Crannog's Challenges and Book 12

So, they recently updated the game again and made some stellar changes in Angmar. I liked this zone to begin with, but now it's 10X more awesome. The quest lines are more logical, the outposts are better, and the level progression across the map just simply makes better sense.

So, I ran both my champ and my minstrel through a series of quests back in good ol' aughaire. The chieftan there (mr. Crannog to you) has a very nice surprise for you at the end of his quest line. I'll let the video below do the rest of the talking.

also introduced with book 12 was THE NEW ULTRA-BARBIE CLOTHING OPTION. So in all their wisdom, the developers added two little clothing slots in your gear, so you can have three outfits to choose for your barbie all while retaining the stats of your "real" gear set. Thank you developers. Now bach can slay the dragon in his party dress. Bless you.

Stunning, just stunning

Sorry no updates in a while

Hello Minstrel Fridge Magnet readers! I just wanted to apologize for the lack of updates. Truth is I've been cavorting with my champion, who dinged 46 today! Give me a few weeks and I should have two max level characters at my disposal, which is awesome. There's going to be a ton more flexibility with that.

So, random reader . . . if you have any requests for information from a seasoned (well kinda) minstrel, please leave it here, and I'll do my best to respond to you in a future post.

Of other character news, Bach became a grandmaster jeweler and my champ is only a few hundred points away from becoming a grandmaster scholar. What does that mean? That means I can craft the best jewelry items in the game and make all kinds of health and power potions for all my raider friends.

Good times.

And now . . . random screenshot time.



I thought this was a great shot of my champ fighting a wolf in the misty mountains. (click to enlarge)

Gollum Encounter in LOTRO

So, I realize that I'm behind the times because this content came out a month or so ago, but it's all new to me. There's a little quest you can undertake in South Trollshaws that pairs you with a hunter named Wistan. You see, this "creature" has been KS'ing the hunters out there, and it's miffing them. To boot, you have this . . . thing . . . sneaking into the local's houses and sniffing at their cribs, so they're a little freaked obviously.

I did this solo instance twice and made screenshots and captured it a bit with Fraps. Gollum has always been my favorite creepy character ever since seeing The Hobbit cartoon.

So, without any more delay . . . I present to you (in all it's ancient stoorish hobbity goodness) my latest Youtube, the Gollum Encounter in LOTRO . . . it's hella good.

Ettenmores for Exp at 40th level

I had hinted on this in an earlier blog entry . . . when you hit 40th you can travel to the Ettenmoors, right? right! It's actually cheeper now that it was as well . . . for the cost of 1 silver, you can buy a trip there.

I recently did this with my little Champion alt who dinged 40. Easy exp my friends. There are at least 4 quests you can do that will net you easy exp and 3 others that could possibly do the same as well.

What you’ll want to do is take the hike like no other quest, the quest to visit Ost, the quest to visit hoarhollow, and the cleansing the hoarwell quest. Before you log in, you may want to visit the AH and pick up 10 hoarhollow ales, 5 historical books of rhudaur, and 10 historical notes of Rhudaur. Why? These may be hard to find, but if you do manage to find them, when you get to Ost, you'll have 3 more quests you can do turn ins for and get exp.

click me to make me bigger!

So, that map shows pretty much the path I took while completing these quests. I'll detail them below

1- You start out here in Coldfells at the Freep main base. Follow the arrows through the back path up to Ost Ringdyr.

2- Here in Ost Ringdyr you can do the turn ins that I mentioned above and complete your first quest. You'll also flag a location for your Hike like no other quest.

3- From Ost you'll want to make your way up to Isendeep Mines to be flagged as visiting that for the Hike like no other quest. As a side note, if you're a miner and this area is controlled by the free people . . . yum . . . mining goodness inside.

4- After making your way back to Ost, head on out and a touch north so you can get flagged for visiting Tirith Rhaw (TR). Just touch the North side and you'll be flagged as far as I can remember.

5- TR is just a quick stop off as you make your way up to the top of the waterfall. Now this is kind of risky. On top of this hill that overlooks the waterfall, you have a good chance that it will be controlled by the Creeps. If you just go barreling through here you'll get smoked and hate me for my advice. What you need to do is approach the hill from the north and make a swoop along the edge. As you do this, you will attract the attention of a giant mosquito looking mob (pass that first one on the hill to the right) and you'll have a series of archers start plucking you with arrows . . . just keep running and fall down the hill to the top of the waterfall. You'll get a message that you should click on the barrel in your inventory. Do this. Now personally I like to then fall down the waterfall. as you fall down the waterfall, press your back arrow so that you hang on the ledge. Wait for the snare from fall damage to go away. Then drop down the rest of the way and swim along the bank and follow the arrow to 6.

