LotRO Journal - 26-April-2007

I'll probably regret not power-farming now one day, but instead I went adventuring yesterday and made level 15. That is an important step, because at level 15 you get your first class quest from your trainer. Very, very nice, the class quest mostly consisted of an instanced solo encounter, and gave some very good results. In my case, minstrel, I got a nice club, and the ability to wear medium armor. Okay, this medium armor ability came as a class trait, not as skill, and so I had to use the only class trait slot I have at level 15 to equip it. (Translation into WoW-speak: I had to choose it as a talent, thus couldn't chose some other interesting talents.) But wearing medium armor instead of light armor is rather important for my survival, especially when soloing. So I consider it a big bonus.

Nevertheless I'm still running around in light armor. The reason for that is my tailoring skill. Although I'm blocked at journeyman, I was able to get some interesting recipes for level 16 medium armor, called "superb leather armor". The interesting thing here is that these recipes are single-use. So I won't be able to produce several of them for alts or for sale, unless I buy several sets of expensive recipes. But I can make a rather nice set of magical level 16 medium armor. As this is now less than half a level away, I'm not investing in any other medium armor right now. The light armor I'm wearing, self-tailored heavy quilted armor, isn't that bad. I only replaced the helmet, but the heavy quilted one made me look suspiciously like a garden gnome.

Overall I noticed that LotRO has a wider variety of armor *shapes* than World of Warcraft. I mean, my WoW priest ran around in the same shape of robe, just with different textures, from level 1 to 70. My LotRO minstrel already wore several different shaped pieces of chest armor, from things looking like padded armor to something looking like a leather coat. And the hats! Every time I get a new piece of head armor, it has a completely new shape, which does a lot to change the look of my character. In comparison my WoW warrior had helmet display turned off until level 70, because all the helmets he found looked like cooking pots, and didn't fit at all on the head of a troll (same helmets on a human or dwarf looked better).

Besides the class quest, I pursued some quests that incidentally lead to me acquiring more traits. I already mentioned my first racial trait, throwing a stone, which quite frankly sucked for a class that already has lots of good ranged spells. So I was quite happy when by killing a lot of spiders I got a second racial trait, hobbit stature, which increased my might by 20 points, nearly doubling it. I also got lots of different normal traits now, I'll have to sort through them and optimize the selection of those that I want to equip.

I also advanced a little bit on the epic quest line that everyone has. Well, every race has a different quest line, I assume, although I'm not sure whether they all come together at the higher level. I'm still in the epilogue, killing goblins in the greenfields.

In role-playing I got my hobbit guardian alt invited into my guild, and started the storyline of the guardian being the adventurous son of the more conservative minstrel / farmer. But I'm still in the Archet newbie zone with the guardian. There are so many things to do in this game, I barely know where to start. Isn't that great?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link