LotRO Journal - 18-May-2007

The more I play my hobbit guardian, the more fun he is. The main reason for that is that combat is more interactive for him, as many of his abilities can only be used after he blocks or parries. So you can't just press the same sequence of hotkeys in every fight, you need to watch what you can use at any given moment. Now level 17, my guardian even has a small self-heal useable after he blocks. I did most of the deeds of the Shire, and a good number of Ered Luin deeds with the guardian, and now I've started doing deeds in Bree. In spite of the map I still managed to die several times in the Old Forest, I'm starting to hate that place, especially the elite trees and their damn roots. Well, I got my deeds there, and except for the epic quest line I don't intend to do the other Old Forest quests with this character.

My minstrel is on hold, he might end up turning from my main into an alt. I mostly use him to buy crafting stuff for the alts, but that turned out to be a bad idea. I fell for a stupid scam where somebody was selling a series of trade goods for 5 silver bid, 10 silver buyout, relatively cheap. Only one of them was not 10 silver buyout but 1 gold 10 silver, which is badly visible. So now I lost 1 gold to a scammer. As the AH mail with the item doesn't even show how much you paid and who the seller was, I can't even report the guy. I'll look a lot closer in the future.

Besides the two hobbits I have one human, one elf, and one dwarf alt, mainly for tradeskills. As you can only have 5 characters per server, at least I have all races and most crafts covered. Right now most of the alts are parked at Duillond, the elf main town, because I found an interesting way to get the otherwise hard to get scholar materials: work orders.

You can buy work orders at different places for different kinds of materials, like skins, ores, or scholar materials. They come in three levels, for 10, 20, or 40 silver. If you buy a 10 silver work order for common scholar materials, you need to wait 6 hours for delivery, and then you get a random selection of apprentice and journeyman materials. As these are otherwise hard to get, and very expensive on the auction house, what you get is usually worth more than the 10 silver you paid. I tried one 40 silver work order for hides, but then I had to wait 40 hours to get it, and received some sturdy and pristine hides, the latter of which are actually too high for me yet. I don't think work orders are profitable for all crafting materials, but as scholar materials are more rare than others, I'll try this for a while.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:21 AM Permanent Link