6- Manuever your way to the grim lumber camp so you can be flagged for the hike quest.

7- Head on over to Hoarhollow and talk to the mayor to finish a quest.

8- Next, take the long way around and over to Lugazag and get flagged.

9- Take a hop, skip, and a jump over to the bridge to be flagged for visiting Tol Ascarnen. Now all you have to do is make your way back to Coldfells and you're done. Easy exp and a few tokens to boot.

Your milage may reeaaaaally vary . . . this is just how I would do it. :-) Best of luck avoiding the creeps.

Book 11 and the Minstrel . . . hooo boy.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, eh kids? Well Uncle Bach has been busy with stuff . . . like a kid still in diapers that has diarrhea . . . ok, I know . . . TMI. But that’s what this blog is allllll about . . . information! Yes! Information! . . . um . . . you thought it was going to be all about diarrhea didn’t you?


So what’s new? Holy smokes! The new minstrel skills . . . that’s what’s new. You see Book 11 was released. This patch introduced a bunch of great things, the first being player housing. Now the metaphor of playing Barbies is complete as I now have a Barbie house in the hills.

I need to talk to my real estate agent about these mysterious blue squares on the ground.

I went with the elf style of house. I chose a house with a super cool deck in the back where you could fish off of (not really since that isn’t in the game yet) and water tube down. Inside my house I have all manner of fancy stuff and even painted the walls purple.

They also introduced a new instance called the Rift. This is a 12-man raid and is a complete prayer answer to smaller guilds. I haven’t gone yet, but this hasn’t excluded me from being asked to go . . . over and over . . . don’t worry I’m always polite when I say no.

It's not you, it's the repair costs . . . I have a barbie house to keep up now don't you know!

But enough of this Tom Foolery . . . gimme the skills man . . GIMME THE SKILLS.

The new skills are, in a word, awesome. I posted a couple of months ago how I wished we had the ability to toggle our skills. Guess what. At the cost of -50% healing, I now can toggle on the “War-speech” stance and have a decent Damage over Time spell (Chant of the Oathbreaker), 2 AoEs (Call to the Elder King and Call of the Second Age), and a faster refresh on my damage shout/stun. This is fantastic for farming. I mean, who doesn’t want to crit on a mob for +700 . . . Unfortunately, the creeps still have time to run away when I’m solo.

The skills . . . to pay the bills . . . repair bills that is.

When I’m playing it, I like to get the DoT burning (Oathbreaker is so neat to watch since it’s a couple glowing swords that hack away at your opponent), begin the rotation with ballad of resonance (to amp light damage), hit call of the elder king (to make ‘em more susceptible to light damage and do some damage), Round it off with Call of the Second Age (this sucker hits for a lot – they have to be right up against you though), and if it’s up tap Cry of the Chorus (to open up anthems), and lay down anthem of the valar AOE. By this time your call of the elder king will have repoped. It’s farmtastic AoE fun.

Long story short for you minstrels: um, don’t use these when you’re the main healer in a group. Sure, you can stance dance if you have a captain helping you cover heals or something, but come on, -50% healing just isn’t something you want to inflict on your group Now, if you have 2 minstrels in a group or (heaven forbid) 3 minstrels, then FIRE IT UP, BABY! Just make sure one of you has enough common sense to declare yourself “main healer.” Hint: bring a bag of tactical crit gear along. Another hint: Remember you’re wearing medium armor and, therefore, are a glass cannon. Don’t go stealing agro just because you can. Yeah yeah . . . maybe the first couple of times would be good just to say that you’re all that, but we know what really makes you all that: self control.

/wink & have fun!

Gold Farmer Crackdown and /anon on

Pretty much everybody has figured out in LOTRO that if they type in "/anon on", then the spam from Gold Selling websites goes to practically nothing. This is the grassroots effort to silence the annoying tells that look like these:

It doesn't stop there . . . they also like to send you annoying in-game mail, just like back in good ol' WoW.

I've been collecting these screenshots just to kind of illustrate how nuts it is when you're playing and don't have /anon on hiding you from their sight. The problem with this is that when you turn /anon on . . . you're invisible to your friends list and to the zone you're in. So if you have friends outside your kinship, /shrug . . . who knows if they're online or not. Not me! /shrug

I've turned my /anon off, and here's why: I'm cracking down on these fellas thanks to the "spam" reporting feature. Here's what you do, the moment you receive one of these, find a safe spot, hit escape, select "help," open a ticket, click spam as the type of report you're submitting, and type "spam message from www. wherever the link goes.com" and the person's name that sent you the tell. So far I've reported at least 7 names in the past couple of days, and I will continue to report this nonsense . . . but I have to tell you this feels very much akin to "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root" as Thoreau put it. I feel like a branch hacker.

