LoTRO – Warsteed

It has been far too long since I played in Middle Earth, so I cranked up the Mac LoTRO client and ventured in to continue my adventures.

I had left off in Harwick, ready to take the Warsteed tutorial. After speaking to Seoca, I summoned my new Medium Warsteed, named Keely.

My Warsteed

The tutorial consisted of basic maneuvering, a slalom course of flags, jumping gates, and then combat. The Warsteed builds up speed and has momentum – it does not stop or turn quickly, which took a little getting used to. My first lap around the training course involved me running straight into the outer wall a few times.

Once I got the hang of it, I advanced in the tutorial to the combat portion. My task was to land 10 blows on a training dummy, so I started, building up speed/fury for a single hit and then stopping. Eventually I got the hang of “steering” my warsteed around the oval at speed – granted, I wound up taking some turns VERY wide; good thing there were no spectators lining the course! – and rotated through my mounted attacks on the training dummies.

Mounted Combat

I finished the tutorial and collected the Legendary Bridle reward. I’ve found a few here and there in Rohan, and now have the trait the lets me slot them and advance their traits.

I need more practice controlling my Warsteed, so instead of riding my regular mount around, I’ll use Keely as well. I’m behind the entire rest of the player population as far as Warsteed knowledge, but the good news is I can read up on various excellent guides others have published. For example, Danania: Supergirl of Lórien, has a 5 part guide I am going to study, starting with part 1.

Mac Gaming

My main computer has been a mid-2009 Mac Book Pro. It’s fine for most everything I do, except for a few games. Plants vs. Zombies is fine. Even Civilization 5 is tolerable. MMOs, not so much. It stutters playing the intro EVE video. It is far below the recommended minimum for LoTRO and GW2. For those games, and other Windows-only ones, I have another computer, an early-2010 Sager notebook, recently upgraded with an SSD and Windows 8. The Sager works well enough for me, except for graphics issues which I think might be related to overheating (which seems to manifest during GW2 quite a bit).

Anyway, I decided to treat myself to a computer upgrade, since my trusty MBP was approaching 4 years old. I bought a Mac Mini, upgraded with a fusion drive and to a core i7. And I added my own 16 GB since Apple charges way too much for memory.

As a result, I am now playing a few games on the Mac Mini instead of the Windows box. EVE Online is one, LoTRO another, GW2 yet another. I downloaded the League of Legends OSX, but have yet to make an account or play. I tried installing the DDO OSX client, but I can’t seem to get a non-corrupted copy. I also play other games on my Mac from time to time: FTL and Hoard – both of which run better on the Mac than Windows, but I suspect the Windows 8 issue is with mouse drivers. The Mac Mini also runs Space Chem just fine, as well as Borderlands 2, Torchlight and various other misc games.

Yes, I hear you Windows purists gnashing your teeth. The Intel HD4000 integrated graphics vs. a dedicated nVidia GeForce or AMD Radeon? Outrageous! Barbaric!! However, I think the games look just fine on the Mac Mini, especially since one of them (GW2) was nearly unplayable on my Windows notebook due to graphics driver resets (possible driver issue, possible overheating; ultimately I got tired of dealing with it). Some games, like bleeding edge first person shooters, undoubtedly won’t play as well too, but I play very few games of that genre.

I do notice some upgraded graphics. In EVE, I see lightning flashes on storm planets, gas clouds on gas planets, weather effect on temperate planets, etc. I never saw those on the Windows notebook, but it is a 3 year old machine with a GeForce GTX 285M, so perhaps it is also on the low side for modern games.

I uninstalled a few games from my Windows gamebox in order to make room for others, for example, The Secret World. I thought a 256 GB SSD would be roomy enough when I bought it, but we all know how this hobby eats disk space.

Of course, all is not perfect. For example, EVE Online… right now, the launcher doesn’t start the game. I click “play” and it just exits. *sigh*. I’ve tried various troubleshooting steps, but nothing has worked. I’m sure it will be sorted soon.

Session Play – Garth Lotheg

My burglar Dhrun has been marooned at Echad Dagoras for a long time, and I decided to take a break from Rohan and move him along. Since he’s level 65 already, I also decided to “bee-line” the Epic Quests for a bit – focus on the epic storyline until it outlevels me. At the very least, that would get Dhrun into Dunland somewhere. I could kick myself for letting him get so far behind but that’s OK, I can peck away at it.

