Soloing Haglob

Grimberg spotted the big troll Haglob so decided to try and solo him. Got him down to about 50k quite steadily and was joined by a fellow adventurer and we took him down quite easily, nice.

Boiled Tentacle of Helchgam anyone?

Grimberg uses his indoor firepit to prepare a very unusual meal!

Soloing Bughrakh on the way to L78

Grimberg managed to solo Bughrakh's  War Band without running out of power this time!

Captain Warsteed Traits

 Having had a few outings on his Warsteed Grimberg has finally had to give up his uber casual mouse only technique. Being unused to triggering skills with the keyboard there is a bit of a random button mashing. Even so he managed to 'Kite and Shout' 6 Salamanders and has defeated War Bands Cinder and Hanrun.

Having trained his steed a few levels, Grimberg was not sure what to invest his points in so consulted his community of friends. Danania Supergirl of Lorien has done this fantastic 5 part guide that helped a lot, it is written from a Runekeepers point of view but is generally useful.

Part 1: Trait line Overview (Part 1)

Part 2: Light Traits (Part 2)
Part 3: Medium Traits (Part 3)
Part 4: Heavy Traits (Part 4)
Part 5: Comparisons (Part 5)

Fellow Captains have advised a Light Steed as a good match as the Captain Tactical skills are better than the Physical skills.

Grimberg found this very handy advice but he doesn't know who to credit for the info. 

• The first rule of Mounted Captaining is to realize you're not a melee class.
• The second rule of Mounted Captaining is to realize YOU'RE NOT A MELEE CLASS!
• Third rule, captains like light horses and have two disciplines. I have never used the Rohirrim discipline yet. The other two are just way better when leveling. 

Captains start with four attack skills. Two are at melee. Two are at range, and the ranged ones do 2x to 3x your melee damage. At 40m or so. Quick note: most enemies either hit really weak, or only have melee attacks. There is NO REASON to try and engage in melee constantly. Sure hit as you pass if they get to close but don't just make melee passes. That's the only way war-band bosses are going to get you.

• Cry Wrath is your nuke on a 16s cooldown. At level 75 with a level 1 steed, it would crit for 8k damage if I had fury built up. It also applies a Dot in Red Dawn stance. That's solid against bosses, but if you're in Riddermark it becomes a 5-target AOE with a 40m diameter. Yes, that means it hits up to 5 enemies that are within a hunter's bowshot of each other. I will ride through enemy camps, agro them all, then circle/nuke them with this before going into the camp for the clickies. It is insanely useful.
• Cry Havoc is your utility attack. It has a base 10s cooldown and on a crit (which you're a captain and you should have a lot of) restores ~200 morale and power to both you and your horse in Red Dawn, 250 or so in Riddermark.
• Rally the Riders is a melee shout but worth mentioning because it's basically rallying cry without the defeat response requirement. It only effects mounts though, but that's all that's needed in warband combat. We all know how good Rallying Cry is so that's all that needs to be said here.

The Light steed is the steed of choice for both healing and DPS IMO. Here's the path I chose to unlock my abilities:

First off, I've seen a lot of people recommend upping agility and yellow traits first to help with maneuverability. I think this is a bad idea. There's plenty of space, and you really don't care if you accidentally agro additional mobs. You're far better served leveling traits that are actually useful for combat first, then working on maneuverability to that end I suggest:

• Leveling strait up the middle of the Blue line until you get Quckness, and maxing it. This knocks 6s off the cooldown of your ranged Cries, and Rally the Riders. This means that your big nuke is now a 10s cooldown instead of 16. It means your utility attack is a 4s cooldown instead of 10. This is an insane boost to DPS. Getting here granted you some mitigations and in/out healing through other virtues, which is a nice bonus but not the reason you're here. After this, time to change over and...
• Level strait up the middle of the Red line until you get Wrath. This adds 25% crit chance to Cry Havoc, Cry Wrath, and Rally the Riders (crit heals!).
• Fill in red traits by finishing off Forceful Blows (for 1200 more crit rating) and grabbing 3 in Combat Advantage (1500 physical mastery which you care nothing about and 2100 tactical mastery!).

At this point you can start branching out to pick up whatever you want. My next move was to get 2 ranks in Bonds of Power and pick up Invigorate in the blue tree to help with power consumption (though nowadays my power doesn't even move... crits restoring power is nice). You could also pick up the morale heal in the blue line if you want it as an emergency button. Eventually I did go into yellow for maneuverability and I did see the difference in how the mount handled but I definitely wouldn't have done that as my first advances.

