"That yard has three Luthien statues."
Apr. 4th, 2008 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liri
I'm giving Lord of the Rings Online a try. Or I may just be replacing WoW with it.
It's hard disengaging from WoW - part of me still wants to be "Rauny of the Shattered Sun," even though I haven't been able to bring myself to log onto her since Sunday - but it's just not worth the hassle anymore. The latest guild had a multitude of sins; too hardcore, led by a warrior tank who had no faith at all in paladin tanking, filled with dps-meter junkies... and they all hung out on Vent all the fucking time, so it would have been dissatisfying long-term. After one disastrous Kara run that STILL didn't let me down FUCKING NETHERSPITE, I'm through. I'm just sick of trying to prove myself every time, sick of having to check if the next guild we want to try is okay with paladin tanks and getting "lol, any tank is better than none" or "...at least they're good on aoe pulls," and waiting to either slowly and tediously wend through bosses in Kara that drop nothing I want while skipping the ones I need and being polite to a druid tank who keeps passive-aggressively taunting things off of me, or ooh, maybe I can join up with people from a guild I already left once and we can wipe over and over in Zul-Aman! I'm never going to see 25-mans because I don't want to put up with jackasses; the Aldori Legacy Defender is gorgeous, but it's not gorgeous enough to be worth that. So Rauny goes on the shelf either until I decide to move her to a new server (I'm tempted to do that anyway, so she'll be somewhere new and able to start up fresh when I feel like playing her again) or until Wrath of the Lich King comes out.
When I was googling for something related to LOTRO, I happened upon a couple of blog posts with people talking about LOTRO versus WoW. At least one person likened WoW endgame to finding out your spouse is an abusive alcoholic. I know how that guy feels!
(Edited to clarify: The comment's tone wasn't melodramatic, and I'm not identifying in a melodramatic way. But it's a decent metaphor for the way you get attached to the game only to have it change drastically at the level cap. Bleh.)
I decided to try LOTRO as sort of like a nicotine patch. It's not bad - not as good as WoW, but it has some nice bribes to take up the slack. Unfortunately for me, one of the bribes is "check it out, Tolkien." And while I'm TRYING to read the books now, I'm not a fangirl and probably never will be.
That said, though... Character creation is AWESOME. Features are much more detailed - it's close to Sims 2 levels of detail, in fact, and more customizable in some ways. You get color fields to choose from for skin tone, hair color and eye color, you can select eyebrow shape, give yourself distinguishing features like scars (unless you're an elf; apparently they don't scar.) For each race there are several potential places of origin, and helpful advice on naming conventions for the region. There are also minor ethnic differences between the nations (in hair/eye/skin color - everyone has the same face templates, hair styles, and markings.) The whole thing seems to be mostly a roleplaying feature, because all my humans, no matter where they're from, have started out in the same areas.
It's a roleplayer's paradise, really. You can purchase a surname, set people as your parents or children (I don't know how, or if, you can marry, though) and most appealing to me, buy a house! Player housing is in instanced neighborhoods, which may be standard; I know it's how they've always speculated WoW would have to do it. I got to wander through a couple of neighborhoods (including one where nearly every yard was decorated with a statue or three of Luthien), so I'm having some nonreal-estate lust at the moment.
The UI is startlingly similar to WoW's (supposedly it's actually recycled from Asheron's Call, also made by Turbine) and a lot of keybindings are the same, too - numlock to autorun, L for questlog, etc. Again, maybe standard, but I associate them with WoW - which makes it very hard to adjust to the ones that aren't. Even though I now know the key to open all bags, I perpetually hit shift-B first.
Oooh, that's one thing it unquestionably has over WoW - you start out with five 15-slot bags.
The game starts with a solo instance; you get a quick "here is how you kill things and search their corpses" tutorial in story format. The idea is to immerse you into the story right from the start; it works, and it's kind of nice to see Nazhgul in your first five minutes of the game rather than "Uh... go stab some wolves. I'll give you money." But they almost go into overkill.
Me: And at the end of the elven starter instance, Elrond shows up.
Boyfriend: Elrond Half-elven?
Me: Yes!
Him: Because you're just that important.
Me: Apparently!