Anyway, I worked on Vol 3 Book 3, Echoes of the Dead. While doing a session play quest that covered the history of Oath-breakers and the Paths of the Dead, I got a task to find some evidence of why Garth Lotheg was attacked. I found this:

Idol of Sauron

Ah of course, so obvious.

I’m just going to put this out there, as a general rule – if I am ever in the position of becoming an evil overlord bent on dominating the world, my very first instructions to my loyal minions will be this: do NOT, under any circumstances, build an idol of me. That’s just going to warn the enemy we’re on the way.

Ready for Rohan!

I’ve been questing furiously trying to finish up the Brown Lands, Rushgore, Stangard, and so on. I just feel bad about leaving an area “unfinished” on my main character.

Now, after reaching kindred rep with Stangard, I have crafted my Great River armor, bought the Return to Stangard travel skill, leveled up my Level 75 Legendary Club and Belt (as a hobbit guardian, I regard any weapon other than a Club, or Great Club for you 2-handers out there, to be barbaric ), and am now finally ready for Rohan!

Great River Armor

OK, small disclosure, I didn’t earn Kindred rep with Théodred’s Riders. In fact, I have a few Nan Curunír quests left to do. But dang it, I can’t hold off going to Rohan anymore. The anticipation is overwhelming me. I’ll come back to get kindred with Théodred, I promise.

Yes, only 4-5 weeks after all of Landroval is off riding their War Horses, Naerys finally crossed the river south of Ost Celebrant into Rohan. I haven’t done much, just a few quests in Langhold, but I also worked on the epic quest line and reached 3.7.8, Reading the Signs.

I believe that 3.8.1, War-steeds from the Wold, is where I get my war-horse, and I am really looking forward to that!

Windows 8

Something as terrifying as the Eye of Sauron was released recently… duh duh duhnnn… Windows 8!

Okay, maybe that is a little dramatic. A few weeks ago I decided to make some minor upgrades to my gaming notebook. I bought a 256 GB SSD, and Windows 8. They arrived and I did the SSD swap, and then plunged ahead and installed Windows 8. I like some of the enhancements (mostly under the hood improvements to the system) especially the newer file copy dialog and task manager. However, my gaming notebook isn’t touch-screen so I lose about half of the design benefit. That’s OK because I spend 99% in desktop mode where it is pretty much like Windows 7, just with a very different Start Menu.

The first thing I installed was Google Chrome. Next was Steam, and I started the download of LoTRO. Then I installed Guild Wars 2 and started it downloading. I took an overnight of downloading to get the bare minimum games from my Steam Library installed. Other than a handful of games, that’s gonna be it except for (maybe) Virtual Box. I’m going to be crazy fascist about keeping this system “clean”, to the point of setting up a VM to contain other stuff, like Adobe Reader, Flash, java anything, compilers/debuggers and so on. This is my gaming system!

After LoTRO installed, I fired it up and it ran just fine. WHEW! I was worried about that actually. Some other games I wanted to try (after all, this blog is MMO Juggler, whereby I dabble amongst the many MMOs) didn’t fare so well.

Vindictus locked up big time, and even after I managed to terminate the process, it left a thread in the System process pounding my disk at 100%. Yes I have an SSD now, but 100% disk activity still drags the system down. Since this system has none of my usual triage tools, such as the SysInterals suite, or a debugger of any kind, I couldn’t see what was going on. Not that it would have told me much anyway, other than “yep, busted on Windows 8″. I had to restart my notebook so for now, bye bye Vindictus.

Vindictus Lock Up

I also tried cranking up Everquest II. Back in the day, when the “big three” were UO, EQ, and AC, I played Asheron’s Call. I never did play EQ so when I saw that EQ2 went free-to-play I thought, hey I’ll check it out. Unfortunately, EQ2 did not start either. More specifically, it never exited the first time install “setting up DirectX” portion after launching from Steam. It just sat there, claiming to be installing DX9. I guess the detection method is confused on Windows 8. I’m not sure if this is a Steam thing or a app thing – LoTRO popped up the same “installing DX9″ dialog, but it moved on. Another uninstall. Sorry but I’m a little tighter on disk space now (currently ~90 GB free) and I’m not going to have an MMO that doesn’t even run sucking up disk space.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes had no problems – it installed, launched, and popped up the Login screen. I don’t have an account, so I just exited and will make one later.

