Altitis

LotRO: Woodworking Apprentice and Journeyman – Erratum

2011-03-18T22:39:00Z

Just a quick note – after logging on tonight and looking at my crafting window, I finally realized that in the previous two posts, I had forgotten to account for the craft experience needed to reach proficiency. My numbers were 33% off.

Both tables have now been updated with the correct numbers.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Woodworking Apprentice and Journeyman – Erratum

LotRO: Leveling Woodworking from Scratch to Mastery, Journeyman tier

2011-03-18T22:29:20Z

Following up on last night’s post, the table for the Journeyman Woodworker tier, using Ash Wood, is already a bit better furnished:

	Total Wood planks	Total Exp	How many to 840	Total Planks needed	Total silver	Total Crafting actions
Champion Horn	4	8	105	420	0	105
Ash Weapons	2	10	84	168	201.6	168
Stout Ash Weapons	4	16	53	212	127.2	159
Heavy Ash Weapons	6	22	39	234	93.6	156
Parchments	2	6	140	280	0	140
Everything else	4	8	105	420	0	105

* Updated to include proficiency

As with the previous table, the numbers assume that you already have Ash planks at the ready, so the cost of turning the raw wood into planks is not part of the price evaluation here.

Going forward, there are several more choices on what to craft in each tier. What remains true is that the faster you want to level, the more Rowan planks will be required. Most wood-efficient remains as always the first set of weapons in this tier – something that we will see later is also verifiable in the Expert tier, and, I suspect, will not change all the way up to master at the very least.

As Longasc mentioned in his comment on the last post, these tables are obviously only directly useful in this form for someone wanting to speed-level woodworking – something that should become very simple to do on a low level alt after the new patch goes live. If you level the craft in parallel with a character’s natural progression, it is best to blend in the higher level weapons as you need them.

You will get most benefit, in fact, if you are able to speed level to proficiency with the plain ash weapons (using 56 ash wood planks), then craft critical equipment for your use. The weapons for instance have quite a nice edge over the normal versions, and the same goes for the musical instruments. Critical equipment also tends to sell quite nicely on the AH (provided it is not completely flooded of course) and can recoup quite a bit of investment if you buy the wood planks instead of collecting them yourself.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Leveling Woodworking from Scratch to Mastery, Journeyman tier

LotRO: Leveling Woodworker from scratch to mastery, Apprentice tier

2011-03-18T22:32:15Z

What is the most efficient selection of recipes to get woodworker to mastery? Browsing around, I found only either out of date or incomplete information. Some initial material I found online looked promising… and then I went in-game to verify it, and saw that in the meantime, all recipes had been normalized.

What’s a blogger to do? Research the stuff myself, of course. Whether you want to level woodworking with the least wood, the least money or the least time, the table below should help you decide.

Today, we’ll look at the simplest table of them all, the apprentice level using Rowan Wood planks.

	Total Wood Planks	Total Exp	How many to 660	Total planks needed	Total silver	Total Craft actions
Rowan Weapons	2	10	66	132	105.6	132
Heavy Rowan Weapons	4	18	37	148	59.2	111

* Updated to account for proficiency level

Crafting the normal, level 7 Rowan weapons takes least wood but more money and time. Picking the Heavy Rowan weapons instead saves on time and money, but will require 21 more rowan. If you gather them yourself, the time savings will be lost with the foresting work

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Leveling Woodworker from scratch to mastery, Apprentice tier

LotRO: No more Clown Shoes – Outfits Explained

2011-03-15T11:57:29Z

When I recently ranted about the problems that mismatching armour would do to a fashion-conscious character, reader Longasc reminded me that Lord of the Rings Online actually had a great system to customize every toons’ appearance, Outfitting.
Of course, me being my usual slow-witted self, I needed some serious twitter coaching by the same Longasc to finally get it. And now I’m totally taken by the system.

When the game first introduces you to Outfits, you get a free cosmetic circlet with the gift pack every new adventurer obtains at the end of their Intro. And I tried that one out immediately, of course.