So what's the root of the problem? Oh man, it goes deeper than I dare shoot in this blog. MMOs have to make games challenging and they have to make earning money somewhat difficult. When things are difficult, they take time. Some people see these games as a type of "work," and therefore buy gold because their time is worth more money to them.

How deep do you really want to go with that?

This whole discussion could also be looked at from a ladder of abstraction view because the root of the problem is a long root . . . where do you cut and why?

I mean . . .

you could blame a particular programmer for not being energetic enough to develop a "cure" for these advertisements that don't involve the player base.

you could blame that programmer's boss for not directing that programmer.

you could blame Turbine for introducing the refer a friend program, which means gold spammer advertisers get 5 free accounts to spam me with.

you could blame MMOs in general for how their business models are.

you could blame the 3rd level of Maslow's hierarchy.

on and on and on ad nauseum. But, for now, what we have in the LOTRO world is a spam reporting feature. I guess I'll take it and use it.

Although, one warning, when you report spam . . . you get spam . . . thanks Turbine, what in the world are you thinking with this deluge of e-mails to my inbox?

FAQ for the PvMP minstrel

I came across this post from croupier at codemasters, I'm going to copy it in full below (in compliance with creative commons license) because I just think it's a very good read for minstrels (and a lot of companys would rather block codemasters than blogger ;-)).

I've tried to answer a few most common questions regarding minstrel's work in PvMP.

1. I'm dead, why the minstrel doesn't resurrect me?
Few possible reasons:
a) Our combat resurrect skill (from a legendary trait) has a cooldown of 10 mins. If we used it, we need to get out of combat first, to res you.
b) You are too close to creeps. Our res skills have range of 25m.
c) In tight situations (fighting a tyrant or a large group of creeps) we don't have time to res if we need to heal others. Resurrection skills have a long casting time.


2. If I spam chat with "rez plz", "I'm dead!", "need res!!1one" or send a tell to a minstrel will I get resurrected faster?
No.

3. I died! Why didn't I get a heal?
Few possible reasons:
a) No "line of sight". Any small rock, fence, trunk, wall, tree can cause this. Please stay in line of sight.
b) Minstrels can't heal while moving. If you charge or chase a creep - we have to run too. If we run, we can't heal. If you need a heal, stop or even better - fall back a little.
c) There are creeps/npcs attacking a minstrel. Every hit we take makes our casting time longer, even to the point we can't heal at all.
d) We are stunned/silenced. Creeps who know what they do, stun/silence us a lot.

4. How can I protect minstrels?
a) Watch our health. If we are taking damage defend us.
b) If we take damage from NPC try to get his agro. Leaving untagged archers and other NPCs around, will result in minstrels getting their agro.
c) If you see that creeps are on a minstrel, try to root, slow or stun them. If you can heal us - do so please. When creeps attack us it's really hard or sometimes impossible to heal ourselves.
d) Try not to leave us behind. If you do - wargs will kill us in seconds. If we are webbed or stunned wait for us. If you order a tactical fall-back, wait for us to finish our heal or resurrect spells.
e) Try to use your class specific protection skills on minstrels. Don't save them for later or "just in case". We use all our skills and abilities to protect you, often paying with our lives. We expect that you back us up too, if needed.

5. Can minstrels blind NPCs?
Yes, kinda.
We have a skill "Song of Distraction" that reduces NPC's perception by 75%. NPC's can resist it tho (~15% chance from my experience). If they do, they will agro. You can tell that a target is distracted by a black-red debuff icon.
Example: We use "blind" on a Chieftain. Now that Chieftain won't agro, even if a Tyrant is pulled.
Example2: There is only a Tyrant left but there are many creeps hiding behind him, ready to defend him. We "blind" a Tyrant. Now you can move much closer (to 25% of his normal agro range) to him, or go around and nail the hiding creeps before pulling a Tyrant.

6. Omg, wtf? Why that minstrel keeps stealing my kills? Shouldn't he stick to healing?
Minstrels are the only class that can efficiently and constantly damage an opponent from range, while running. That's why we sometimes get killing blows while chasing a creep. For 10k+ kills I got only 230 killing blows tho.

7. How can I thank a minstrel for a great healing?
No need to thank us really. Every class does his job.
But if you really need to - give him some ale. Or a pie. Or both. ;)