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 26th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Free to Play, Raid, Raids and End-game, blog, expansion, hard-mode, lotro, podcast, video.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/more-lotro-video-resources/
There’s been a number of new (or maybe just new to me) videos posted over the past few days that I wanted to comment on and share.
First up, I know many of you are interested in the Lua scripting so in addition to the video and information I posted previously Merric from a Casual Stroll to Mordor has put up a great video. His video focuses on just a couple plugins and seems to hint that he’ll be doing more of them, this review touches on the Plugin Manager and Hunter Travel Window. I think the Hunter Travel window will definitely be one of the must-haves for any Hunter or Warden.
Next up for those of you looking for tips or hints from running the various Instances, Middle Earth Chronicles has started a new section of the blog with a good collection of videos. Go check out their Instance page and make sure to send in any videos you may have.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 11th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, Raids and End-game, Warden, beta, expansion, gear, group, hard-mode, lotro, radiance, video.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/developer-diary-instances-part-4-helegrod/
For me this was the most highly anticipated part of the instance scaling diaries to date as not only do I love Helegrod but I’m curious to see what they have planned for the space. There’s a lot of good information in the Diary so check out the latest from JWBarry.
To start off, three of the wings will be 12-man spaces with the Thorog wing being a full 24-man raid. There are no locks at all, but before being able to tackle Thorog you must complete the other three wings at least once. So essentially, clear the first 3 and you can farm Thorog to your hearts content.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 10th, 2010.
Categorized as Enedwaith, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, beta, captain, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/captain-healing-present-and-future/
With the big changes coming down the pipes for Captains I decided to do a little number crunching to see how the different lines stacked up. Part of my motivation was to see just how good the Hands of Healing line is and if there are ways to compensate for the trait line. I also don’t like having to play a captain as a “heal-bot” so I wanted to see if it was possible to use different traits but still be effective as a healer. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to see how the various captain legacies varied these results to see if my assumptions about good and bad legacies were correct, and I must say I was pretty surprised.
Really what I wanted to look at was how the tweaks to the Leader of Men line stack up against the Hands of Healing line. For those of you who haven’t heard, with the upcoming F2P changes the various Shield Brother skills apply to the entire fellowship albeit with a reduced effectiveness if you trait fully down the Leader of Men line with the Capstone Legendary. For Inspire the fellowship gets HoT ticks of 25-40 morale and a flat healing boost of 4% for Strength of Will that’s not boosted by legacies. To get a feel for the changes you can look at my previous post as well as the side-by-side visual comparisons over on LOTRO Weekly.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 6th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, Raids and End-game, beta, expansion, gear, group, lotro, radiance.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/developer-diary-instances-2-0-part-3/
The next series of JWBarry’s Instance 2.0 Diary has been posted and I highly suggest checking it out as it is another great read.
There’s not as much talk about new features and such but it really gives a great insight into how they went about this process and what they wanted to achieve. This post helps highlight what their goals for instances (and raids) are going forward and I’m liking what I’ve read so far.
This post covers the Annuminas instances and the Eregion 3-mans, although really it is the Annuminas instances as they didn’t need to change the Eregion instances much at all.
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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 28th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, expansion, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lotro, radiance.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/developer-diary-instances-2-0-part-2/
The next portion of JWBarry’s Developer Diaries is up, this one focusing on the rewards and quality of the instances. You also might want to check out Part 1 of this 5 part series as that covers some of the high level concepts like travel, scaling, and quests.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 27th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, beta, expansion, festival, isengard, legendary items, lore, lotro, moors, radiance, rohan, screenshots.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/filefront-hands-on-with-lotro-f2p/
There’s been a number of write-ups from people (Massively Part 1,Massively Part 2) who have had hands on experience with the new content and business model but Ron Whitaker’s (@ffronw) from FileFront did have some new tidbits that I figured I’d touch on. I’m not going to focus on the portions that are common from the other previews, just the things I haven’t seen before.
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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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