Star Trek Online hasn’t completed the download yet.

Other MMOs I have also run fine: Guild Wars 2, DDO, and Fallen Earth. I logged into both and played a little bit of each. I also fired up other games I enjoy (Defense Grid: The Awakening, Skyrim, SpaceChem, a few others) just to see if they ran on Windows 8, and they also had no problems. Overall Windows 8 works for the games most important to me. I gave most games a cursory play, but I’ve played LoTRO several hours on Windows 8 at this point and it is fine. If LoTRO didn’t work, that’s a 100% deal breaker and I would have wiped the disk, dug out my Windows 7 DVD, and installed that instead.

One odd thing with GW2 – I linked my account with the mobile authenticator, an app from Google that implements two-factor authentication. I’m not asked for the authentication code when I log in, but still have it enabled according to my account profile. Not sure what is going on there, maybe I need to unlink/relink to get that working again (due to my reinstall)?

In conclusion, most my games are working fine under Windows 8. I’m sure the issues that prevent EQ2 and Vindictus from running are straightfoward, so if those are your top games, don’t worry just be patient. Besides, only crazy people jump on an OS upgrade so soon after release.

EDIT (Mon Nov 12):

STO finally downloaded (I guess the servers were busy) and I went to install it. It hit the same “Installing DirectX” dialog that EQ2 appeared hung at, but I decided to let to go because I had some other minor errands I could finish up. About 10-15 minutes later (seriously, it was about that long), it finally continued on and I got the splash screen.

Now I couldn’t actually start the game, due to an issue obtaining an account. That’s just the usual “create an account vs send me password reminder” thing so I anticipate having that squared away soon.

Since EQ2 looked stuck at the same point, I thought I would give it another chance too. I gave up after about 5 minutes the previous time, maybe there is some quirk that makes it take so long. So I re-downloaded EQ2, went to run it… and boom it zipped through the dialog in seconds. I already have a SOE account, and EQ2 launched just fine.

Since letting the DirectX setup take its own sweet time for STO somehow corrected the issue for EQ2, I think the most likely explanation is that DirectX version check isn’t matching what Steam or the game expects, so it goes to download it. The download is the unusually long delay.

I ran EQ2 long enough to create two characters and do the combat training, so it seems to work under Windows 8 as well. As soon as I get my account info straightened out for STO I’ll try there as well.

LoTRO – Eagles

I have a lot of fun playing LoTRO, especially questing and exploring on my own. The other night I found some content that I just loved, a gem nestled in the hills outside Stangard.

I took a quest, Visitor from the North. After checking the map and riding towards the ring, I figured I’d find a guy standing in the woods with a few errands for me. As I drew near, I thought I saw a giant bird…

Landroval, Great Eagle

Wow, a Great Eagle – Landroval! It turns out he and Meneldor were tracking a creature, but Meneldor hadn’t yet returned. The area was infested with spiders, and after slaying several I found a cave entrance.

Trapped in a web

Meneldor was trapped in webs! I immediately rushed around and down the ramp, only stopping when I reached him.

Spiders

A bunch of spiders followed me so I had to deal with them.

Meneghen, Spider

Meneldor told me I had to defeat a giant spider who lived in the cave, Meneghen. I turned and found him creeping up behind me…

Meneldor, free

A battle ensued and I stood victorious over the giant arachnid. I quickly freed Meneldor, who then offered to fly me back to Landroval!

Eagle Title

They bestowed a new title on me, Friend of the Eagles. I now wear it proudly!

In all seriousness, I had a great time with this little sequence. It could only have been better had the Gollum been the creature that Landroval and Meneldor were tracking (and Gollum had made an appearance)!

Quick Notes

GW2

I read Zubon’s elementalist review over at KTR, and worth a read. Granted, chances you are already reading that site if you are here but just in case.

That experience mimics my own. My ele Aurora Tian is level 80, and fights are tough in the Orr areas. Mobs almost always come in twos and threes and they hit hard; an add often sends me fleeing. Some skills have lengthy cooldowns and if you don’t swap attunements, you definitely miss out on playing as well as you can. It’s a fun class, but I’m going to finish off some exploration before continuing the storyline. Plus, I am leveling an engineer as well.