How does that work? Besides your normal character equipment screen, you also get currently two tabs for outfits, a series of duplicate slots that will accept cosmetic items – gear that is purely decorative in nature and has no stats.

After receiving my first gifted circlet, I promptly equipped it in one of those outfit tabs… and noticed that it would remain in my inventory. As bag space tends to be at a premium (isn’t it always), I promptly banked the thing, and dismissed the whole system as more or less useless.

Say it ain’t so.

And indeed, it isn’t. The system is way better than that.

What I finally understood was that cosmetic items remain in your inventory because they act like templates: drag them onto your character’s outfit panel, and a copy gets created that dresses your toon accordingly. Then you can send the same cosmetic item to another of your toons and equip it. Which is nice. But it doesn’t stop there.

To really get the full grasp of what Turbine has done here, one needs to spend some TP and get at least one shared wardrobe expansion of the Lotro store. And BTW, they’re on sale this week, which makes it a good time to grab them if you got any Turbine Points to spare.

Shared Wardrobes come in 10 slot increments and are, as the name states, shared among all your characters on the same server. They work the same way as your character’s outfit panel, in the sense that you will copy an outfit into the wardrobe while the original remains in your inventory (and you could for instance resell those after you copied them to the wardrobe).

From there, you can again simply drag and drop a cosmetic item from wardrobe to character panel and create a new copy. Fair enough. But where the system starts to shine is when you add the various dyes available in the mix.

If you apply a dye to an outfit in your inventory, it takes on the new colour scheme while losing the previous one. Straightforward. However, if instead you apply the dye to an outfit in the shared wardrobe, it will get added to the selection of colour schemes for the same outfit.

From there, you simply select what colour version you want for an outfit and drag it into your character panel and voilà, you have a wardrobe with up to almost two dozen different colour choices for every single piece of outfit available (and every piece still only uses up one space – my wife’s dream come true if this was possible in Real Life).

Of course, Turbine also thought of the people who would apply dyes to the cosmetic item in your inventory instead of the wardrobe, and if you do that, dragging the outfit with the new colour onto the wardrobe adds the new colour to the existing schemes. What’s not to like?

As the picture comparison above shows, I’d rather have my little hobbit warden looking the part instead of a stocky shire farmerwoman who just fell off the haystack. Only remaining concern: I need to find cosmetic pants, shoulderpieces and gloves.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: No more Clown Shoes – Outfits Explained

The MMO Law of Gathering Professions

2011-03-10T13:33:58Z

While I’ve made cynical observations about loot drop in MMOs before, in an amusing twist of fate, the invaluable Casual Stroll to Mordor today blogs about optimal profession spread between four alt characters in LotRO. As coincidence has it, I made another observation on this very matter last night.

“The valuable resource you just found can only be collected by your one alt located on the other side of the world.”

True fact.

This was a post from Altitis.

The MMO Law of Gathering Professions

LotRO: Warden’s Heal over Time, Second take

2011-03-08T13:40:59Z

In my first attempt, I gathered the relevant information from the Lorebook and lotro-wiki, for the sake of convenience. Unfortunately, when playing my Warden the next time, I found out that the in-game tooltips didn’t always match the external data I had been using. In particular, the previous table displayed several HoT with a 12 seconds duration and my superficial analysis was based on that.

In-game, however, the HoTs only last 6s, at least for the two I can verify with my low level warden.

Luckily, one of the cool features your class trainer offers is to see all your class skills complete with their tooltips, including all of those that you won’t get for another while. And even better, all effects that scale based on your stats or level are also scaled down to the present character’s level.

Which gives me a new table as presented below and a first approximation on the relative efficiency of each HoT. Approximation because I only have two data points to look at so far, at level 14 and 16. While this isn’t enough to work out precise formulas for each gambit, it at least gives a certain indication of what gambit produces how much healing:

Skill	Gambit Length	Total healing / level	Healing / Power	Notes
War-Cry	2	2.1	1	6s
Impressive Flourish	2	2.1	1.2	6s
Persevere	2	3.2	13-15	6s
Safeguard	3	5	2.9	6s
Celebration of Skill	4	5.8	5.1	6s
Restoration	5	6.7	6.7	6s
Fierce Resolve	3	2.7	1	16s leech
Resolution	4	2.7	1	instant leech
Exultation of Battle	5	5.4	2.3	16s leech

Source: In-game tooltips, 8 March 2011. Note that “Power” reflects on the power stat (aka mana in other games, not the notion of potency)

Absent from this table is Conviction, which I understand is a quested gambit and would obviously not appear here.