UPDATE
 Grimberg likes running in Riddermark discipline for the Cry Wrath AOE and is really jealous of Hunter Apelred's 21% run speed so after maxing Quickness he went for Dash with the Hard to Tire toggle for the max 16mps.


After Quickness reduced the cooldowns Grimbergs horse power seemed to vanish, not too good in the middle of fighting Bughrakh, thankfully Loremaster Celeros joined the fight and we took him down.



So with his Steed at level 15 Grimberg took Danania's advice about points in the blue line getting Bond of Power and Invigorate

Captain Grimberg gets his War Steed

 Grimberg makes level 76 and aids the retreat from the Fell Beast at Langhold finding himself in Harwick with the gift of a War Steed, he is looking forward to romping round Rohan on horseback like a true Rohirrim.

Dargnakh

 


























Yep - he was right!

It was a dark and stormy night

Grimberg finally got the time to get on his (travelling) horse and visit Galadriel who sent him into Rohan - the land of his birth.

Below he is sitting on the Seeing Seat atop Amon Hen.

Fangorns Edge & Pits of Isengard

Colzarak, Zeshac and Grimberg finally managed to get together to attempt some of the Isengard 3 man instances - I did say we were casual!

We chose Fangorn's Edge as the easiest of the three to try and did a bit of reading up. This didn't stop us wiping out on the first crossing, not a good start. But remarkably we went on the defend all the Huorns and only loose 1 of the Ents in the chaos of Ents, Trolls and Orcs that was the final fight.

Now we had time to spare so decided to 'have a look' at the Pits of Isengard with no idea of what to expect. Strange stacking sickness affected our vision and a plague a Limrafns punted us into oblivion. Not sure what caused the Limrafns to appear so we peeled the mobs off the tank one at a time from then on.

The whip wielding Zaberz flung us around for an exciting ride, nobody ended in the sludge.

And so we eventually stumbled across Ironarm the final boss, could we make it 2 out of 2? The punting Limrafns appeared again and with limited ranged attack we just had to suffer the punts and damage and heal through. Grimberg got an on defeat heal from them so that helped a lot. And yes we defeated Ironarm and completed 2 on level instances in one session, unheard of!

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I suspect Riders of Rohan will prove a bigger draw for a while but I hope we can complete the third of the 3-man instances sometime soon.

Skybreaker a bit too tough

 Level 49 Loremaster Florandir tried to get the better of the very tough shard dropper Skybreaker but could not quite manage to keep the fight under control and failed when the big Drake was on about 9k. Fun trying though.

Sunset over Malenhad

 

Evening sun in Malenhad waiting for Skybreaker to show up.

Florandir tested in Goblin Town

Florandir the loremaster felt his staff was a little dusty after being in the cupboard for a long time so he needed a good challenge to sharpen up his skills.

So at level 47 he set off for Goblin Town to try and solo all the way to Gollum's Cave so he could make a sketch for Bilbo.

Working his way to the Slave Pens was good practice for his mez & root skills. He summoned his eagle for the good flank rate so he could try a 'flank & tank' tactic using Wizards Fire. He also expected a few defeats so the eagle rez would come in handy (and it did).
 
Flank and tank worked well and Florandir got good experience of the timing of cracked earth root and blinding flash duration to manage the fight. He tried alternatively starting the fight with the eagle and then doing a mez pull. The mez pull meant Florandir did not have to worry as much about breaking mez with AOE skills so preferred this approach.

The eagle rez was tried as an aggro wipe after running through a crowd to avoid some fighting. The eagle was set to passive, then run through the crowd to a safe spot, let them kill you, eagle rez, mobs all run back. This worked some times but others times the eagle seemed to aggro mobs that the loremaster didn't so was not around for the rez. Good job he had a stack of revive scrolls as backup.


A vital piece of advice from fellow loremaster Aeshac about Air Lore healing the pet as well when using Wizards Fire after a flank served Florandir well as he adventured deeper and encountered the level 50 signature Goblin Town Soldiers (GTS). The eagle would survive the whole fight to allow use of mez then Inner Flame healing when down to 1 mob. Florandir managed to defeat 1 GTS plus 2 normals and 2 GTS using this technique.

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A final sprint towards Gollum's Cave ended in defeat as Florandir's level 48 was too low to enter the Great Goblin's Den and shake off his pursuers. A revive, Wisdom of the Council and sprint down the right tunnel found Florandir at Gollum's Cave where battered, bruised and much the wiser, he could finally achieve his objective and make a sketch for Bilbo.

Florandir enjoys adventuring with his pets so looking forward it is worrying that pets DPS/abilities have not scaled well to L75 (see this post).

Lost Temple - Grimberg the Tank!