The first six levels are a sequence of instances, in fact. For the human questline, this means that they can put the village through some changes; the intro instance shows you one version of the town, and once you're out of it, you see the other. It's like if Moonbrook also contained a non-instanced version of Deadmines and you could see it cleared out after you'd finished there. Also, none of that Goldshire crap where you're spammed with duel challenges by people 20 to 60 levels higher than you - no one over level 6 or so is in there.
The graphics are gorgeous. The default settings made for really choppy animation, but a quick Google showed me how to fix that (it seems to be a known issue.) Though once I was able to clearly view the way my elf runs, I decided to reroll a human. It's not seductive... just weird-looking. Controls are weird, though - it feels like my control of my character is a lot more slippery than I'm used to. Targeting a corpse to loot takes more time than it should, as does stuff like turning around. Targeting something that my raven is blocking always leads to cussing, and I'm used to targeting around flappies. My lore-master's one spell (not really a spell as such) seems to be "on next swing," making for weird fight timing.
The class selection is smaller. Guardians are obviously the tanks, minstrels are healers (cloth armor, holy damage through songs - so they're smitelol priests), champions are dps warriors, hunters... are hunters, though they have no pets, lore-masters are a hybrid caster/melee/healing class with a pet (and no self-heal yet! boo!), and captains... I'm not sure what captains do, exactly. I know they're another melee class with some buffs, but mostly, I know that they have a pet too - a human minion that follows them around, which I find hysterical. All classes - including minstrels, the closest thing the game has to a caster - are expected to melee. Hunters can get off shots in melee range, but it's a bit like a mage without frost nova - you lose casting time on damage (no instant shots as of level 5 or so.) Fortunately for me, the hybrid-y class I'm drawn to is not a tank candidate, so at least I won't be repeating the DAMMIT I'M PROT experience from WoW.
The big appeal here is that the game is new to me. There are a few long-term downsides - for one, there's less available variety and the current level cap is 50, so it won't stay new for as long - but those are a bit more distant. The biggest downside is that it's not WoW - it's not as silly, it's not as cartoony (apparently this is something about WoW that players of other MMOs hate, but to me it's a selling point) and it doesn't have the variety of races and classes. But I've tried all WoW's races and classes.
It's not like WoW has nothing that's new to me. Most Horde quest areas past level 25 or so are new to me. But I already know how I feel about Blizz endgame. If it were just a matter of running the same instances and dailies over and over, I'd be fine with that; if it were just a matter of raiding the way we did in Nocturnal, I'd be fine with that too. What I hate is the "look at my gear" part of the game, the fact that there's always someone in a casual guild who wants to be non-casual enough to fuck over the rest of the group... and lately, the endless frustrating hunt for a guild that won't make me want to uninstall the game client.
LOTRO's laid-back community and its massive set of roleplaying widgets read like an antidote to that, at least in theory. On the game forums, ex-WoW players' questions about good spots to grind to the level cap are met with "Quests are the quickest way to level," and "What's the rush? Just do quests and enjoy the game." One of the reasons we were considering an RP server when we wanted to transfer was teh boyfriend's reasoning - on an RP server, at least some of the people have a way of having fun that doesn't involve the quality of their gear. Well, in this game, you can get rewarded for having your friends spam emotes at you.
I don't want to RP in LOTRO - I fear Silmarillion readers would find out a way to crawl through the screen and flense the flesh from my bones. But it's nice that the game makes it so people can. Other things about the general tone and focus of the game, quoted from this thread: "No one is required to go into Helgerod, especially since crafted gearis on par with the epic set that can be found both in AND outside ofHelgerod. Turbine clearly is making raiding as an alternate play modeand not as a required method for advancement, so there is nothing to beworried about." "Hasn't turbine repeatedly stated that they don't want raiding to be the only way to get the OMGWTFBBQ loot?"
If this is true and stays true - crafted gear is equivalent to raiding gear and a valid way of advancing at max level - I am SO THERE. I love crafting, and their system is interesting and nicely complicated.
The only catch is that WoW, at the early levels, is still a lot of fun, and far more visually appealing - the scenery in LOTRO is gorgeous but the characters don't appeal to me nearly as much. It's so tempting to go play my dwarf pali or my Horde characters instead of having to learn a whole new game with a whole new set of acronyms, but I know what's at the end of that road, and it involves more outraged screencapping of people calling each other fags.
