DocHoliday posted this on March 11th, 2010.
Categorized as Book 9, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Rift, Skirmishes, Warden, epic line, lotro, video, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/h77
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/challenging-adventures-in-the-rift-skirmish/
Since there are a few skirmish barter items I want from the Rift, I figured I’d go through a couple of test runs and capture them via Fraps and CStats to do some comparisons. I wanted to not only compare the archer to the sage to see how they rank for DPS but also see how things had changed with the new tier 2 drop rates.
A few notes first concerning my soldiers as they are a bit different, which will skew the numbers a bit unfortunately. My Archer (my Warden’s soldier) is only level 60 with mainly level 54 skills available. And my Minstrel has a 63 Sage with primarily level 56 skills.
I ran it first on my Warden and as the following 2 videos will show I really didn’t have too many issues. I was a bit rusty, but for the most part it was rather smooth.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 10th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Warden, epic line, gear, legacy, legendary items, lore, lotro, radiance, sto, threat, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/h6f
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/back-from-a-short-absence/
So real-life has been a bit of a drain lately for me and I’ve been very quiet of late both here on my blog as well as in-game. It is a combination of a bunch of different things, but much of it will pass here soon.
So to re-cap on a few things, I did want to comment on some LOTRO items and also some non-LOTRO ones that were of interest too.
My in-game activities have been rather enjoyable, just limited after my fun in Volume 3. I’ve been playing much more on my Minstrel lately and have quite enjoyed not only soloing through content in war-speech but also running the various Mirkwood instances as a healer. I did notice more of my skills being resisted but really didn’t seem to be too big of a problem, but it was good to see that it has in fact been changed as commented on by CStM and confirmed by the devs on the forums as well. On a more positive note, I think I’m getting pretty close to having enough tokens for the radiance sets on him but will probably take a few more runs through SG. My legendary items still need quite a bit of work although I have a couple that are somewhat promising. I do have some of the legacies that help out on the resists, so I may actually play around with leveling them up instead of just leaving them at rank 1. Sadly, outside of the Volume 3 activity I really haven’t been on my Warden too much outside of an SG run or two. She still is 2 pieces from being eligible for BG, so a few more SG runs are in my future. And for those of you that actually do have your BG armor sets, there will be a change made to the set bonus as commented on the forums. Essentially the current bonus is broken (not that a 5% chance shield mastery will debuf your target was all that exciting) and will be changed to a 10% chance to provide a 10% melee damage bonus for the Warden. I’m glad they’re looking at those bonuses and that is a better bonus, but I would’ve loved a 10% threat bonus!
Up on the Warden boards there a pretty detailed discussion on threat. from precise blow and comparing it to damage done. Essentially numerically comparing how much threat was done to counter a certain amount of damage. The numbers worked out to about 1750 damage (or ~100DPS, which is pretty darn low) to counter the threat from a single precise blow, which does seem to indicate that you do need to work and continually apply our ToTs to keep ahead of DPS classes.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 2nd, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Single player, Warden, crafting, epic line, gambits, group, legendary items, lore, lotro, screenshots, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/gx4
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/my-first-day-in-volume-3/
I was pretty successful yesterday, although I ended up running out of steam towards the evening 
and didn’t get quite as much done as I had planned.
I started off on my Minstrel as I had less to do on him. I had logged out the previous night at Gath Forthnir such that I could jump right in and finish off the final quest of Volume 1. Considering this is still a level 50 quest, my 65 minstrel had a LOT of fun running through there. The “Inspire Greatness” buff is quite fun and I ended up having some real nifty big numbers floating around my screen 
The biggest was my Call to the 2nd Age critting for over 5K on all three mobs attacking me! Here’s a shot of me in the middle of that quest, and a shot of the buff (notice at this point I had forgotten to re-do my legendaries)…
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DocHoliday posted this on February 26th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Warden, books, crafting, epic line, gear, legendary items, lotro, pvp, radiance, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/gsk
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/plans-for-patch-day/
As you may or may not have seen, Monday March 1st is patch day for LOTRO as Turbine releases Volume 3 Book 1. The full official patch notes are up, but I will admit I didn’t see too much different between this version and what was posted to Bullroarer. I’m pretty excited about this patch not only for the content but it actually hits at a good time for me personally such that I’ll have big chunks of un-interrupted time available! So I figured I’d try to plan out a bit what I’ll be up to. I’m sure there will be many other thoughts and/or plans – what’s everyone else excited about doing first?
First up will be a check on my Minstrel for all the crafting changes. He’s my Cook/Jeweler so there are lots of changes I’ll need to absorb and ingredient lists to make (although I may try to do some of that ahead of time). Then I’ll probably have to put up sticky notes to remind myself to re-distribute points to my legendary items It is then off to Angmar to finish up Volume 1 Book 15, chapter 12 and get my new horse!
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DocHoliday posted this on February 22nd, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, Warden, champions, gambits, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lore, lotro, radiance, threat.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/gmv
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/monday-forum-update/
So I wanted to share a few things I found interesting while checking up on the forums over the weekend.
I’ll start off with a really good informational Lore post by Hakon_Stormbrow that shows a timeline of all the lands and kingdoms throughout the history of Middle-Earth. Pretty helpful as I’m also making my way through the Silmarillion and learning all the early history so seeing how that maps to the “current’ history of LOTRO is quite handy.
I’ll continue first with the warden posts, and then finish with some regarding minstrels.
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DocHoliday posted this on February 21st, 2010.
