So things have been pretty quiet here for a bit with a combination of work travel and some actual vacation time as well. I have a bunch of things to catch up on and I’ll have a few posts coming out this weekend but I figured I’d update on a few things first.
Aside from the travel craziness I have been playing some but just not nearly as much as would warrant writing about. I’ve been working on the Ale Association quests and I’m intrigued by not only the titles but what they might put on that vendor 🙂 This new quest line seems to have drawn some comments from folks that they feel bad doing bad things in the Shire and I’ve actually taken a bit of a different slant on it. I’m looking at it more like a friendly rivalry between two bars (ala Cheers) and the Ale Association is just launching the first line of the pranks 😉 Now if they continue this, I’d love to see the hobbit retaliation! I do like the upcoming changes coming that will put negative reputation for the opposite faction. This makes sense as we’re really not all that sneaky when poking holes in the kegs and stealing recipes 🙂 I am enjoying this festival as they are pretty quick things I can do and I still always enjoy running through the Shire as it is so beautiful and relaxing.
In addition to the festival I have been doing some SG and SH runs on my Warden and am one piece away (16 tokens) from the full set such that I can actually run the BG raid. They have made some subtle changes to SG and I like the pace of that dungeon. With a decent group, it is around an hour or so which really isn’t all that bad and you can reasonably do a couple runs in a row. I have my pseudo static group I run with late at night but in addition I really don’t have any issues finding groups (and successful ones too) for both SG and SH. I still haven’t run the other dungeons yet and do want to check them out at some point. I did also run SG on my Captain (only 62) which was quite stressful as I so didn’t want to mess things up for the group. The good news for these runs is that I’ve seen 2 Symbols drop (lost both) so maybe I’m just lucky or maybe they did tweak things a bit.
I also stuck my neck out into the moors a bit on my Warden and holy cow was that a blast. I started off soloing and got stomped on by a Warg/Warleader duo – which wasn’t surprising. Wargs are really annoying with all their stuns and I’m also REALLY rusty out there 🙂 I then ended up running with a small group and we didn’t do all that bad in the grand scheme of things. I really need to get out there more as I found myself falling into my tanking rotation which is just bad. I re-spec’d full fist line with the 2 additional masteries as I think the fears could be more useful down the line then possible additional DPS. The pace out there really is MUCH faster and it will certainly help overall to make me a better and more dynamic player. The moors always has been a good fit for me as when I don’t have much time I can just run around solo but can also hop in groups when I have more time available and you’ll probably hear and see more from me from the moors. I also need to keep my eyes open for other weapons with better PvP legacies…
Doc Holiday's LOTRO Blog 
Do you feel the game is slanted toward being lvl 60to65 now? I hardly ever see people LFF or PUG these days. Now that so much is soloable, it is pretty quiet out there. My kinship tends to focus on SG and SH runs. My warden is almost lvl 51 and lvl 65 seems a long way off.
I would love to see LOTRO have better match making for skirmishes or instances, much like Dawn of War II’s Last Stand or even Diablo II Baal Runs.
I also have a lvl 40 Captain and I am really starting to like the Captain play style.
I honestly can’t say as outside of my RK (she’s 21) I’m not on toons in that level range. One thing I’ve done recently is join Silverlode’s GLFF channel which does seem to help for the more notoriously harder group content (2.4.7, 2.5.5, 2.6.8, and the turtle to name a few) which might help you out in the 50s.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if groups in the 40-60 range were tough as it will take a while for alts to get up there if they’re checking out the new experience. Plus in the 40-55 range there are a number of different zones you can quest in so folks are a bit more spread out.
But with the addition of skirmishes and the different choices available, I can see folks skipping most group content unless it is a story quest (Volume 2), or one of the Moria instances.
One encouraging thing I did notice that’s up on Bullroarer is Horse rewards for deed completion in places like CD, Uru, BG, etc so that should help drive folks to those dungeons as well (going to talk about this more this weekend).