Believe it or not, it's still not an easy decision.
It's hard disengaging from WoW - part of me still wants to be "Rauny of the Shattered Sun," even though I haven't been able to bring myself to log onto her since Sunday - but it's just not worth the hassle anymore. The latest guild had a multitude of sins; too hardcore, led by a warrior tank who had no faith at all in paladin tanking, filled with dps-meter junkies... and they all hung out on Vent all the fucking time, so it would have been dissatisfying long-term. After one disastrous Kara run that STILL didn't let me down FUCKING NETHERSPITE, I'm through. I'm just sick of trying to prove myself every time, sick of having to check if the next guild we want to try is okay with paladin tanks and getting "lol, any tank is better than none" or "...at least they're good on aoe pulls," and waiting to either slowly and tediously wend through bosses in Kara that drop nothing I want while skipping the ones I need and being polite to a druid tank who keeps passive-aggressively taunting things off of me, or ooh, maybe I can join up with people from a guild I already left once and we can wipe over and over in Zul-Aman! I'm never going to see 25-mans because I don't want to put up with jackasses; the Aldori Legacy Defender is gorgeous, but it's not gorgeous enough to be worth that. So Rauny goes on the shelf either until I decide to move her to a new server (I'm tempted to do that anyway, so she'll be somewhere new and able to start up fresh when I feel like playing her again) or until Wrath of the Lich King comes out.
When I was googling for something related to LOTRO, I happened upon a couple of blog posts with people talking about LOTRO versus WoW. At least one person likened WoW endgame to finding out your spouse is an abusive alcoholic. I know how that guy feels!
(Edited to clarify: The comment's tone wasn't melodramatic, and I'm not identifying in a melodramatic way. But it's a decent metaphor for the way you get attached to the game only to have it change drastically at the level cap. Bleh.)
I decided to try LOTRO as sort of like a nicotine patch. It's not bad - not as good as WoW, but it has some nice bribes to take up the slack. Unfortunately for me, one of the bribes is "check it out, Tolkien." And while I'm TRYING to read the books now, I'm not a fangirl and probably never will be.
That said, though... Character creation is AWESOME. Features are much more detailed - it's close to Sims 2 levels of detail, in fact, and more customizable in some ways. You get color fields to choose from for skin tone, hair color and eye color, you can select eyebrow shape, give yourself distinguishing features like scars (unless you're an elf; apparently they don't scar.) For each race there are several potential places of origin, and helpful advice on naming conventions for the region. There are also minor ethnic differences between the nations (in hair/eye/skin color - everyone has the same face templates, hair styles, and markings.) The whole thing seems to be mostly a roleplaying feature, because all my humans, no matter where they're from, have started out in the same areas.
It's a roleplayer's paradise, really. You can purchase a surname, set people as your parents or children (I don't know how, or if, you can marry, though) and most appealing to me, buy a house! Player housing is in instanced neighborhoods, which may be standard; I know it's how they've always speculated WoW would have to do it. I got to wander through a couple of neighborhoods (including one where nearly every yard was decorated with a statue or three of Luthien), so I'm having some nonreal-estate lust at the moment.
The UI is startlingly similar to WoW's (supposedly it's actually recycled from Asheron's Call, also made by Turbine) and a lot of keybindings are the same, too - numlock to autorun, L for questlog, etc. Again, maybe standard, but I associate them with WoW - which makes it very hard to adjust to the ones that aren't. Even though I now know the key to open all bags, I perpetually hit shift-B first.
Oooh, that's one thing it unquestionably has over WoW - you start out with five 15-slot bags.
The game starts with a solo instance; you get a quick "here is how you kill things and search their corpses" tutorial in story format. The idea is to immerse you into the story right from the start; it works, and it's kind of nice to see Nazhgul in your first five minutes of the game rather than "Uh... go stab some wolves. I'll give you money." But they almost go into overkill.
Me: And at the end of the elven starter instance, Elrond shows up.
Boyfriend: Elrond Half-elven?
Me: Yes!
Him: Because you're just that important.
Me: Apparently!
