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In mmorpgs a lone hero will never be rich

Monday night I logged in to Lotro to play Ceoldir my Loremaster alt. It was quite late when I started so I had missed the peak time chance to do groupy stuff but I wasn't in the mood to do any of the the typical kill ten warg solo quests. I managed to amuse myself for almost three hours by soloing through the dangerous region of Angamur. This was fairly tricky even for a LM because the region is full of elite wights and shades who are immune to many of a Lore masters tricks including the default mezz "Blinding Flash". I had a few deaths but eventually worked out a reasonable routine based around my new favourite skill "Cracked Earth". Kiting the mob while waiting for Cracked Earth's root to apply provided plenty of opportunity to stumble into adds so it kept me on my toes. I enjoyed the session but it was very unproductive in progression terms. I was killing stuff very slowly so I got no more than a quarter of the way through my original quest and the few drops were not enough to cover repair bills.

Tuesday was a completely different story. Logging on at peak game time (7pm gmt) I managed to find myself in three different fellowships one after another (a kinship fellowship followed by two different Pugs) and even managed to knock off a bunch of easy solo quests in the mid North Downs in between. Another enjoyable session but this time a very profitable one.

Oddly enough the Kinship fellowship was probably the most haphazard. One of our kin asked for help with a level 50 book quest so I logged Throg my lvl 50 Champion and volunteered. A few other lvl 60's did likewise. With a group that was way over level we didn't bother with planning and just tore into the mobs. This worked well enough till we got to the final boss who spawned waves of adds at various trigger points as he was killed. With our level 60 dps we managed to kill him very quickly which simply meant all the elite adds spawned together. In the ensuing melee the tank was overwhelmed. Whatever cohesion our little group had fell apart about this time and everybody just stated hitting targets at random. Total chaos but the group was sufficiently overpowered to pull it off in the end.

The second group was pug for Freeing Dori. Nothing spectacular but there was enough of us and the group was balanced enough to do the quest without problems.

My final group was a pug threesome: Ceoldir my lvl 30 LM, a lvl 29 Captain and a level 34 Rune Keeper. This trio of hybrids turned out to be surprisingly flexible - the general plan was for the Captain to tank, Runkeeper to heal and me to dps but between us we also has plenty of buffing, debuffing and oodles of crowd control. We managed to do Tending the Glade and Half-Orc Schemer without a hitch.

Two very different mmo evenings both enjoyable but one of which was far more profitable than the other.

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