LotRO Journal - 25-June-2007

I went back to playing my minstrel in Lord of the Rings Online for a bit. Now that farming has become dirt cheap, I finally finished it by going from master farmer to grandmaster farmer. That used to cost over 1 gold piece, but now costs only a handful of copper pieces. On the downside you can't produce anything valuable with farming any more, which makes it a lot less interesting.

On the positive side they undid the seeds nerf for crossbred pipeweed, making it possible to do so again. Crossbreeding starts with rare seeds, Sweet Lobelia, which you can get from a quest, or find as loot. After multiplying those seeds, you then need to buy a recipe for crossbreeding Muddyfoot pipeweed. For this you use a mix of Sweet Lobelia seeds and Longbottom seeds, and you get a mix of Sweet Lobelia, Longbottom, and Muddyfoot plants. You turn the poor Muddyfoot plants into seeds, multiply those, and then move to the next step. Fun for a day, but as pipeweed doesn't do anything but blow different smoke rings, there isn't much of a market for the stuff.

Right now in Lord of the Ring Online there is the summer festival going on, in four locations: Thorin's Hall, Duillond, the Party Tree north of Hobbiton, and the Festival Ground north of Bree. For pipeweed farmers this is interesting, because you can do quests in all these places except Bree to get new recipes and seeds for pipeweeds. Near the Party Tree there is also a mystery quest where you are told to plant some black mushrooms, but won't see the result before the harvest festival.

If you aren't a farmer, there are still things to do. There is an hilarious Tavern League quest starting at the Party Tree, where you have inside a time limit drink 6 beers at the party and in each tavern of the Shire. Not only do you get quite drunk from that, the quest givers also seem to have partied a bit too much, and the last one is hard to find, snoring drunkenly behind the beer barrels in the cellar of the tavern. I especially like the "You should immediately visit a minstrel" drunkeness debuff I got during that quest.

At all four summer festival locations you can learn new dance emotes. Every 20 minutes a dance begins, and the dance master calls out steps from one to three. You need to use the /dance1, /dance2, and /dance3 emotes to follow his announcements. Hint: Use a command like /shortcut 13 /dance1 to put the emotes on a hotkey, makes it a lot easier. As a reward you get a new dance emote at every location, a man, dwarf, elf, and a hobbit dance. I found learning new emotes through a quest an interesting idea.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:43 PM Permanent Link