DocHoliday posted this on March 15th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Guardians, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, Warden, champions, expansion, gambits, gear, hard-mode, legacy, legendary items, lotro, runes, threat.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/hbd
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/warden-forum-nuggets/
As usual, the Warden boards of late have been filled with quite a few really good posts, so I wanted to make sure everyone saw them. And at the bottom, there’s a pretty good in-game champ quote that I couldn’t resist re-posting 
The first post is centered around Warden DPS, not that we should ever be mistaken for a DPS class but what’re some ways to get a higher output. Long post short, trait spear line, high might, high melee offense rating/critical rating, and good legacies on your weapons. Personally I am leaning towards having some DPS weapons as opposed to just tanking ones as it is easier, quicker, and cheaper to swap weapons then it is to completely re-trait. Also a refresher on what good DPS rotations are, which essentially are the spear line gambits
After that, we go to our main role of tanking. The first post primarily discusses the difference between the Fist line and the Shield line and when each are preferred. The thread does start with the excitement over Perceived Threat being recently fixed, which does make the First line more viable. The general consensus is that Shield is slightly better for the overall healing abilities but there are cases (BG for one) when you won’t be using your HoTs and there’s lots of –threat debuffs tossed around – making the Fist line pretty appealing. Following a similar line of thought there’s a thread on setups for BG which not only follows the trait line from above, but also has some good ideas for BG in general. If you’re a Warden planning to run BG, I’d highly recommend those posts and probably a conversation or 2 with a couple of the posters there that have actually run that raid. And actually, there’s some good tanking posts in those the would be of use for everyone running that raid.
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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 February 27th, 2010.
Categorized as Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Warden, crafting, epic line, festival, lotro, screenshots, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/gtn
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/massively-tours-volume-3-book-1/
In case you haven’t made your patch day plans, Massively has a pretty good walkthrough of all the new things coming with the latest update. as they continue their weekly feature “On the road to Mordor.” Be warned, there are some spoilers in there 
as they describe some of the epic storyline and the new Rift skirmish. But there’s also information about the upcoming festival and it looks like once again they’ve come up with another fun game! I mean not only to do you get to stomp shrews, but you have a chance to win a huge shrew lawn ornament!
Certainly some nice information, including screenshots, and I’m again looking forward to this upcoming Spring festival which starts in a couple weeks.
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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 25th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Raids and End-game, Warden, crafting, epic line, gear, group, legendary items, lore, lotro, runes, screenshots, volume 3.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/grf
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/developer-diary-volume-1-revised-edition/
The much anticipated Dev. Diary on the Volume 1 revamp has been posted by Orion. We already knew many of the details, but I really appreciate the way all of these diaries (and this one is no exception) walk us through the process in how they attempted something particular. I’m all for the changes and not just because I want my pretty horse I also appreciate that they were very concerned about not only the balance but the lore and remind us that all throughout the LOTR books there are cases where characters do things they probably shouldn’t normally be able to do. The general idea behind this is when doing quests that would normally be a full fellowship you will get a scalable buff to your morale, power, regen rates, incoming damage, and outgoing damage all of which scale based on how many others are in your fellowship. So this system allows you full flexibility in not only your initial play through but allows you to repeat these quests in any fashion as well, which was a draw-back to the system put in place for the Lone-lands revamp.
The addition of the “Elf-stones” allows them to tightly control the areas where these massive buffs will be allow during quests that are out in the open. However, maybe my memory is failing me, but I can really only think of one quest that is a fellowship quest out in the open. That quest is the find the rider quest in the Trollshaws, which other then farming trolls, there’s really no reason to go down there.
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DocHoliday posted this on February 24th, 2010.
Categorized as Age of Conan, DAOC, End Game, Equipment, General, Raids and End-game, blog, expansion, gear, legendary items, lotro, moors, pvp.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/gov
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/alternate-advancement-paths/
So just a day after posts (and good conversations as well) on both the Epic Slant and Casual Stroll to Mordor blogs, I saw this announcement on MMORPG.com on the upcoming expansion for Age of Conan. Now I did try AoC but I just really couldn’t get into it – however, this new concept is VERY intriguing to me and I will be paying close attention to this as it is rolled on out.
To recap, the discussions on CStM and ES talked about both vertical (raising the level cap) and horizontal progressions and the advantages (and pitfalls) of both. As they talk about the different ideas, I think one of the main points is that there needs to be a diversity in the methods of progression and that just raising the level cap isn’t enough.
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DocHoliday posted this on February 24th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Guardians, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Warden, captain, crafting, gambits, gear, group, legendary items, lotro, pvp.
Shorthand Link: http://combo.mmeow.net/go5
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/wardens-in-the-ettenmoors-part-2/
So I really haven’t taken my Warden out in the moors at all, but I am starting to get more of an itch to go check it out. I did quite a bit of PvMP back in the SoA days with my Captain and Minstrel and did enjoy it quite a bit. It is a nice diversion from grinding rep, IXP, or other things you might do at the level cap. I managed to stumble upon a couple of posts on the LOTRO live boards about how to fight as a Warden in the moors with some cool ideas for leveraging other classes.
I did mention the moors a while ago when I saw a thread on this same topic but it wasn’t nearly as intriguing or promising as this more recent post
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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 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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