Moving Day

After almost a full year of writing about LOTRO and various other topics, I’ve decided to move sites over to docholidaymmo.com.  I will have the RSS feeds moved over and it should be a pretty smooth transition, but please let me know if something gets messed up 🙂  If you’re using the WordPress RSS feed, please switch over to the FeedBurner one that you’ll find over on the widget on the right.  It has been a fun year in what started just as an idea for me to write about Wardens.  I’ve branched out to cover my main classes in LOTRO and also other games as well.  I did keep the name somewhat generic, as although I do love LOTRO and will be spending lots of time there, in the future I know my interests will diverge in other areas.  I will continue to write what drives me but continue to ask for ideas or topics you’d like me to cover.  One thing I know I’ll be working on is more videos and screenshots of my gameplay and I’m very anxious to start doing some comparisons between champions and wardens, so get your torches and asbestos gear ready 😉

I’ve also dabbled a bit in the podcast arena as a guest on a few shows (CSTM, LOTRO Reporter, and Gondor Awaits) and have enjoyed them so much that I am contemplating starting my own podcast.  However with the return of Ringcast and The One True Cast there seem to be quite a few LOTRO podcasts and I want to make sure that if I do something it would be unique.  So stayed tuned for news on that front.

Thanks so much for all that have contributed to this site and helped me out in more ways then I can possibly fit in one post.  Here’s looking forward to another fun year and making our way closer to Mordor!

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My plan for my F2P Turbine Points

So I posted this question a couple days ago (the poll is still open) but I figured I’d share my plan.  I’m expecting to have at least 5000 Turbine points just counting the Loyalty rewards, but I know I will also get more for the various new deeds that are implemented for Reputation as my 3 mains each have a quite a few factions at kindred rank.  Initially I plan to focus on Captain, Minstrel, and Warden but am sure that my Champ (more about her later) will get some attention too.

I know that the Wardrobe will be a big help to offload some of my storage issues but currently I’m using the Shared Storage as an extension of a couple characters vaults so I will have to end up getting some more Vault space.  I really want to get to a point where I can use shared storage as a replacement for mailing items between toons, but currently it is overflow 😦

On my Captain and Warden I’ll be finishing off Zeal to Rank 10 which is a bit more painful on my Captain but certainly worth it.  They’ll also both be getting a bank space update as their banks are packed and I need the space for crafting.

My Captain and Minstrel are also pretty low on a couple Virtues but mainly Empathy and Innocence so a big chunk of my points will go to max those out.  I will probably look and make sure there aren’t any low hanging traits there that I can grind in game, but Innocence is not one of my favorites to grind out.

The virtues that I’m focusing on I’m doing for two main reasons.  First off, melee defense and armor value are universally important and make a pretty substantial and measurable difference to your characters’ survival.  The second is that in all honesty, they’re a tad painful to grind out as those are mostly quest deeds and even worse they’re the top end of the tiered reward system for quests so I’d have to do 40 some odd quests in a zone to get the virtue.

Hopefully after all that I’ll then have enough leftover points to get at least the riding skill on my Champ such that I can avoid that riding quest 😉  And I might buy a better horse as I’m a bit poor from trying to power through Scholar and Weaponsmith.

After all that, my priorities for my 500 point allowance and whatever else I earn are:

• More Shared Storage
• Stat Tomes
• Larger Wardrobe – I might not need this as I know I have similar items many times across my toons
• Virtues for my Champ
• Cosmetic Items
• Housing Items

But once I go through and clean up all my vaults and such to take advantage of the Wardrobe I might find that all I really need (or want might be a better word) to get are the stat tomes.

So far though, the results of the poll show that I”m quite in the minority in my thought process 🙂  But, if you’re thinking like me, go vote and help me prove to myself that I’m not crazy.

Dev Diary – Lua Scripting

The long awaited diary on the new Lua Scripting has been posted with some very cool insight from Narrel on the process to get Lua scripting into the game.  Even more exciting is the confirmation that Lua Scripting will be in the game at launch of F2P.  Granted Narrel does put some caveats in there, but assuming all goes well it will be in launch.

I’m always fascinated about how these things progress and appreciate the insight on how the internals of Turbine work.  This certainly sounds like an impressive effort from Narrel, ForsakenArcher, Agiclaw and Frosty with the support of the whole dev team I’m sure.  It was also very encouraging to see the beta community step up and not only try things out but post some pretty darn cool UI scripts.

At the initial launch they will restrict the system to the following areas:

• Quickslots – Allows for the creation and customization of additional quickslots.
• Player self-vitals – Exposes effect information as well as health and morale for only yourself – party member and target vitals did not make it in for this release due to time constraints and will be addressed in a future update.
• Inventory – Allows for custom organization of your inventory. For example, creating a single-bag view of your character inventory.

In addition Narrel is very specific to mention what applications they’re going to avoid, those being “bot-ing,” “macro-ing,” and things like gear score comparisons.  Also, notice in the list below they’re still not allowing you access to damage or healing output so we won’t see any sort of threat, DPS, or healing meters from this system either, which makes me VERY happy.

In addition to the launch features, they also have a few items on the planned list:

• Party member vital information
• Target vitals
• Vault UI
• Mouse cursors
• Chat window customization
• Kinship UI

Feel free to look at my post and video on the system as well as the video from Merric mentioned in this post and especially the posts from Mike mentioned in the comments of that post.

For me, this could be the single most anticipated system of the entire F2P launch 🙂

Important Note Regarding Consignment Quests

While loading the client up this morning, I noticed the following note:

ALERT: If you currently have active crafting consignment quests, please cancel or complete these quests before server maintenance begins on Tuesday, Sept 7.  These quests (available in Overhill, Silverdeep Mine, Combe Lumber Camp, or Duillond) will no longer be available once Volume III, Book 2 goes live.

For those of you who haven’t done these (I’ll admit I just started myself) you essentially are paying an NPC to go off and farm materials for you, up to Artisian level.  You travel to the NPC and there will be a few different options for the different skill levels and based on your level you purchase the right one.  Using those items creates a new quest which is essentially a timer and at the end of the timer you return to the NPC and they present you with a key to a chest with the appropriate crafting ingredients.  There isn’t a ton of ingredients but usually a handful of the different types including chances for some of the crit items.  These can be pretty handy for leveling up alts or in augmenting your resource gathering at the lower levels.  They’re also nice for cases where you can’t gather resources for yourself.  Case in point, the Historian includes weapon-smithing but no prospecting, so these quests can help quite a bit.

Two quick notes on these quests:

• You can only have one quest active per resource type
• You can however have multiple resource type quests active (scholar and prospecting for example)

I know I will be doing these quests on all my toons as often as I can in order to try to jump start my Scholar and Weaponsmith that I’m leveling.  So if you have any of your toons with crafting levels at or below Artisian, you might think about grabbing these before they go away.

2 LOTRO Podcasts Returning

I had almost removed them since they hadn’t been updated in so long but I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed new episodes of Ringcast by Lady Sinea and The One True Cast by BadPanda pop into my iTunes.  Both plan to put out new content now that they’re getting spun up on all the F2P news and excitement.  I know there are quite a few LOTRO Podcasts but it is always good to get another perspective on things.