Ding 46 in half a bub and screenshot time!

I'm just a little nick of experience away from dinging 46. This is exciting because that means the pvp world has just opened up for me. You see monster players come in to the pvp world automatically as level 50. Being level 46 means that I can now hit them. Hooray! It also means that there are a whole slew of quests in the ettenmoores just waiting for me to help me level up to 50.

So this has been an interesting few days since my last post. There has been a big push in the kinship to complete book 5 of the epic quests and this has led to some amazing battles. Well scripted ones too. Close your eyes if you don't want to see a screenshot of a Nazgul awakening this giant, dead dragon.

"arise, spirits, and awaken this great beast back to our world"

Here's a good one of our fellowship hanging out with Glimly before a nasty fight in book 5.

love it when Glimly talks tough.

Dinging 45 was pretty cool as this is when you can start raiding if you want to. This is just a quick screenshot for anyone that may be wondering where Sigrun is for opening up all the Helegrod raids. Look for the red arrow.

Do you see it? Sigrun, right below the bitter stairway and to the west.

And just to round out this screenshot extravaganza I've got going today . . . here's one of a random named (shataz) in the misty mountains.

Gratz Shyadarin on the kill. :-)

And last but not least, the ego-stroking closeup of me and Jello. We were hanging out last night in gloomy ol' Imlad and I snapped this closeup. Our barbies sure have nice clothes these days.

:-)

Jello and Bach, the duo of rock on Windfola. ;-)

Ding 45, minstrel of such talent

So, when you ding 45 and go talk to the local minstrel trainer you find out a couple things. 1) hey, there's no more skills for me to learn from these people. nice. 2) you get paid a nice compliment and told to go find a nice elf lady who wants you to grind out stuff and in return she'll give you some epic gear stuff.




I've just received the first part of this, but there's more you need to grind than just this. Here's a screenshot of the first two gathering quests.

So basically I need to farm snow beasts, orcs, a named warg, and some wing-less dragons. In return I'll get some . . . da da da DUN . . . teal gear. Screenshots to come . . .

And speaking of screenshots, here's how the ol' boy is looking lately. Dig the purple shoes man . . . dig 'em. That club I'm using is fairly nasty; it does bonus damage vs. trolls, but it's most notable characteristic is a mana drain proc. niiiiiccce.

Ding 43 . . . well close enough

I'm just a bub away from 43. These last couple of levels have been all about Angmar. Ohhhh my, Angmar.

You see, Angmar is the Maiden's Eye or the Plaguelands of Lord of the Rings. Why do I say that? Well, in EQ, Maiden's Eye to me was one of "thee" scariest zones out there back when you were in your low 50's. It was easy to get overwhelmed and die there . . . and die quickly. There was just a feeling about Maiden's eye that will stick with me always. spooky. Plaguelands in WoW was the end leveling area back before Burning Crusade. It wasn't terribly nasty although you could definitely die there if you weren't alert. But it too was slightly overcast and forboding.

So let me see if I can describe what I've seen of Angmar so far. It' chock full of nasty mobs that will kill you quick. Anywhere you go, there's something there to kind of keep you on your toes. In the fields there are these hitpoint heavy elite bulls (called "Gouge-horns") that give you a nice 2 second warning before running you down if you're still in their agro radius. In the bogs there are these gigantic hitpoit heavy elite turtles (yes, turtles . . . it's quite funny to be attacked by a giant aggressive turtle) that can mow you over faster than one would ever dream a turtle could. In the center of the bog there's a hidden den of fire worms (like dragons without wings) . . . again, these things will kick your butt faster than you know your butt's on fire. In other areas mobs like to come in twos and threes and assist each other. There's also a bunch of connecting raid instances in Angmar. It's just a downright spooky zone.

Jello and I leave a lot of these turtle corpses around when we duo.

If you can't tell by now, I like Angmar a whole lot. :-) It's just the way I am. So, I'm having a ton of fun working through this stuff as well. The run to level 50 is going to be spent 2 places . . . angmar and misty mountains . . . there's really no where else to go. i guess some parts of Evendim are still viable, but this is the spot atm! Good stuff.

There was one particular quest in Angmar that lead me through 3 challenges. The end challenge was to sneak/kill my way into a nasty hillman camp and kill their chief. this was by far one of the coolest quest lines I've done so far. Chief Walraig came in a pull with a healer. It was an incredibly difficult fight, but I lived to tell the tale and have the "solo pwnd" screenshot to match.

Walraig and Bach tango into the night. HACHA!

**NOTE** this quest line was changed in a recent patch, please go to this newer post here to read about it **NOTE**

Of other note I also crafted a really nice “crit” ring and discovered that when you crit on these upper items you get to “inscribe” a word on them. Awesome.

I wanted to inscribe "Bachelbu made this beeotch," but opted for a simple "Bachelbu" when I discovered you couldn't put spaces in the inscription.

The grind . . . here it is

I found on the LOTRO forums some great information on gathering the Legendary Trait books for minstrels. I'm shamelessly stealing it and reposting it here because it's a great list.

Book Name: Melodies of the Valar
Granted Trait: Rally!
Description: In-Combat Rez

Book Name: The Rising Chord
Granted Trait: Song of the Hopeful Heart
Description: 60 second +hope buff

Book Name: Valour's Marches
Granted Trait: Anthem of the Wizards
Description: Light damage AOE + debuff

Book Name: A Lesson from Lindir
Granted Trait: Fellowship's Heart
Description: Instance cure of fear + fear immunity + HOT

Level 50 class quest
-------------
WHere to get the pages

Rising Chord:
1st 4: Orcs in Dun Covad
Last 4: Wights in Imlad Balcoth - all of them, not just archers

Valour's Marches
Worldwide random drop off humanoids (aka non-beast/insect) lvl 39+

Melodies of the Valar
1st 4: Morroval in Western Angmar (both outside and inside the cave)
Last 4: Goblins in the MM

All books drop the same as valour's marches pages, but at a reduced rate. I would guess if you have the book for valar or chord the drop rate is around 5% or less, tradeable pages around 2% and books less than 1%. I firmly believe this drop rate increases slightly based on the level of mobs you kill.

