Throg actually hit 60 a few days back but life has conspired to keep me away from the blog. I brought him to the edge of Lothlorien for the last half level which was a good choice. Nice to be out in the sunshine again and there are good quest rewards to be got from killng orcs there. Some of the quests are marked as small fellow but don't let that put you off - they are soloable with careful pulling. Minor gripe: a few players were farming the orcs for drops making it harder than it should have been to complete the quests. My requests to fellow up were rudely turned down.
Aside: It seems that the orc camps in Lothlorien are one of the few fast respawning level 60+ spots in Lotro at the moment and are therefore favourite spots for farming. However there is a better choice: The library of steel single player instance can can be farmed repeatedly for the cost of 1 adamant crystal (exit or fail the instance to reset it). It also has level 60+ mobs and being a single player instance does not interfere with other players
Aside to the aside: The main driver to farming in Lotro at the moment seems to be the legendary weapon system. The randomness of the system means that you need to farm an insane amount of mobs to get a good 2nd age weapon and an even more insane amount of mobs to get all the relics needed to max it out. Perhaps a future update will make second age weapons more readily available through the crafting system.
Aside to the aside to the aside: I am not a crafter but from what I have seen MoM seems to have borked high level crafting. Weaponsmiths are screwed because there are easier and better ways to get legendary weapons than through crafting. Armoursmiths and Tailors are screwed because quest rewards and drops are better than crafted gear and because everybody is running hard mode instances for their radiance armour sets. Scholars are screwed because morale and power pots now drop like rain water and radiance gear seems to be replacing the need for hope pots. The only professions which seem to be holding their own are jewellers and cooks.
End of nested asides.
Anyway Level 60 allows Throg to don his level 60 axe-master armour set. It has given him a good boost in armour class a good boost in might and a fwe useful set bonuses but his total morale actually dropped by about 60 points compared to the randon collection of stuff he was previously wearing. I reckon its still worth it plus its looks like a serious set of armour which is nice.
Time to start joining my fellow guild mates who are doing daily hard mode runs for their radiance armous sets. I am not sure I have the patience to grind out a fulll radiance set for my self but I'd like to go along for a few runs and to help others out perhaps.
Aside: It seems that the orc camps in Lothlorien are one of the few fast respawning level 60+ spots in Lotro at the moment and are therefore favourite spots for farming. However there is a better choice: The library of steel single player instance can can be farmed repeatedly for the cost of 1 adamant crystal (exit or fail the instance to reset it). It also has level 60+ mobs and being a single player instance does not interfere with other players
Aside to the aside: The main driver to farming in Lotro at the moment seems to be the legendary weapon system. The randomness of the system means that you need to farm an insane amount of mobs to get a good 2nd age weapon and an even more insane amount of mobs to get all the relics needed to max it out. Perhaps a future update will make second age weapons more readily available through the crafting system.
Aside to the aside to the aside: I am not a crafter but from what I have seen MoM seems to have borked high level crafting. Weaponsmiths are screwed because there are easier and better ways to get legendary weapons than through crafting. Armoursmiths and Tailors are screwed because quest rewards and drops are better than crafted gear and because everybody is running hard mode instances for their radiance armour sets. Scholars are screwed because morale and power pots now drop like rain water and radiance gear seems to be replacing the need for hope pots. The only professions which seem to be holding their own are jewellers and cooks.
End of nested asides.
Anyway Level 60 allows Throg to don his level 60 axe-master armour set. It has given him a good boost in armour class a good boost in might and a fwe useful set bonuses but his total morale actually dropped by about 60 points compared to the randon collection of stuff he was previously wearing. I reckon its still worth it plus its looks like a serious set of armour which is nice.
Time to start joining my fellow guild mates who are doing daily hard mode runs for their radiance armous sets. I am not sure I have the patience to grind out a fulll radiance set for my self but I'd like to go along for a few runs and to help others out perhaps.
Comments
I was doing some questing in that orc area as well. It was pretty heavily camped but I managed to complete my quests due to the fast respawns. I'll have to try out some of those other weapon-buff instances. I've only done the lower-tier ones.
I agree about the crafting stuff. It's amazing that as a cook, people are asking me for more stuff because they're not spending on crafted stuff. I think there are plans on changing that though (getting better crafted items in the game, etc).
I was very worried about the random farming aspect of legendary weapons when they were announced. The dev comment was something to the effect of "this will make you appreciate it more when you get a weapon that you actually want". Yeah, thanks guys.
As to crafting, I suppose this is the pendulum swinging the opposite way from where it was at 50. I hated the critical success system with a fiery passion - I spend all the mats and all the farming effort and then I have a 66% chance of getting a crappy low-end version of the item I actually wanted. In some cases, it was actually cheaper to buy the finished product on the AH than to have the recipe fail even a single time. Game systems should not punish players for attempting to make progress. (Though I suppose that flooding the AH with dirt cheap "polished", failed "mirrored" items was good if you didn't care that much about min/maxing...)
With regard to the "weapon buff" instances Library of Steel is the hardest one I have done so far. You are effectively on a very tight timer because you need to clear out all the mobs before they can summon ten fire spirits at the same time. The fire spirits are very weak (1 hit kills them) but they are being generated every few seconds. It creates a nice sense of urgency trying to keep the number from rising while you deal with the normal mobs(Lotro's version of Whack a Mole)
Green Armadillo there is good news and bad news on the randomness of crafting. The good news it that there are now crafting guilds which allow you to produce "as good as crit" items without the element of chance (on a limited basis - ie one per week). The bad news is that crafted items aren't good enough to compete with drops any more.
Even though I am not a crafter I liked having the alternative of buying high quality gear on the AH so I hope all is fixed in future patches.