Some LOTRO for a change

My adventures in the land of JRR Tolkien have been peaceful. Me and two IRL friends have been leveling about 1 hour/day, when all the kids (and wives) are in bed, and while far east stock exchanges are not trembling :)

This means I'm now a proud level 38 minstrel elf girl, named Janariel, collecting a few achievements.. or should I say deeds.
The big advantage of deeds over achievements is that you can use the deeds to enhance specific traits that might be good for your class. Instead, in WoW, you do all those achievements for.. the insanity of doing them and feeling well :)
So, you do deeds, enhance traits, equip them, use them in sets when appropriate, and therefore you become allmighty.



Another nice thing that LOTRO has is the bunch of different quests with elite mobs you can do, which is what we three wanted, when we decided to skip DDO for LOTRO.

In comparison, WoW is much more soloable than LOTRO. And easier too. As a minstrel, with healing and CC(fear), I can attack 2 mobs, 3 if I'm pushing my luck, but more means I'm dead meat. In WoW, I remember as a warlock, pulling 5-6 mobs and happily getting away with it.

But back to elite'ing, you've got:
- Skirmishes, ie, closed instances that you can do solo, in a small(3x) or large (6x) fellowship, that reward XP and medals for gear. Instead, WoW has only closed instances for fixed 5 ppl. If you can't find a healer, or a tank, you cannot do them. In LOTRO, you can adjust the skirmish to your party.
- Closed instances, with specific quests inside, just like WoW, but a tank is not mandatory (at least, doesnt look like that to me) although a healer.. indeed is.
- Open instances (as I call them), caves and such things with elite mobs where you are inside but can suddenly find other ppl too. And they are *huge*.
- A lot, and I mean, a lot of out-in-the-wild elite quests/chain quests, that require a small fellowship to do them. I'd say, 5-10 times more than WoW, which sometimes feature an elite at the end of chain, and that's it.

We'll see when it gets to raiding, how it will be.



This week we killed our first rare named elite, a huge dragon that was patrolling near the Mother Drake (another elite dragon) in the North Downs. It took a while for us 3 to control the drake breathing and to position myself between both the drake and her kin, while my fellow comrades smashed one.

One is a guardian, with the tanking role, the other is a champion with the AoE role, so the only ranged is myself, when not healing. But we're bound to get a Rune Keeper to play with us soon.

Next stop is Rivendell ! Aragorn, will you please wait for us!!!!!!!

Oh well, back to WoW :)

PS: This week I finally got Sartharion down + 3D in 25', so I'm a Twilight Vanquisher!