New Class Trait Guides

With the Rise of Isengard update, we have both been working our way through our different characters and different classes, levelling them, playing in groups earning new gear, and working out new trait sets ups, legacies and layouts. As a result we have made some notes, and in places, changes to the way we play and the gear we use. We are now in the position to go back through our guides sections and start to make some changes to our current guides as a when necessary, to keep them up to date.

In addition to this we have also made ourselves a few notes about class traits, as on our champ, minstrel, and RK we have found ourselves retraiting more than every to help balance out the groups we have found ourselves in. This has led to us creating a short hand reference to some generic builds, with some top priority traits, and nice complementary, but not essential, ones to enable us to retrait quickly without too much messing around.

We will (slowly as always) be adding them to the site, and the first, the Champion builds, we are making live today. You can access it via this link, or via the guides menu in the top right, under class trait guides.

thanks for reading!

Adam

 

Outfitting a Dwarf – Ganin

Adam has done a series of posts looking at some of his cosmetic outfits, and I thought it time that I joined in. Having got our first characters to 75 a few weeks ago (we meandered to 75), and looking at every quest reward and crafted item for both its stats and cosmetic value, I had a lot of choice. The designers with this expansion have gone to town on cosmetics, and as a result I had a vault full of stuff that I liked the look of. Saying that, it can be very difficult to outfit a Dwarf – the proportions do not lend themselves well to many outfits which would look great on one of the other races. Dwarfs have thick, slightly bowed legs, large forearms, broad shoulders and a thick chest, and often depending on the build, a paunch too. All of this means that many armour and cosmetic items distort too much as they are stretched to fit the Dwarf physique.

I’ve always struggled to find an outfit on my legion of Dwarfs (other than the Khazad Guard Uniform) which I really like, but now utilising the new armour quest rewards and new Tier 7 crafted items, I’ve found one that I’m pretty happy with. Most of the new quest rewards in Rise of Isengard have a medieval feel to them, which suit the bulky Dwarfs, although beware of some of the helmets- while they look good they completely remove the facial hair of the wearer. Now who wants to play a beardless Dwarf?

Armour: Forged Iron Dunlending Hauberk, Crimson Dye, Heavy Armour quest reward.

Shoulders: Potent Calenard War Paldrons, Crimson Dye, Heavy Armour Westfold crafted level 66

Gloves: Warriors Buckled Gauntlets, Crimson Dye, Medium Armour quest reward

Boots: Reinforced Leather Dunlending Boots, undyed, Medium Armour quest reward

Cloak: Embroidered Cloak of the Dunland Healer, Crimson Dye, quest reward.

I love this chest piece, and would recommend anyone get it as a quest reward purely for its cosmetic value, it looks good on all races and dyes really well. As you can see from my chosen outfit, I really like the crimson dye. The red spectrum of dyes always make a big impact on colouring cosmetics and often I use a mix of red, burgundy and crimson in my outfits, depending on the base colour of the item I want to dye. I chose the gloves because they were fingerless, and to my mind much better for gripping the two axes Ganin habitually uses. The shoulder guards, with chased metal underneath and rich fur on top look great, and are a happy medium for Dwarfs in the cosmetic stakes. Large shoulder guards, especially the heavy armour ones, can often be too extreme on a muscular Dwarf, whereas some of the medium armour ones can make the shoulders too narrow. The light armour shoulders, especially the ones which resemble a scarf, can make a Dwarf look too round, and remind me of an egg. The ones that I chose here, are broad shoulder guards, but the fur softens them down again, without detracting from the detail on the hauberk. I could say something profound about the cloak but I’m not going to. It’s got dragons on it and looks ace, and the green and red go with the red of the hauberk, and un-dyable green parts on its arms.

Protectors of Zigilburk

Recently the Khazad Guard has met a great bunch of guys on our home Eldar server we would love to let you know about!

Their name is the Protecters of Zigilburk kinship, and like ourselves they are big fans of the dwarves. They are a new kinship, but founded by players who have been in-game since the Rift days. Having been in various kinships they decided it was time to start one of their own, and formed the Protectors of Zigilburk.