LoTRO

This isn’t specific to LoTRO, but should be of interest. I follow a data visualization blog, and am interested in stats, and found the Lord of the Rings Visualized interesting. The linked site, LoTR Project, is really interesting too!

LoTRO – Combat Speed

As fun as Guild Wars 2 is, I enjoy LoTRO too! So I logged back in and quested a bit in Thinglad, on Naerys my guardian. I think I’m done with the Thinglad quests as my next ones leads to the south, but I’ll probably switch over and advance the epic storyline a bit next time I play.

The first thing I noticed was how slow combat seems in LoTRO compared to GW2. It isn’t a completely fair comparison, because the LoTRO guardian is a typical tank – high defense and low DPS – whereas my elementalist in GW2 is high DPS. Still, I kept thinking about this and finally decided to jot down some notes about combat. I got out a stopwatch, and kept track of how much health I lost during a fight (one on one), and how many skills I used. For this purpose, I counted a keystroke as a skill, and fought using a rotation I would have normally done. That is, I didn’t just rely on autoattack to kill the enemy, and used the best available skill off cooldown. Oh, and I always play Naerys as a sword and shield tank, or more accurately, a club and shield tank (to take advantage of the Hobbit +2% damage on clubs). These results may change in Overpower stance, but I’ve never used that so I don’t have a leveled Legendary weapon or decent legacies, etc.

After taking care of a “kill 10 enemies” sort of quest, and averaging the results:

• health at the end of comabt: about 80%
• length of fights: 30-35 seconds
• number of skills used: 15-20

I think those are representative enough. My LoTRO guard is fairly survivable, leaving a one-on-one on-level combat against a regular foe with about 80% of the health (morale in LoTRO terms). An encounter like that is basically never fatal, or even close. In fact, I often try to draw over 2 enemies at the same time and rotate short-duration stuns and bleeds to make the most of those skills.

The amount of time a fight takes and the number of skills used is interesting. Fights are over faster if I get lucky with a crits, but on average, it takes around half a minute and 15+ keystrokes. I think this is where LoTRO gets its reputation for slow combat… I’ll do some quick measurement in GW2, but I’m positive most fights there (one on one versus regular mobs) take about 5 seconds with 5 skills. On the other hand, the chance of death is much higher since my Asuran elementalist almost always leaves a fight with half health or lower! There is definitely not a 30 second slug-a-thon going on.

Anyway, this isn’t criticism as I do enjoy LoTRO! It’s just a natural comparison to make after several days in GW2 and the much faster/riskier combat there. Another thing I miss from GW2 is the auto-selecting of resource nodes or enemies to loot. Too often I’ll click around in LoTRO for a few seconds before hitting the “del” key, which selects the nearest item, and then have to right-click to “use” it.

The scenery is great in both games. Here is Naerys surveying the elf fortress of Thinglad.

Thinglad

LoTRO – Level 75

I finally hit level 75 on Naerys, turning in a quest at a camp just north of Thinglad. While I’m glad I made it before Riders of Rohan releases, I’m also probably the last person on Landroval to hit the level cap.

Level 75

At this point, my play style will shift a little bit (except not so much this time – more on that later).

Epic Storyline vs Questing

When I hit max level, I prioritize the epic storyline over regular questing. That’s because epic quest rewards are often nice equipment upgrades. I do enjoy regular questing and am somewhat of a completionist, so I’ll continue exploration/regular questing… after catching up on the epic storyline.

Currently, Naerys is at III 6.6 – Downriver Dangers. Goal: finish up before RoR releases!

Virtues

I don’t worry too much about virtues while leveling; however at max level they are something I revisit and tweak a bit.

Naerys slots:

• Charity – 14
• Innocent – 14
• Zeal – 11
• Honour – 10
• Valour – 10

I believe in mitigation over straight stat bonuses, which is reflected in my virtue choices (except for Valour). It may not make sense to slot Valour anymore – Naerys’ morale is hovering around 9000, so the Valour bonus of +389 (if Valour is maxed at 14) is 4%, not very compelling, especially considering some of the kill deeds I’d have to do.

