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 July 30th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Warden, gambits, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/tell-the-community-team-wardens/
No surprise here, I have some thoughts on this one 
And I strongly recommend all you Wardens to post your thoughts as well. I’m going to just copy/paste what I have here into the thread on the live forums.
Question 1
Give three examples of changes or improvements you would make to improve the Warden class (e.g. skills and abilities). Please limit your responses to 3 brief examples. Wardens only please!
1. Lower the power costs of the gambit builders themselves, we have lots of ways to drop the gambit costs but they don’t apply to the builders which are the big problems.
2. Another ranged attack would really help us fulfill a secondary ranged DPS role.
3. Some way to recover threat after a death. Something on a long cool-down that pops us back to our pre-death level, or even pre-death level minus some percentage.
Question 2
If you could create one new legacy to add to the Warden’s Legendary Item pool, what would it be? Please specify whether you feel it should be a Pool A or Pool B legacy.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 26th, 2010.
Categorized as General, Mirkwood, lotro, star wars, swtor, video.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/cinematic-game-trailers-do-they-work/
It seems like many of the highly hyped games are producing very high quality cinematic trailers to help get people excited for their upcoming releases. For the most part, I do enjoy these trailers but I’m starting to wonder what they really tell us about the games themselves and are they doing more harm then good. It seems like many of these trailers are given lots of room to expand on what is possible in the game such that they look cooler and tell a better story. Even from a purely graphical nature these trailers are incredibly misleading as the games never look as good as what they can show cinematically.
The trailer that touched this off for me was the recent DC Universe Online trailer from Comic-Con (which is very cool btw), but I see Star Wars the Old Republic as one of the biggest culprits. I’m sure there are others doing this exact same thing, but SWTOR sticks out for me mainly because of the effect these trailers have had on my interest for the game. I know many like myself were absolutely floored when the Deceived trailer hit and then were even more in awe with the recent Hope trailer. In case you haven’t seen them, check them out here:
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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 24th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, epic line, expansion, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lore, lotro, screenshots, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/the-news-pours-in-about-beta-and-enedwaith/
This past week has been quite busy on the news front for LOTRO and I will admit I’ve been quite behind. This has just been a pretty long week for me with my job and as such I’ve barely been able to keep up on the news, let alone comment on it. However, I wanted to touch on a few of the releases as there’s some good (and not so good) updates of late.
First up is the HUGE Developer Diary covering the new region Enedwaith which covers pretty well the new zones, their history and influences, their general storylines, and some of the kinds of enemies you’ll face. I’m looking forward to not only exploring all of the new spaces, but I really like the idea of pulling from Medieval Welsh and Briton influences. I’m also very impressed by the size (bigger and more quests then the North Downs) and all the new artwork as I will admit I’m getting a little tired of not only the darkness of Mirkwood but goblins and orcs There are lots of new screenshots in the diary, but these were 2 of my favorites:
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DocHoliday posted this on July 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, captain, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, pvp, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/captain-roundtable/
If you missed it live (or want to listen to it again), a Casual Stroll to Mordor’s Captain Roundtable is now posted both on their site and on iTunes. I participated but definitely Elb and Geiri really do know their stuff and they do play their captains slightly different. If you have a captain or want to learn more about the class, it is certainly well worth the listen. It is a little long (a shade over 2 hours) but we do also cover a bunch of other group related topics as well. The build-up and recording of it certainly has gotten me more fired up about the class and I’m actually working on my captain again as well as working on his radiance. I did finally hit 65 and realized that I really do miss the class I’m not saying he’s going to become my main again, but certainly not banished to the Thorin’s Hall Homestead either.
DocHoliday posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, captain, crafting, epic line, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/captains-roundtable-live-tonight/
In case you missed the post from a Casual Stroll to Mordor I will be participating in another roundtable tonight, this time focusing on Captains. If you can join us live at 9pm Eastern (-5GMT) there will be a live chat room where you can participate. The link for the chat room information is either on CStM’s live page or on the LOTRO Network. Or you can feel free to post questions here or on their thread, or email one of us if you have specific questions or topics you’d like us to cover. It will be a similar format to the Warden roundtable.
And if you can’t make it live, we’ll both be posting when it it released.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, General, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, beta, epic line, expansion, legendary items, lore, lotro, radiance, runes, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/enedwaith-beta-and-subscription-news/
Well in some cases it does help to be a bit delayed in getting news out as sometimes numbers do change and fluctuate especially when subscription numbers are mentioned. Yesterday, Mordor or Bust posted an article from the PatriotLedger which originally stated 200K new LOTRO subscribers since the F2P announcement – but that has since been clarified to be 100K-200K beta applicants, via Turbine. Now, while not quite as impressive as new subs, when you consider that subscribers were automatically signed-up (and hopefully not counted in this number) that’s still a pretty good sign of new blood to the game. So my thoughts are this will be a pretty substantial influx of new folks to the game and some portion of those will certainly transfer over to subscriptions, or buy things through the cash shop, which will bring new revenue and resources to Turbine. Most people peg the current subscription base around 250K to 500K for LOTRO (still hard to figure out) this will most likely mean about a community twice the size it currently is. Which yes, will bring some annoyances but will all the tools we have to get around those, I’m more excited for all the cool people who will be joining us!
The other piece of news lately that has stirred some commotion was the article over on Massively where they get to sit and chat with the Turbine folks about the new toys and such coming with Enedwaith. If you haven’t read the article, I highly suggest it but I figured I’d share my thoughts on what we’ve learned so far.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 6th, 2010.
Categorized as Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Warden, lore, lotro, video.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/popular-videos-moved/
For those of you who enjoyed the Warden video and the one for the Loremaster done by EveNArtworkS they have moved. I saw this on the forums and wanted to re-post here too as the original copies of these videos that I linked to previously have been moved over to YouTube. I also updated my original post as well.
Here are the links for the Warden Video and the LoreMaster video, I’ll also embed them here as well.
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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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