Their aims are much the same as most kinships, they are not particularly Role Players themselves, but are more than happy if there are RP keen dwarves that want to join. Their distinguishing criteria are that they are only recruiting race of Dwarves characters. Some of you think that whilst this is all very well for 3 mans, but this will leave them a little short on some classes for 6 mans and raids where the variety of classes come into play. But this is something else they are keen to explore as part of the challenge. The flexibility of classes these days means that Hunters and RK’s can use many CC abilities, Minstrels have an overwhelming arrays of buffs, and so on, so Running these instances with only dwarves will be great fun, and allow players to truly explore the ranges of their class abilities and come at some of these problems from different angles.

The Khazad Guard have naturally formed a close alliance with the Protectors, and we shall be running some content together fairly soon, and hopefully long into the future. As a product of this, Eldar Server now has its own Dwarf channel, for communicating between players and fans of dwarves. Simply type: /joinchannel DurinsFolk and you will be connected to the chat channel on that character. You can type messages by typing /1 *your message* if you have never joined a user chat before, or /2, /3, or  /4 if you are in Global LFF or any other user-created channels. don’t forget you can right-click on your user chat tabs to change the colour of your chat channels if it is hard to spot, or creat another tab and filter it just to receive text from specific chat sources, again all by right clicking on the tab. We think this will be great fun, exploring different tactics and skills and traits that often get sidelined, so we look forward to it immensely!

Any one who is interested in joining The Protectors, either with mains or alts, please send Peco or Trioin a tell, or if you are happy with your current kinship, but have a dwarf character and fancy joining in ones of our runs just join the channel and say hi and we can have a chat!

So Good luck protectors, may your beards grow long and never wither, and we look forward to taking on the enemy together, at the correct height.

Changes to joining a Crafting Guild

Tedwise demonstrating the art of Home Brew

I was having a little look at crafting today and decided I would be really nice and do some cooking and farming for one of Adams little Hobbit alts. Between us we have an awful lot of characters and we try to craft on all of them and have them all in a Guild. Today was little Tedwise’s turn, as Adam is not such a fan of cooking and farming, and I agreed to do it for him, as he will often run skirmishes and such for me. When crafting, I throw nothing away. After levelling several of my farmers, I had a lot of fine crops left over which i had passed on, which needed turning into various fruit and vegetables (today it was mainly blackberries – I ended up with 1050 of them!). Tedwise could master many of his tiers without planting a field, and I could read a book while he did it, the best way to craft in my opinion.

The Cooks Guild Leader in Michael Delving

Anyway, with his bags bulging with fruit, I headed back to Michael Delving for him to cook it all up. He’s a fun-loving party hobbit, so naturally, this is mostly now beer. I opened up expert, and up popped the quest to join a Guild. We have very few characters who are not in a Guild, and those that are have been in for some time. Like before, you would be asked to go and speak with the Guild leader. Now though, the Guild leader asks you to speak to the person selling the Guild crest recipes, for the Cooks Guild this was the Repast Recipe Vendor. They then point you to the Improved Recipes Vendor, who then rewards you with a Small Expert level barter item, worth 400 reputation. That is definitely new, and I was pleasantly surprised. I had known that in previous updates, crafting had been changed – you no longer needed to go off to all parts of Middle Earth to get a strange Jewel/Mould/Hide/Stick/Herb/Relic etc. to advance the crafting tiers, but I had no idea that they had done a new “introduction to” quest chain for joining a Guild also.

The reward for completing the introduction to the Cooks Guild quest

Go on, and talk with your nearest Master of Guilds – there’s usually one in most craft areas, to join in the fun! They can be quite expensive in terms of materials, but it is definately worth it!

Happy Crafting,

Emma.

Pig Spa

We were exploring the Dunbog the other night and came across a very exclusive Spa for pigs. Here, members of the Boar Clan would pamper their porcine friends with facials, trottericures and massage. Judging by the look on the pigs face, it was highly appreciated. I wonder if there is a Dwarf Spa nearby?

"yeah thats the spot"

Bye-Bye Axe

I got extremely lucky with a legendary weapon on my Dwarf Champion Ganin. It was a 65 Third Age, so not the greatest now, and was identified and used back in the days when you couldn’t save legacies, and add them on, even before F2P and the LoTRO Store, where you can remove your relics prior to deconstructing, and before crafted First Age weapons,  and possibly even crafted 65 Second Age weapons. It was that long ago.