The Flaming Halflings managed to get together to take a long planned trip to the Lost Temple. The party of L75s was Runekeeper Zeshac, Champion Colvedui, Hunter Findo, Captain Grimberg and rubbing the sleep from his eyes Captain Stuball. Not exactly a 'classic' fellowship.

After the Champion got in a spot of bother while tanking Grimberg was asked to tank - a new experience for him. Fortunately he did not have to compete too much with Hunter Findo for aggro as there were plenty of rot maggot larvae and other delightful denisens for him to burn up.

We had a bit of bother with Ferndur and wiped. Second time, as soon as Ferndur summoned anything we stopped all DPS on him and Grimberg kited until all the adds were dealt with, this proved the winning strategy.



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Bilbo's Birthday - Battle of the Five Cupcakes

 The 22nd September is a triple celebration, My Wedding Anniversary, Bilbo's birthday, and Apelred's Adventures birthday, the blog is 4 years old today.

So I am celebrating with such delicacies as cup cakes, black and white pudding, ale and cider among others.

Gazing into Galadriel's Mirror I will guess how old the blog will be when we finally get to witness the Ring being destroyed. We are currently at book 2 chapter 9 The Great River. That is 21 chapters in 5 years. There are 35 chapters to go until we get to Mount Doom. That means at the same rate there is about another 8 years to go until Mount Doom and about 2 more to The Grey Havens.

So I predict the blog will be 12 years old by Mount Doom and our toons will be level 300!

Here are my black & white puddings for the feast in case you wondered what the in game food looks like. The recipes are the same except the black pudding includes blood.








And for refreshment we have the battle of the goblins. Wychwood breweries special version of Hobgoblin, called King Goblin versus Thatchers oak aged cider Green Goblin. A delicious contest!

Grimberg finds Stoneheight

The Flaming Halflings fancied trying The Lost Temple but Grimberg hadn't done any of In Their Absence. Tormay and Crowthorn helped Grimberg with Northcotton Farm but time was too short to attempt Stoneheight as well. Grimberg decided to venture up to discover the location alone. And then he popped his head inside, chatted to the locals, killed a few Ruffians and Wolves. Emboldened he took on Gundul and his 2 wound dealing henchmen but didn't manage the fight well and went down. He rethought his plan and went full dps on the henchmen and kept his archer alive for longer, this did the trick. The other boss fights with Búbhosh-grat and Dale Truitt were more straightforward and Grimberg walked away with a nice stack of ixp runes feeling very pleased with himself.

Apple stealing burglar

Apeljack has been adventuring around the shire and exercising his enmity of spiders and wolves. He has made level 15 so can claim a surname. A name that combines apples and burgling is scrumping, so Apeljack is now known as Scrumper. By way of demonstration here is a vid of an apple stealing sheep.

Floribunda hands her cooking pot to Apeljack

Floribunda is a Tinker and member of the Jewelers Guild. After making Great River gear for Grimberg & Apelred she thought she would have a go at a bit of Westfold cooking. She bought a few ingredients from the AH and started mixing away but then realised that her lowly level (21) meant she couldn't make anything really useful as the new recipes mostly need reputation she cannot hope to get without leveling up.

Sadly she realised she would have to give up cooking and let young upstart Burglar Apeljack (level 7) become a Yeoman so he could level both farming and cooking and join the Cooks Guild so he could craft some tasty morsels.

In the pic Apeljack is doing some high level campfire cooking, what a scamp!

In an epic weekend he leveled both farming and cooking to Westfold and made level 10.

The Burglar class seems to be a combination of 2 favoured classes, Loremaster and Captain so Apeljack may well get a bit more adventuring while he builds his rep with the cooks guild.

Florandir dusts the cobwebs off his staff

Florandir has been given the rare opportunity to venture outside the crafting halls and romp around Angmar and the Trollshaws mezing, stunning and rooting his way towards level 47.

Grimberg gets his 2nd age

Grimberg has completed the Great River epic quest line to get a Worn Symbol of Celebrimbor. Florandir has used it to craft a 2nd age war hammer and with liberal use of the Lotro Store it has been shaped into a mean weapon.

Metalsmith Folflorin and Jeweler Floribunda have crafted some guild Great River items to equip Grimberg with some of the best kit available to the casual adventurer.

Grimberg tested this out on a training dummy in Galtrev with the Combat Analysis plugin loaded and improved his DPS from 350 to 500. He reckons his healing output has gone up about 50%.

Apelred has also had a good set of gear crafted for him so they are all set to venture into Rohan when the gates are opened.

