DocHoliday posted this on August 30th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Guardians, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Warden, captain, champion, champions, crafting, gear, group, hard-mode, lotro, moors, radiance.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/good-warden-end-game-gear/
This will probably have some spill-over for the other classes as well but I wanted to start keeping track of not only some of the better gear options but where some of these things drop. The forums are a great resource for this kind of information but sometimes it can be hard to find and even lost due to forum wipes.
The armor sets are a little easier to keep up with and follow, but I do have some spreadsheets for Wardens, Captains, and Minstrels comparing the various sets statistically and visually.
When it comes to jewelry and cloaks it gets a little bit harder for 2 main reasons. First off there’s just a lot more variety in these areas with crafted, drops, quest rewards, etc that all can be viable in certain cases. But probably the tougher part is that many of these are random boss drops that don’t always drop so it can be hard to not only track them but remember where they dropped from.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Raids and End-game, Warden, beta, captain, champion, champions, expansion, gear, group, lotro, screenshots.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/new-treasure-category-on-the-classic-skirmish-vendors/
I saw a thread on the Minstrel Board about these new items and figured I’d go check them out. The way it works is that each instance “cluster” now has a Treasure category for it that has various weapons, shields, and jewelry available for barter. I’m a bit torn by this honestly as I do like the chance of randomness in instances but this does give a reliable way to achieve what you’re looking for. For the most part, I’m ok with this split implementation they’re rolling out with F2P in that the current instances will be “random” and the level scaled instances will be more deterministic in their loot. The other nice thing about this implementation is that you do have a list of what’s available as opposed to wondering if/where something drops.
There’s a bunch of drops there, so I’m just going to post some of the higher end gear. I’m also not posting the various weapons as honestly I just don’t know if they’re viable compared to others since I haven’t looked at off-hand items at all. I’ll have to do some more checking on the comparisons to my current gear but there are some nifty items.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Traits, Virtues, Warden, alts, blog, champion, champions, legacy, legendary items, lotro, podcast, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/a-couple-other-place-to-find-me/
Just a quick update this Monday morning, but I should have another post out today with some new goodies on the Skirmish vendors over on Bullroarer.
I posted a new version of my traits discussion over on the LOTRO Reporter which took a slightly different approach from the post I did here a while back. The one over on LOTRO Reporter is a bit more high-level while the post on this blog is more detail oriented.
I also joined @Theobor on his latest episode of the Gondor Awaits Podcast chatting about Minstrels, so if you’re interested in my take on that class head on over there.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 11th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Warden, beta, captain, gear, group, lotro, radiance.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/new-radiance-sets-tweaked-in-recent-bullroarer-patch/
This was a bit of a stealth update that wasn’t mentioned at all in the patch notes but all the new radiance sets were upgraded with the most recent patch. The Annuminas sets didn’t change all that much, just a point or two here or there. The Helegrod sets though were buffed quite a bit and in many cases are some of the best pieces around. I’m pretty happy about this for two reasons as it shows they’re still tweaking things as well as making sure the amount of effort matches the rewards. The appearances of them haven’t changed but if you’re interested in the stats they’re worth a look. If you need a refresher on the looks check out the Minstrel sets and the Warden and Captain sets.
I’ve updated my spreadsheets for the Warden, Captain, and Minstrel sets so check those out if you’re a number geek like me.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 3rd, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Raids and End-game, beta, gear, group, lotro, radiance, screenshots.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/new-minstrel-armor-set-data/
I finally got around to adding in the Minstrel sets but I fail at Google Docs so I had to create a new Excel version but I could just append to the Google Docs. I have both the Excel version and the Google Docs version depending on which you prefer. Also, I took snapshots of the Minstrel set and remember the medium Annuminas set is the same as what I showed in the previous armor screenshots.
Light Annuminas
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DocHoliday posted this on August 2nd, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Raid, Warden, beta, captain, expansion, gear, group, lore, lotro, radiance, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/updated-warden-and-captain-armour-sets/
As I promised in my previous post today I did capture the new set information for the Annuminas and Helegrod armour sets. I have since updated both the spreadsheet and Google Docs version of my previous armor comparisons for those who care. I have not updated the Minstrel sets, but I will include the light and medium Annuminas sets for that one. Overall the sets aren’t bad but really they’re just providing another path and option for folks if they want to get the required radiance. When Bullroarer comes back up I will post with some screen-shots of what these look like and the barter levels but essentially they look like the original versions with different color schemes. Basically the same idea as what they did with the moors sets.