As mentioned, no HoT lists a 12s duration at present, and I did verify by playing that everything I had access to would only tick for 6 seconds, so that part is consistent. Later on, the Warden can unlock traits that add ticks to his HoTs, and that may be the reason for the differing data gathered from other sites.

I’ll have to gain a couple of more levels to start figuring out the formulas which give the exact healing per level, so this table will probably be revisited again some time in the future. Until then, the approximation should be sufficient.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Warden’s Heal over Time, Second take

From Azeroth to Middle-Earth: United Colours of Clown Outfits

2011-03-08T12:31:11Z

One thing that both Lord of the Rings Online and WoW have in common: the garish fashion sense that results from collecting the gear from quest rewards, skirmish tokens and crafting.

To wit:
Yes, unfortunately, that live embodiment of a complete lack of fashion sense in the middle happens to be my Runekeeper, waiting for a cooldown to finish to go and dispatch some undead creep. And apparently the undead are also immune to displays of bad taste.

LotRO offers a solution in the form of dyes that can be applied but I’ll have to confess that yours truly is a bit too stingy to spend money on that. The gentleman to my left, a guardian four levels above me at that time, was wearing a set. The lass on the right was level 40, go figure what fashion outlets they get in Rivendell.

Completely mismatched gear seems to be a common trait of several MMOs (and don’t get me started on the Subligar Men in FFXI…), almost to the point of becoming a reassuring feature that transcends many settings.

Food for thought: in the fiction works inspiring our MMOs, the protagonists usually start and end their adventure in the same armour (and often with the same weapons). In LotRO, players eventually get access to Legendary Items, a weapon and a class-specific accessory, which will level, can be imbued with effects and reforged as needed (but, I gather, still get replaced every so often).

I for one would be keen to see a game system where you start by creating the looks of your armour set at toon creation, then keep the same throughout your career, with enhancements no longer in the form of wholesale armour pieces dropping (hey, look, that tiny goblin just happened to have a blue mailshirt that amazingly fits my elf three times the size perfectly!) but rather an expansion of enchanting and gemming systems, where over time you reforge and mend and add in and gradually replace materials to your taste.

One can always dream. In the meantime, walking around like a poor impression of a clown or buying dyes off the AH seems to be the only way to ward one’s innards against unwanted spilling out.

This was a post from Altitis.

From Azeroth to Middle-Earth: United Colours of Clown Outfits

LotRO: Warden’s Heal over Time Duration, First Pass

2011-03-08T13:44:09Z

Author’s note: The post below is based on incomplete and inaccurate information and does not reflect in-game reality. A more recent post supercedes the content below with more accurate information.

As has been noted before, the Warden’s Heal-over-Time skills do not stack, so spamming the one and the same skill with a HoT will lead to overwriting. The question then becomes how long each of those different HoTs tick away.

The table below is a first take on this. Obviously, the biggest missing piece is for how much each of these gambits does heal, and this will eventually make its way to a revised version. Still, for a first approach, here it goes:

Skill	Gambit length	Hot duration	Initial heal	Notes
Persevere	2	6s	yes
Impressive Flourish	2	12s	yes
Safeguard	3	6s	yes
Celebration of Skill	4	6s	yes
Restoration	5	6s	yes
Conviction	5	12s	yes	Fellowship heal
War-Cry	2	12s	yes
Fierce Resolve	3	16s	no	Leech (every 4s)
Resolution	4	16s	no	Leech (every 4s)
Exultation of Battle	5	16s	no	Leech (every 4s)

Source: Lotro-Wiki, 1 March 2011

All normal HoTs tick every 3 seconds, all leech effects (Morale transfer as they are technically called) tick every 4 seconds without an initial effect, at least as far as I can tell.