The first six levels are a sequence of instances, in fact. For the human questline, this means that they can put the village through some changes; the intro instance shows you one version of the town, and once you're out of it, you see the other. It's like if Moonbrook also contained a non-instanced version of Deadmines and you could see it cleared out after you'd finished there. Also, none of that Goldshire crap where you're spammed with duel challenges by people 20 to 60 levels higher than you - no one over level 6 or so is in there.
The graphics are gorgeous. The default settings made for really choppy animation, but a quick Google showed me how to fix that (it seems to be a known issue.) Though once I was able to clearly view the way my elf runs, I decided to reroll a human. It's not seductive... just weird-looking. Controls are weird, though - it feels like my control of my character is a lot more slippery than I'm used to. Targeting a corpse to loot takes more time than it should, as does stuff like turning around. Targeting something that my raven is blocking always leads to cussing, and I'm used to targeting around flappies. My lore-master's one spell (not really a spell as such) seems to be "on next swing," making for weird fight timing.
The class selection is smaller. Guardians are obviously the tanks, minstrels are healers (cloth armor, holy damage through songs - so they're smitelol priests), champions are dps warriors, hunters... are hunters, though they have no pets, lore-masters are a hybrid caster/melee/healing class with a pet (and no self-heal yet! boo!), and captains... I'm not sure what captains do, exactly. I know they're another melee class with some buffs, but mostly, I know that they have a pet too - a human minion that follows them around, which I find hysterical. All classes - including minstrels, the closest thing the game has to a caster - are expected to melee. Hunters can get off shots in melee range, but it's a bit like a mage without frost nova - you lose casting time on damage (no instant shots as of level 5 or so.) Fortunately for me, the hybrid-y class I'm drawn to is not a tank candidate, so at least I won't be repeating the DAMMIT I'M PROT experience from WoW.
The big appeal here is that the game is new to me. There are a few long-term downsides - for one, there's less available variety and the current level cap is 50, so it won't stay new for as long - but those are a bit more distant. The biggest downside is that it's not WoW - it's not as silly, it's not as cartoony (apparently this is something about WoW that players of other MMOs hate, but to me it's a selling point) and it doesn't have the variety of races and classes. But I've tried all WoW's races and classes.
It's not like WoW has nothing that's new to me. Most Horde quest areas past level 25 or so are new to me. But I already know how I feel about Blizz endgame. If it were just a matter of running the same instances and dailies over and over, I'd be fine with that; if it were just a matter of raiding the way we did in Nocturnal, I'd be fine with that too. What I hate is the "look at my gear" part of the game, the fact that there's always someone in a casual guild who wants to be non-casual enough to fuck over the rest of the group... and lately, the endless frustrating hunt for a guild that won't make me want to uninstall the game client.
LOTRO's laid-back community and its massive set of roleplaying widgets read like an antidote to that, at least in theory. On the game forums, ex-WoW players' questions about good spots to grind to the level cap are met with "Quests are the quickest way to level," and "What's the rush? Just do quests and enjoy the game." One of the reasons we were considering an RP server when we wanted to transfer was teh boyfriend's reasoning - on an RP server, at least some of the people have a way of having fun that doesn't involve the quality of their gear. Well, in this game, you can get rewarded for having your friends spam emotes at you.
I don't want to RP in LOTRO - I fear Silmarillion readers would find out a way to crawl through the screen and flense the flesh from my bones. But it's nice that the game makes it so people can. Other things about the general tone and focus of the game, quoted from this thread: "No one is required to go into Helgerod, especially since crafted gearis on par with the epic set that can be found both in AND outside ofHelgerod. Turbine clearly is making raiding as an alternate play modeand not as a required method for advancement, so there is nothing to beworried about." "Hasn't turbine repeatedly stated that they don't want raiding to be the only way to get the OMGWTFBBQ loot?"
If this is true and stays true - crafted gear is equivalent to raiding gear and a valid way of advancing at max level - I am SO THERE. I love crafting, and their system is interesting and nicely complicated.
The only catch is that WoW, at the early levels, is still a lot of fun, and far more visually appealing - the scenery in LOTRO is gorgeous but the characters don't appeal to me nearly as much. It's so tempting to go play my dwarf pali or my Horde characters instead of having to learn a whole new game with a whole new set of acronyms, but I know what's at the end of that road, and it involves more outraged screencapping of people calling each other fags.
Believe it or not, it's still not an easy decision.