Naerys arrived at Minas Tirith and it is impressive looking. I think Turbine did a fantastic job with it, much like they did with Rivendell and Caras Galadhon.
Anyway, I quested along and stopped at 4.4.10, an Epic Battle. Many of the quests in the epic storyline involved a lot of back and forth between the various rings of the city.
Those weren’t mechanically interesting, so I took it easy and spent some extra reading the quest text. Yes… I sometimes skim over that but I figured rather than race through everything I’d pay closer attention to the game.
There is a bit of Helms Deep vibe with a siege coming to the city – midway through the book the city switches into siege mode, with fires and destruction everywhere.
One factor of why I didn’t feel the urge to race through is the fact the Naerys is in striking distance of catching up to the storyline. As in, Naerys is almost through 4.4!
I haven’t had a character up to date with the epic storyline since the SoA/MoM era. It’s been at least 4 years and for much of that I was lagging far behind.
So, that got me thinking, what to do at the “end” game?
Typically that would mean group instances and grinding reputation or gathering tokens for gear upgrades.
However, I don’t feel like doing that stuff on Naerys.
Why?
Well… essentially I leveled the wrong character. 😉 Over that past year or two, I’ve come to enjoy the healing role for group content. It’s fun and doesn’t seem to require as much knowledge about the dungeon and each fight as the tank role does.
I saw this raiding in WoW – in our raid group, DPS and healers had to follow the fight mechanics, but the tanks were the ones who explained each fight and also had to get the timing down to make it happen (aggro trading, positioning the boss correctly, etc.) Healing can get hectic but I don’t want to study up on every fight in the time I have available.
Don’t get me wrong, I love playing the guardian… solo. Sturdy, survivable, fun mechanics (block and/or parry response skills, regular skills, emergency skills). But for group content, I’d rather heal and unfortunately while the guardian can do a lot, they can’t heal.
So when Naerys finishes off the storyline and we await Book 5, I’ll probably shift gaming priorities elsewhere for a while. Ultimately I’ll probably start another minstrel, as I mentioned before, but not for a bit, I need a break from the starter areas and Bree. Or I might level up my burglar Dhrun, who is level 82 in Rohan.
One thing that I’ll do when I get back to playing LoTRO regularly, is look for another kinship. The one I’m in is pretty dead. I’m one of 4 level 100s, and based on the “last online” information, I’m one of 4 or 5 that logs in more often than every 2 weeks! We had some fun times but I might be more motivated to re-level a minstrel in a more active kinship.
MMO Juggler 