Go ye' forth and grind your hearts out friends. Grind grind grind grind grind.

Ding 41 and King Charles

So being friends with Cagefury has already paid off in bling . . . hooray for my new horse. She lent me the last gold I needed to get my pretty pony.

I'm still thinking of a name for my new horse, but I'm leaning toward "King Charles the looming."

I dinged 41 while grinding Wargs the other day in Misty Mountains. Ahh, the good life.

Jello and I managed to group up again, and I did capture some video footage. After viewing it a bit, I think I need to not zoom out so much and try again. But, here is what I captured anyway. It was kind of difficult to play the game with no interface and really show how it goes down, but my Fraps is currently set to start video capture when I hit F12 and that's the same key to hide the interface. yeah, easy fix. Let it be done. this was just some easy grinding on some humans. We chose them because the humanoids drop pages for our legendary traits . . . it's the big, cool thing for level 40+ people to work on. To tell you the truth I don't even know what my legendary trait is. LOL. I should spend some more time researching this stuff.

Ding 40! Oh Noos!

So here I am . . . facing my last ten levels. Btw . . . as a tip, they give you a free 2.5k exp at 40 just for visiting Ettenmoors (the pvp area). Sure it'll cost you 35 silver or so just to pay a visit, but I don't care. I didn't go out to pvp or anything; I just talked to the stable hand, he ported me there, I talked to the stable hand there, he gave me exp loving, and I ported back to the real world. yay. Harmless, shameless exp.

I spent some time the other day just running around mining up copper and gems and killing low level wights. Why? Well I just figured something out in the totally non-intuitive crafting dialog box. You see, once you've completed a tier of crafting, you then have a second notch in that tier of crafting open up so you can "master" that tier of crafting (provided you "mastered" the lower level tier of crafting . . . clear as mud?). What I didn't really get was that there was a tab at the bottom of the dialog box (TOTALLY UNINTUITIVE . . . SERIOUSLY) that you can click on and . . . wow . . . this is what I thought to myself, "you mean if I go farm wights I can get a drop from them that gives me an almost 50% chance to crit when crafting an item? no way!" It's true! (someone is laughing at me for taking so long to figure that out on my own /shrug.) So a lady in our guild wanted some jewelry crafted for her alt and I volunteered. This wasted a bunch of time as I farmed up crit items and enough to give it two shots. LOL. I didn't crit either time. Oh well. It was a nice distraction.

On the killing things front, It's all about Misty Mountains for me now. Jelalron and myself went and killed a bunch of really grumpy Mammoths the other night and also discovered the joys of training through a number of seriously nasty elite mobs to get to some precariously placed non-elite bears I needed to kill. Good times. We then proceeded up a trail through goblin territory and completely destroyed a named at the top. Our little hunter/mistrel combo is something to be feared. Add Rogart for some tankage and we are even more deadly with random world stuff.

Onward to 50! /snap



btw . . . bad me for looking at upper level loot, but I saw this today and actually drooled a bit.

Daddy wants.

A horse? and POWA!

So it's now become public knowledge in the kin that I don't have a horse, and I'm a hair away from 39th. This seems strange to most.

Wait a second. You hit 35th and didn't get a horse? What the heck are you thinking?

I'm just thinking I don't want to slow down and get a horse . . . that's all.

Wait a second. Did you just say "slow down" and "horse" in the same sentence?

yeah, I did. First of all, the horse you buy isn't as fast as the horses you rent. Second of all, you actually have to pay attention when you drive your own horse, you can't put it on auto pilot and walk away from the computer. Third of all, you can get knocked off your horse if you get tagged by a mob when you're riding it. And you get all this excitement for 4.22 gold. Yeah, it's a luxury item to me. /shrug

But it's all good . . . people seem to like offering up suggestions of how they farmed up their 4.22 gold. This is good info to absorb and hide in the folds of your mind (only 50 years later to be revealed to your 80-year-old buddies at the nursing home *there goes Tom talking about gold again*)

I thought for a second that I might have a good cash farm the other day. The boss mob for Book 3 chapter 5 is a nasty orc called Drukordk). He's tucked away in a corner of North Downs. Everything there is grey to me at this point, meaning I can just run past them and they don't agro. I can even go dance with Drukordk and he just continues walking with his whole, "I ain't gonna mess" attitude with me. I found a nice pathing for him and a spot to pull him to. I was probably crazy for trying to solo him . . . he is a 9k+ hitpoint super dooper elite mob anyway, but I tried it.

The first time he owned me when he was at 200 life. The second, third, and fourth time he coughed up 20 silver and loot for me. Also, there are two ground spawn chests (well, corpses . . . same thing *shifty hands*) up by him that I can loot from as well.

You know . . . if I had a way of transporting people to me, I could port them in to my farm spot, tell them to sit very still, kill the mob, and charge a fee for service. It would be awesome.

/shrug

As it turns out, I can make money faster from killing other stuff.

Someday I'll have my horse, call it Betty, and feed it crispy bacon. Until then, the bacon is mine, and I'll keep riding the rent-a-horse.