Every little bit of morale helps, but the only time that 389 extra morale would literally make a difference in avoiding defeat would be in the following situation: Naerys is brought under 389 morale, and then survives the fight. After all, lowering morale via damage to 500 and then avoiding defeat means that the extra cushion wasn’t needed (the margin would have been even thinner, but still positive); meanwhile lowering morale down to 500 and being defeated anyway also means the cushion didn’t matter. But in that small space where Naerys is in a fight and gets down to 200 morale (for instance), has time to heal or drink a potion, and then goes on to survive… well then, in that case, the Valour bonus actually mattered.

So I’m considering booting mitigation and/or resistances further and slotting one of these virtues instead of Valour: Patience, Tolerance, Idealism, Compassion, Fidelity, Confidence. Idealism has a slight advantage in that Naerys already has it to 13, meanwhile Compassion and Fidelity at 12 are not far behind.

Crafting

I do enjoy crafting and making gear, but I survive on quest rewards until I hit max level. Naerys is an Armourer, and will work on Metalsmith and Tailor… meanwhile Dhrun is my Tinker (Jeweler) but he’s 10 levels lower and way back at Echad Dagoras.

I’ll inventory the armor Naerys currently uses, and see if there are reasonable upgrades available via crafting. Lately, the top crafting recipes come via reputation vendors or crafting guild recipes, so I’ll also investigate there as well. (Building up reputation is one reason to peck away at exploration questing vs epic storyline).

Legendary Items

Naerys is also using the same Legendary Items she had 10 levels ago. That’s right, a Third Age level 65 club and Third Age level 65 belt (I have the Second Age LI from the epic storyline but haven’t built up its legacies yet). I just don’t have time to grind out incremental improvements. At least I’ve been leveling up secondary items and deconstructing those for shards, relics, etc. so eventually when I get new Legendary Items, I’ll have something to slot on them.

I need to figure out where to get level 75 Legendary Items – usually it is a barter NPC.

Traits

I’ll get into this in another post, since a trait loadout ties back to Legendary Items and the legacies chosen for them (i.e. pick legacies that buff the traits you choose to equip!). I’ve been using the same general class traits for many levels and am happy with them, so I’ll probably stick with my choices. I saw the Dev Diary highlighting upcoming changes for Guardians in RoR, but nothing I read made me think I need to make sweeping changes.

Skirmishes

Skirmishing is fun – they are all quick enjoyable action with variety in settings and goals (offense vs defense). One nice bonus is earning points which are useful for other goodies, from skirmish skills to LI boosts to gear.

I don’t skirmish much while leveling – once again it is something I shift to doing at max level. If I don’t get to skirmish much, I’ll at least try out the new ones that have released.

But not so much this time

Earlier I said these play shifts usually occur, but won’t as much this time around. That’s because there isn’t much time before Riders of Rohan releases, whereas previously I’ve usually had max level chars for week/months before an expansion. Heck last summer I had plenty of time I decided to work on World Renowned! Also, I’d like to move Dhrun (my burglar) along since he’s also fun to play and my Tinker. If he doesn’t level up nobody gets new jewelry to wear.

LoTRO – Farmer’s Faire

I felt like taking it easy, so I participated in the Farmer’s Faire. I hadn’t played my Rune-keeper Daerellaen in quite some time so I logged in on her for a bit.

Farmer’s Faire

After speaking to the Festival Announcer, I took the tour in order to familiarize myself with the available events. First stop was to visit a fishing hole, then an Egg Scramble, and finally a Mushroom hunt.

Egg Scramble

All sounded interesting but I decided to try the Mushroom hunt first. The goal was to eat 8 mushrooms without being spotted by the farmer’s dogs.

The field was medium sized and several mushrooms spawned in the borders… the key was to keep moving and duck into another row when a dog was near. Some of the mushrooms gave a minor poison effect, while others gave a hallucination effect, with a washed-out view similar to what happens when you drink too much.

One of the more amusing hallucinations was this:

I ate a bad mushroom, or perhaps the Nazgûl are mushroom lovers too.

Unfortunately I was spotted after eating 7 of 8 mushrooms! Argh… so I tried again. I failed even sooner, at only 2 of 8, due to bad luck moving from one row to another right on top of one of the dogs. Sensing this wasn’t my night for the mushroom hunt, I returned to the Festival Announcer and completed the quest, earning more tickets so I can try again later.

A Casual Stroll to Mordor has an excellent guide available for this event: Farmer’s Faire Guide.