Categorized as Minstral, Minstrel, Warden, beta, captain, gambits, lotro, screenshots.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/glb
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/developer-diary-skill-upgrades/
There was another Dev. Diary posted talking about not only the details of the new skills but some of the rationale behind the changes. There’s even some discussion on why some of the skills were further tweaked after they were announced. Since I’m really only knowledgeable in 3 classes I’m going to leave the other classes to others who can talk more intelligently about them.
The three main goals with all of the upgrades were:
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DocHoliday posted this on February 16th, 2010.
Categorized as Book 9, End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Warden, epic line, expansion, gear, legendary items, lotro, radiance, video.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/ghm
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/my-minstrel-and-his-boomstick/
Ok, so it isn’t quite a lore appropriate name for my sage soldier – but I was reminiscing the other day with a couple of folks on Twitter about the movie Army of Darkness. So in following some of the epic one-liners from that movie I decided to give my sage the nickname Boomstick. Now she’s still not quite on level, but I’m pretty happy with her damage. I ended up working on finishing off Book 9 (hit 65 last week) so I had a few skirmishes to run to round out the book. I’m really looking forward to how the sage will grow once I get her on level and an Ultimate skill under her belt. I actually think the scarier thought is how fun a similar sage will be on my warden As you’ll see from the following videos – my minstrel does tend to get in a bit of trouble. I also captured a bunch of fights in CStats just to see how my minstrel parsed Tops was 600 for a crit loaded fight with Mazog (9000 damage in 15 seconds!!), but average was mid to high 300s. Which for those of you keeping score, that’s about double my warden And Boomstick is right around 70-90 DPS, which isn’t too shabby considering her level – only 60, with no skill above tier 4 (level 50ish).
I captured a couple of fights, including the encounters and last boss fight for those who are interested. Kufit the troll was a little dicey, but part of that is due to me being a lazy cook and not having any food on me…
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DocHoliday posted this on February 8th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, gear, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/g8c
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/survivable-minstrels-in-lotro/
As I’ve been dusting off the cob-webs on my minstrel lately I’ve also been hearing (and reading) folks talk about how hard it is to solo as a minstrel, especially in skirmishes. So I figured I’d write a bit about how I’ve built and set up my minstrel as well as how I play him. My minstrel is probably my most rounded end-game character I have as I’ve done Helegrod, the Rift (including a few 1st time kills for groups), all the Moria 6-mans, the Watcher, DN (not the whole thing sadly), and it is also my highest ranked character in the Moors having reached rank 5. I leveled up mostly in the days pre-warspeach and as such am pretty used to chaining ballads and working to maximize their utility.
One of the things about my minstrel is that I do PUG quite a bit and as such I have to be ready for and be able to take a few hits. So I tend to built more towards a vit/morale heavy build and not the will/power build that pure healing minstrels tend to prefer. I’m currently running with 4641 morale and 3679 power with an ICPR of 1000, but my un-buffed common mitigation is 28.4%. Even when I’m raiding, having the extra morale is ALWAYS helpful as there are LOTS of high damage AOEs in the game that can potentially one-shot you if your morale is too low. Even if you are not 1-shotted, you might be low enough that another hit would finish you off – or if nothing else distract you from healing someone more crucial, like the tank. Now I certainly will re-trait depending on what I’m doing, but aside from instruments and legendary items, I rarely will swap out equipment.
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DocHoliday posted this on February 5th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Warden, captain, crafting, epic line, expansion, gambits, legendary items, lotro, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/g2n
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/volume-3-allies-of-the-king-news/
Ok, so I’m mainly gong to be posting the links here and adding my comments as I’m sure most of you have already seen some of this before.
The first post came from MadeOfLions and is a Dev. Diary talking about the behind the scenes mechanics of the Drama sequence system. Pretty interesting as he walks through that they have to account for not only the options the characters can chose but also how they might have chosen up to this point. He also talks in vague terms about Volume as a whole that “will bring us to new lands, new threats, and new adventures “ and shows some of the epic book rewards. I think the rewards are pretty nice as it gives characters without swift-travel options (i.e. non hunter/wardens) better ways to move around as they do tend to have many of these “travel the land” quests. Further discussion on the Volume 3 quest rewards can be found on the live boards.
In addition, the preliminary patch notes on for Book 1 have been posted by Sapience as well as the announcement that Bullroarer is now live. For me there are some really nice additions:
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DocHoliday posted this on February 4th, 2010.
Categorized as Bioware, Dragon Age, End Game, Minstral, Minstrel, RPGs, Raid, Raids and End-game, Single player, expansion, lotro.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/g1f
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/more-single-player-focus-recently/
So I’ve been quiet lately and that’s mainly due to real-life distractions and work getting quite a bit busier for me. I really haven’t had much time to fully devote to a game so I’ve steered more towards single-player games that I can pause
I’ve got a backload of LOTRO items, and will be getting back into a better blogging routine as I”m really itching to get back to Middle-Earth. Especially since there’s a new raiding group that I joined so I’ll have a chance to get back into some more of the end-game stuff that I so enjoy! I’ll be working on my minstrel and as such you’ll probably see some more posts on his progress and how I handle skirmishes as well.
The biggest in-game news for me is that my mule kinship (which was formed with the help of some of the blogging community) reached rank 7 and the kin-house right behind my house was still available. So I’ve been slowly moving things around and filling that up, and working to re-build my bank account . Here’s a shot of my minnie out front of my new and sparsely decorated house. Too bad you can’t mail items across servers as I know Merric and Goldenstar have TONS of household items
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