today… but it’s not. There are a lot of players upset about the way War of Three Peaks, LotRO’s new so-called “mini-expansion,” was handled. Personally, I have a lot of mixed emotions about it, so let’s parse some of my feelings toward this update.

So what is all this fuss about? First off, there isn’t that much story/zone content here. Hence the “mini” label. Second, while true expansions have always had a cost associated with them for everyone, LotRO’s model has always been that subscribers get all of these smaller zones included in the subscriptions, whereas non-subbed could buy them piecemeal. This was the case as recently as last year’s Vales of Anduin release. These smaller, post-expansion updates were previously just called… updates, so this obvious marketing label feels tacky. Three Peaks broke this long-standing pattern, however, and requires everyone who wants to play it to pay at least $20 to unlock it. To make matters worse, players can’t use cash shop currency (aka “money we already gave you”) to unlock the zone as with previous releases; it’s a direct buy on the website only. To add insult to injury, there are two premium packages, labeled “Collector’s Edition” and “Ultimate Fan Bundle” (the latter with a big gold RECOMMENDED banner over it) for $60 and $100, respectively, that add a range of cosmetics (all of which, as far as I’ve seen, are ugly) and a few convenience items you could have bought from the cash shop.

Of course, LotRO got way out ahead of this and made the community aware ahead of time and communicated the reasons for this sudden change, right? Nope. As fellow bloggers Roger over at Contains Moderate Peril and Syp of Bio Break have chronicled, LotRO’s communication to its players has been bad for a long time, and seems to be getting worse. For some unknown reason, the pricing and details of these bundle tiers were kept secret until release day. I say “unknown reason,” but I would speculate that it’s largely because they knew this was going to tick off a lot of fans, and hoped this would get people to convince themselves to buy it ahead of time. Of course, instead this has caused the launch day to be more about angry fans griping about the change in sales tactics than about the actual release.

I do want to say, though, that, in Standing Stone’s defense, the update is a little more than just a single zone quest pack. It also includes the new mission system, which looks like it’s basically skirmishes by another name. Skirmishes have always been one of my favorite things about LotRO, because I can scale them in difficulty with my level and group size. Not enough games have that kind of content, and I’ve always wished they would start making new ones again. To be honest, I’m not really sure how much content is in these missions, because they haven’t been talked up much (again, communication problems). If, to play devil’s advocate, you did think missions justified the mini-expansion label, this isn’t the worst thing, given that the last couple of expansions were also a cash buy-in at first, and it is half the price of those expansions. But even if they’re extensive, is such a feature enough to justify treating this like an expansion? In my opinion, not really.

A lot of players are really upset about this, shouting about corporate greed and such. They feel that SSG has altered the deal they’ve had for years now, with no warning, and they want an explanation. People are threatening to quit because of this. To be fair, none of these kinds of shenanigans happened before the transition to Standing Stone Games and Daybreak’s involvement as publisher/owner/corporate overlord/whatever (everyone has been weirdly cagey about the nature of that relationship). Personally, I’m less upset about it and more worried about SSG’s financials. I don’t know anything about how they’re doing money-wise, but how desperate must they be to do something like this that they know will tick off so many of their fans? And they had to know this would tick off their fans. Nobody can be that incompetent… right?

It’s really sad to me, because I feel like a lot of this could have been avoided. SSG could have communicated better. If it’s a financial issue, they could have just said “Look, we’re not making money like we used to. We need to charge for some of the smaller updates we previously gave to you for free,” and this community would have started throwing money at their screens. The players who bounce out of an MMO because its future looks stormy have left this game a long time ago. The players who are here are here because they’re loyal to this game in particular. If SSG really truly believes this content is meatier than a regular patch, they should have marketed it better. And if it really is gross incompetence, then, well, I hope this is a wakeup call that they need to do better.

It seems like players would have much more easily accepted it if the zone update had been delivered the way previous zones had been (i.e. free for subbers and in the cash shop for non-subbers), and the mission system, which seems to be the tentpole feature SSG is saying makes this mini-expansion bigger than a regular patch, had been sold separately. Sure, you wouldn’t have milked extra money out of people sitting a big pile of premium currency from paying their monthly game tax, but again, that’s money they have already paid you.

At some undetermined date in the future (again, communication from this studio is wonderful), this pack will be going up on the cash shop for purchase with premium currency, and at that point, I may pick it up for the mission system. Or maybe I’ll wait for a sale. At any rate, I’m not too broken up at the idea of not getting to play this (fully skippable, as it has no level cap increase) content on day one. I’m perpetually behind in LotRO. It’s just what I do at this point. I don’t think this is worth breaking out the pitchforks and storming SSG HQ over, but it certainly is a move that is disappointing at best and worrisome at worst.

Do you ever have regrets about decisions you’ve made in MMOs? A few years ago in Lord of the Rings Online, I needed a crafting alt for a profession I didn’t have on any other characters. I decided to do a class I had never done, Rune-Keeper, with a race I hadn’t done much of, Elf, just to be different. I had to level him a bit to get him to a superior workbench (I’m so glad they got rid of those; they were dumb), but I quickly fell in love with the way the class played. I always regretted not making him a Dwarf, however. I tried to remind myself that Elves had racial passives that were more useful for Rune-Keeper than Dwarves, but it didn’t help. I just like Dwarves a lot more than Elves. Leveling is so slow in LotRO (I know many LotRO fans find it too fast, hence the slowed progression on the legendary server, but I guess I’m just spoiled by other games) that I didn’t want to start over just for the sake of my character’s looks.

Then Minas Morgul came along, bringing with it the new Stout-Axe Dwarf race and a special edition that nets me cosmetics and a character boost. I know a lot of MMO players sneer at level boosts, and I can certainly understand why, especially in this game where the story and the world is the standout feature. But this seemed like a perfect opportunity to create a new dwarf rune-keeper without having to start over at level 1. Plus, it’s a class I already know, so it’s not like I’m going straight to 120 with no idea how to play my character. And if I hate it, I can just go back to my old Rune-Keeper.

It’s also a way for me to resolve another regret: Mordor. I was really interested in the story of Mordor — where will the story go now that we’ve entered more-or-less uncharted territory, with the big-bad dead? — so I bought a similar package for Mordor on sale a while back and level boosted my Captain, and immediately regretted it. The mobs in Mordor have so much health that my Captain in DPS spec has a lot of trouble surviving, and in tank spec it takes her so long to kill mobs that, if I have to pull two mobs at once, the first mob has respawned by the time I’ve killed the second. As far as I can tell, it’s not like they start you off with garbage gear or anything, that’s just the way it is for some classes. I didn’t expect a cake walk into Mordor, but it was just too much to do alone, at least with a Cappy.

So I have decided to take my new Stout-Axe Rune-Keeper through the main quest for Mordor and the associated content before starting Minas Morgul. He’s overleveled, so it has been going pretty quickly. And, once things do get tough, I have more confidence in the Rune-Keeper’s DPS and self-healing than the Cappy’s; I think if I had boosted my Rune-Keeper instead of my Captain for Mordor I wouldn’t need another token today, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

Long-term, once I’m caught up with current content, I would like to turn him into a healer and run some dungeons with the guild I’ve been a part of for a long time, but have never done anything more than chat with. As much as I love newer, faster paced games like Guild Wars 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online, I miss the experience of healing in more traditional, tab-target MMOs, and from what little grouping I’ve done in the past, the Rune-Keeper is a lot of fun to play as a healer.