When faced with hard-hitting opposition, keeping Impressive Flourish (Shield-Fist) and War-Cry (Fist-Shield) up seems to yield the most bang for a low-level Warden’s buck. The other HoTs last only 6 seconds, and on the face of my still way too limited experience, it’s hard to pull off even 2-skill gambits in less than that time. It appears the intention of the designers with those short-term HoTs is less to drive the player to keep a multiple series of different self-healing effects up at all time, but rather to propose a straightforward alternative to damage output: either you go for a Spear-Shield sequence for damage and interrupts, or for a Shield-Spear sequence for damage and healing.

Again, at this time, further analysis of this without having precise numbers to include both for damage and healing potency makes this a purely academic exercise. While long-term readers have humoured my empty theorycrafting for long, I believe hard numbers will serve everyone better. I shall revisit this topic another day.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Warden’s Heal over Time Duration, First Pass

LotRO: Graphical view of Warden’s Gambits, consolidated

2011-02-25T13:44:29Z

To conclude on this series of posts, as promised on comments and Twitter (and thanks to Twitterer Longasc for the multiple plugs), here is everything on a single page. After completing the Fist gambits, I went back and added colour-codes to the other two and expanded the legend. I hope it doesn’t detract too much from readability.

I also have these on two different PDFs, each with a slightly different layout.

The latter has been made so that you can print each half on an A4 page and place them side by side.

I hope this will prove useful. This concludes this specific series of post, but if you want to read some additional comment on each gambit series and how sequences build up, you could go back and read the following posts:

Trying to make sense of the Warden Gambits, the thought process that set the rest in motion
Graphical view of the Spear Gambits
Graphical view of the Shield Gambits
Graphical view of the Fist Gambits

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Graphical view of Warden’s Gambits, consolidated

LotRO: Graphical view of Warden’s Fist Gambits

2011-02-22T14:45:32Z

The last group of Warden Gambits is the yellow group initiated by a fist attack, and this one was significantly more difficult to make sense of. Indeed, whatever the sequence, the pattern will break at some stage when more elements are added to building up the gambit.

Accordingly, in particular in comparison to the shield gambits that I found pretty straightforward, it my be a bit more difficult to memorize patterns instead of individual gambits. But without further ado, let’s have a look at the result:

While mapping this one out, I found myself having a hard time making sense of it, so I decided to add the colour squares describing the effects at the right hand of each gambit. I hope it remains readable for the rest of you. A red square will indicate that the whole gambit has an AoE effect, and the number in the first red square will show how many targets will be affected. The red AoE marker will overlap other colours to show what other components benefit from AoE.

One blessing is that the AoE morale leech gambits (in the middle column) are all built upon the one same consistent pattern, fist->spear->shield as a starter. I’m again far from able to speak from experience but I suspect those will come in handy.

The other seemingly important tanking gambits are Goad and War-Cry on the top right corner, the latter also adds a HoT (Healing over Time) effect on the Warden. One thing to point out again on this chart is that ToT (Threat over Time) effects do stack, so having two instances of Goad ticking away will not lead to the second one overwriting the first one. On the other hand, HoTs do not stack, and tanking will probably involve a healthy mix of the two short AoE threat fist gambits with the various HoT gambits from the shield line.

Last but not least, as Longasc pointed out to me on Twitter, War Cry (Fist->Shield: AoE ToT + HoT) is the reverse sequence of Impressive Flourish in the shield line (Shield->Fist DoT + HoT). But let’s look at what happens when you continue that line, as shown on the figure on the right: A shield followed by a War-Cry will generate Threat transfer, in other words, the Warden will start to take all threat that the healer and the DPS members in his fellowship have accumulated onto himself. So you could think of AoE Threat generation as: War-cry to get attention, then periodically shield + War-Cry to scoop up “stray” fellowship threat.

Mind you, this is purely from a memory stand-point, not a tanking treatise. You’ll want to check with the true experts, starting with Doc Holiday on the LOTRO Reporter here.

And this completes this mini-series. If you missed the previous posts, here they are:

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Graphical view of Warden’s Fist Gambits