DocHoliday posted this on August 2nd, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Traits, Warden, beta, captain, expansion, gear, group, lotro, radiance, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/lotro-f2p-beta-initial-details/
As Sapience has posted, the NDA on the LOTRO Beta has been lifted. I’m pretty surprised they did it this early, but I’m not going to complain if they decide to release this sooner as opposed to later. There are tons of posts up on the boards but if you don’t want to sift through those I will share my thoughts so far. I will admit that I haven’t done everything but will break my post up in a few different topics as well as spread them out a bit. I’ve already talked a bunch about the store so I’m not going to talk about that. Once the servers come back up I will be posting some screen shots as well but I’m sure others will have them up shortly too 
Also, if you have any specific questions let me know and I’ll see what I can do to answer them.
Starting off with my main class, the Wardens have gotten some nice bumps at the cost of a potentially nasty bruise. The biggest change is that our various carvings now apply to not only the gambits but the builders themselves. For me this not only made a significant difference in my power usage, but since I didn’t have to pull back as much I also had a nice DPS boost. Also Wardens will be getting a Muster to Forochel which while not game breaking is nice to fill out the skills. The biggest “nerf” is that our Gambit recovery skills are now “fast” skills as opposed to immediate which means you can’t use them to interrupt long animations like Defiant Challenge. I’m a bit on the fence about this one as Defiant Challenge really is now back to a crappy legendary but I understand that they need to be careful as it could be overpowered. Not much else changed, but for other thoughts and ideas, check out the live boards for other reactions.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 25th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Lothlórien, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Warden, captain, epic line, gear, group, hard-mode, lotro, moria, podcast, radiance, screenshots.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/preparing-to-raid-radiance-gear/
A combination of a few things got me thinking that it might be a good idea to actually post some of the specifics on how to prepare for raiding. I cover some of the general topics on Episode 47 of the LOTRO Reporter Podcast but didn’t go into too many of the specifics. The other piece that got me thinking on this subject was listening to the View from the Top Podcast (Episode 12 to be specific) where they were talking about gear progression in Everquest 2. I’ve posted on armor sets previously (Warden and Captain Post and Minstrel Sets) but that was covering their stats, this post will purely talk about the radiance aspects of the sets and how you obtain them.
There is actually a pretty good page on the Lorebook covering the Radiance Armour which has many of the same specifics I’ll be posting here. Also on the Lorebook you can find all the non-set pieces that have Radiance on them. The nice part about sticking to just the Radiance aspect as it applies to everyone who wants to run the 12-man content and works exactly the same for every class.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 20th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Minstral, Minstrel, gear, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/tell-the-community-team-thread-minstrels/
This weeks TtCTT is up and the class of focus is the Minstrel, which is another of my mains so I wanted to not only suggest that folks submit their responses but I also wanted to share mine.
I could only come up with 2 suggestions for things to change:
- I’d like to see some more melee options for the Minstrel in War-speech. This becomes a real problem with all the silences and such and I’d love to see something else other then Herald’s Strike and our auto-attacks.
- Probably a bigger problem for Minstrels is that our heals don’t scale with the changes in the morale pools for characters up to level 65. I will admit I’m not sure what the right solution here is but some tweak would be very nice to scale those heals better now that we have many characters quite easily eclipsing 10K morale.
As for a new legacy, I would like to see a power return addition to Herald’s Strike. Nothing over the top but a little something to help with the ridiculous power drain of being in War-speech.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 1st, 2010.
Categorized as Equipment, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, legendary items, lotro, video.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/my-minstrel-takes-on-the-death-from-below-mirkwood-instance/
After reading this thread over on Casual Stroll to Mordor I figured that not only would I run this to make sure I still could do it, but record it, and post about it.
For those of you who haven’t run this instance, it is a solo quest out of the later Mirkwood quest zones Thangulhad. One of the draws of this quest is that it is one of the few (I mainly just do 2 of the dailies) that rewards the Gold Star Emblems. Check out Chordian.net for what you can use these for, but mainly the Horse, Port, and Legendary item stuff including the Scroll of Delving which adds 10 levels to your legendary item. I actually will grab this quest and the one for the black badges of dishonor as I find usually I can get the 5 badges I need while finishing up the instance. That way I can get my 2 Gold Star Emblems and Item XP all in one shot.
In this quest you are proceeding with 2 dwarves trying to seal up an area that the goblins are using to possibly penetrate and harass the various Mirkwood camps. And of course, both of these dwarves need to survive in order for you to complete the quest. Because of the escorts and the number of mobs, this is usually viewed as on of the tougher solo instances in the game and pretty darn hard on certain classes.
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