A Casual Stroll to Mordor

This week we discuss warden and minstrel teasers, armour coming to the LOTRO Store and more!

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Orion is active in the forums and that usually means sneak peaks of changes he’s working on with classes

How this escaped my notice until release is unknown to me but the Minstrel class has a new instrument available to them with Update 5!

The last time I played my Minstrel, I said that I would put her aside until I reached 75 on my warden and Lore-master. While I leveled my warden immediately, I decided to level my minstrel to 60 before leveling my lore-master to the new cap. Yes, I am still wearing the outfit from the [...]

Where other classes got some minor upgrades with the release of ROI, the core mechanics of the way minstrels operated were fundamentally changed. After getting my minstrel to the new level cap and having the opportunity to run solo and in groups, I’d like to make a couple of comments on how I feel that the changes have affected minstrel gameplay.

When I first started playing LOTRO and saw that the primary healers were called “minstrels” and played music to restore health, the first thing I thought was, “That’s stupid.” I had similar reservations about the captain as a healer.

Like many people playing minstrels, when I first logged on to LOTRO, the first thing I thought was “O.M.G. What the heck happened to my buttons”?

If you look at the screenshots of both my minstrel and RK’s setup, you’ll see that I leave many of the basic elements in the same places.

This week we discuss the new screenshots, hunter dev diary, changes coming to the LOTRO Store and more!

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Mae govannen, friends! So you want to be a healer?  Did you find a calling to help little hobbits cure their need to deliver pie and mail all over the shire?*  Or perhaps you saw too many men slaughtered on the Fields of Fornost?  Or were you like me and asked yourself one day, “Why [...]

When Attack at Dawn and The Icy Crevasse were released, the main character for my blog (Spear and Skirmish) was in the middle of Mirkwood preparing to assault Dol Guldur. Despite this, I decided to handle the two new skirmishes promptly. The upshot of this was that I needed to select one of my other [...]

In what can almost be described as a novella, Orion has released the latest Developer Diary regarding Minstrels in the upcoming expansion, Rise of Isengard. The changes are, at the very least, extensive and intricate.

There really isn’t much that changed for me with the Minstrel in these levels. My plan for leveling pretty much just stayed the same as always. But I really can’t say I had many complaints.

Orion is continuing his proposed changes for the Minstrel class and today has a nice summary post of what he suspects will be on the test servers for us to try out first.

A second blog post covering proposed minstrel changes has been posted by Orion late last night. This post focuses on trait sets, legacies and Anthems.

In this episode, we talk about the EU migration, lotteries are temporarily suspended, proposed minstrel changes, proposed warden changes, store specials and more!

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Orion has posted the proposed changes for the Minstrel class on his blog yesterday. These are proposed changes, as in there is nothing done to test servers or anything for us to try out.

In this post, I will list the instruments available, how mentoring works and where minstrels get these skills so we can spread the joy of /music across Middle-earth!

Today, Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang posted a Minstrel Developer Diary discussing the upcoming changes to Minstrel class in the upcoming update (apparently now known as “Update 2”).

Way back in 2007 when LOTRO was first launched, one pretty consistent gripe from reviewers concerned the whole concept of the Minstrel class. Sure, everyone knew that the game needed a healer of some sort, but many people just didn’t get the concept of the Minstrel.

Honestly this post could be summed up quite simply as “Not Much” but I thought it worth a post to describe the smaller more subtle changes currently in beta.

We finish up the Summer Festival goodies we were trying for. Goldenstar is a Lucky Duck! Merric is also a little closer to finishing up the lucky duck deed. We’ve purchased almost all the summer items we can think we need at this point and may be just about done with the Summer Festival.

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“Tell the Community Team” is where Turbine asks for the players to give them direct and specific feedback about a specific topic. This is really a fantastic opportunity for you to give your thoughts and opinions about the game directly to Turbine to think about.