Riders of Rohan delayed

Beta testing of RoR has been very successful in finding loads of bugs so the release is put back to 15th October. More detail can be found on Contains Moderate Peril.

The countdown timer has been adjusted.

This means Loremaster Florandir will get some adventuring time after all!

Grimberg makes L75 following doomed Isengard Assault

 Grimberg joins his fellow Rohirrim in the assault on Isengard.

But things don't go well ...










 ... and Grimberg has a bad dream ...

... but he is rewarded with L75 from his namesake Grimbold.


















This means Grimberg has achieved his objective of L75 before Riders of Rohan.

Metalsmith Folflorin and jeweler Floribunda are ready to craft Grimberg some Great River armour and  jewellery and Florandir has crafted a third age legendary L75 great hammer.

Next for Grimberg is the epic quest line in the Great River to get the Worn Symbol of Celebrimbor so Florandir can craft him a second age legendary.
Can he manage this before Riders of Rohan?

Flaming Halflings in the Limlight Gorge

 5 Flaming Halflings Zeshac, Colzarak, Stuball, Findo and Grimberg ventured into the Limlight Gorge. Things were going well until we mined the ore nodes and got the attention of 3 trolls. Hunter Findo was CC built so could mez and trap. Colzarak tanked the trolls and the rest stayed behind to avoid his big AOE. Unfortunately as the troll threw Colzarak around and Grimberg kept behind he got in ranged of a trapped troll who stunned and mashed him. He was rezzed OK but when he mined the ore node again to our surprise we got another 3 trolls who killed us off. Luckily the quest completed so we could retreat and hand in.

All this got Grimberg within a whisker of Level 75.

Grimberg in Nan Curunír

Grimberg is helped by Guardian Sofor with quests in Nan Curunir outside Isengard. This took him through level 73. We chatted about Captains and realised Grimbergs 20% crit chance was key to keeping his DPS up even though he is still fighting with his L65 legendary 2 handed hammer.

In the screenie the Master of Beasts gets a slap from an Ent.

Adventuring and blogging has slowed down recently due to real world and due to setting up an upgraded PC. With Lotro on an SSD load times are dramatically reduced and I can recommend this upgrade to reduce lag & delays when playing the game.

WeatherStock 2012 in pictures

Apelred Jnr attended his first WeatherStock on Landroval server and had a really great time despite the occasional issues with lag which meant the sound disappeared for a few seconds. He had to set graphics to very low res to ensure he heard the music so the screen shots of the performances are a bit fuzzy but managed high res for the group shots at the Lonely Tree. Screenies can also be found on Flickr.

WeatherStock 2012 - Just logged on and Apelred was starting to feel overdressed!

He managed to hear the last 8 bands and they were all great, the standard was very high. The music was varied with some having lyrics posted to regional chat as the music played. The lyrics were sometimes epic and sometimes funny, Ingolemo's "I want to ride my War Steed" to the tune of Queen's "I want to ride my bicycle" gave Apelred the biggest grin.

WeatherStock 2012 Light in the Dark winners Andunie

WeatherStock 2012 Light in the Dark winners were Andunie who did a varied set including an all percussion number, two mellow 'elvish' tunes and a jig.

The Great Smokeout WeatherStock 2012

Being a hobbit Apelred likes a good smoke.

Apelreds favourites the Songburrow Strollers during the Battle of the Bands WeatherStock 2012

Mornie Alantie - Batttle of the Bands Winners - WeatherStock 2012

Apelred thought Mornie Alantie's tunes were the most evocative of Middle Earth, and the Mordor, Mordor song a very witty ditty with a catchy tune.

Fireworks for WeatherStock 2012

WeatherStock 2012 Lonely Mountain Cup judging was very close - 'give us 3 minutes'

The Lonely Mountain Band did a great job of organising the 5 hour event which went very smoothly. There were a couple of killjoys who moaned and did group emotes but that did not spoil Apels enjoyment so a big thankyou to the LMB. They have recorded the tune they used to introduce the bands, you can hear it here www.tinyurl.com/weatherstockforever.

Lonely Mountain Cup winners Songburrow Strollers with their Bywater Bouncing song - the crowd went wild! WeatherStock 2012.

Apelred is a sucker for a song about biscuits and an excuse to jump about so he was delighted when the Songburrow Strollers won the Lonely Mountain Cup.

Procession to the Lonely Tree - WeatherStock 2012

We all cheer for a fantastic event, thanks to the Lonely Mountain Band - WeatherStock 2012

Harperella serenades the crowd at the Lonely Tree - WeatherStock 2012

Fireworks at the Lonely Tree Photo Shoot - WeatherStock 2012

Apelred can't resist another bounce! WeatherStock 2012