Now Ganin and I became very proud of that axe, while Adam, a seasoned Champion, looked on with envy at every reforge. And this is why:

Okay so it probably didn’t have the best relics on there, but it did have 6 Major legacies on there, which is almost impossible to get. If the level cap was never to have increased past 65, it was unlikely that I would ever have to change this axe out. All this axe had added to it was a Scroll of Delving to upgrade it from 60 levels to 70, otherwise it was utterly perfect, I was just working to earn scrolls of empowerment to up the tiers (a slow process when you are casual/duo player!).

However last night Ganin reached 71 on discovery of the Rohirrim Scout Camp in the Gravenwood, and at that point it became obvious that the axe was starting to lag behind, in terms of its DPS. The quest reward there was for an axe (green background so in reality not that special) with a full 10 DPS lead on my precious legendary. During the course of the evening I had looted some nice Champion weapons while killing Bugan in the Mines (all champs – go there! I got 7 champion legendaries in about 20 mins and they all turned out really nice) and bit the bullet and said bye-bye to my beloved axe.

My new weapon (an axe obviously) is pretty nice, and probably better suited to my playing as a Glory Champ now. But it will never be as great as my original axe. I will not see its like again. Farewell old friend, gone but not forgotten.

I’d love to hear about your legendary weapons – did you too have the perfect level 65 and have to deconstruct it? Leave a comment and let us know!

Emma

Lottery Status for EU players

So we saw the return of the lotteries in test form yesterday which is very cool and exciting. These lotterys have been available to the US players for a long time, but us former EU server players have never tried them before. I have seen some very cool prizes, including rare steeds, legendary item symbols, cosmetic rewards, fireworks, silver, and anniversary or festival tokens.

As EU players we thought it would be interesting to test which of our characters we eligible to enter and win as there are still some issues with our MYLOTRO pages not showing data, updating slowly, or mixing data up, and we were keen to see how this impacted the lottery.

Firstly I will briefly recap the status of our characters as this may, almost certainly, matter regarding whether you can, or cannot enter, or indeed if you can enter, whether you can win anything.

Character Status

Neither of us has a MYLOTRO blog; we just can’t access that page, and get

The page isn’t redirecting properly  
*browser* has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

However, All our characters are present on character page for the individual servers now, particularly in this case Eldar, which is my main server we play on and the one I tested on. If your characters are not yet present, this is probably a bad sign for the lotteries. My characters are, however, at different states of ‘present’.

1) The first three main characters Emma and I created back in 2008; Elgalandir, Chumbo, and Eodraed (Adam), and Azbarak (Emma) are present as names listed under our accounts at the: http://my.lotro.com/home/character/ page, but we are unable to view any character details for them, and simply get the following text when trying to view them:

Error: An error occurred while processing your request. We apologize for the inconvenience

All these characters were at level cap when we transferred to the Turbine service.

2) A whole bunch of our other characters are present on the correct server and listing details, however, these details are out of sync with real-time. These include some of Emma’s characters created when the above ones were, but that were still only in there 30’s, and two characters created much later, but which were 65 when we transferred to the Turbine Service.

3) 2 or 3 low-level characters created after we transferred to the Turbine service, which are present in the character details, and update in real-time.. or close enough to not get picky!

I am not sure what exactly will occur under other circumstances, for example I have seen people listing:

• No characters/some characters not present under the http://my.lotro.com/home/character/ section
• Characters present, but listed under the wrong server
• Somebody elses characters listed under your account

Please leave a comment if you have experienced these, or any other iteration of a character problem, and especially if you have entered the test lottery and what the result was.

Test Lottery Result

The fine folks at a Casual Stroll to Mordor have out up a little guide to the lotteries, so I recommend you go check that out here if you are not sure what to do.

I short; I won, on everyone. Well, we all did, that was the point of the test lottery:D, but as a test I was able to enter with all these character listing types, and received the appropriate rewards in the mail. This included entering the ‘Test lottery’ for fireworks, the former EU ‘continental lottery’ (we got wine!), and the level appropriate lotteries. I also entered one lottery on my Landroval character, for the former US servers, and won that fine too.

There was no problem entering, and no problem winning, even on those characters not listing character details. So I think it is safe to at least say, if you have a character listed under the server, then you can enter and win lotteries, regardless of details, or update status. What I’d love to hear, is from people who have some more complex character problems, and what happened to them, so please drop and email, or leave a comment!

Good luck on those lotteries, great to finally give them a try after all those envious years!

Adam