Attention, farming enthusiasts!

The Hoarhallow Farming Society is accepting new members! If you

• enjoy working outside in fresh air,
• are a proficient farmer (expert and upwards),
• are good at dealing with various pests that may attack your beautiful garden in Hoarhallow,
• are prepared to bring your own farming supplies,

then you should apply! Veteran farmers get access to improved tools that make farming easier than it has ever been before. They also get an adorable little badge that they can display proudly to let everyone know of their recent achievements.

What are you waiting for? Go find the hobbits in Hoarhallow and apply!

U9/U10

Last week Turbine announced their plans for update 9 (in December) and update 10 (in February)... and the raiding community responded accordingly.

1/6 for Sammath Gul, guys! Guys? Anyone? I can't be the only one who's looking forward to running that at lvl 85!

Blending in

I like it when people at least try to dress their characters reasonably. I don't think that wearing dresses in great battles is very practical and I don't think that using ridiculous dyes helps to hide yourself from unfriendly eyes... which is why all my characters look rather boring. I try to look like a normal citizen of Middle-earth.

It's okay to wear colourful dresses on special occasions, though! You can't go to a hobbit party (you know, pies and fireworks and beer and all that) with a dull brown ragged robe, it'd be silly.

But just think of it: how is a burglar supposed to blend in with the background if he or she is wearing a bright orange outfit in a forest? You can get away with red and orange and other bright colours if you're, I don't know, a ladybug or a strawberry, but for humans it's definitely not going to work.

Or how do you expect a dwarf swimming in yellow shorts to... errrr... I'm... not quite sure... how you could... I mean... I suppose you could... dye your beard green and... and pretend to be a huge... floating ball of seaweeds, but...
...
I have very mixed feelings about that picture.

Anyway, most of my characters have one or two silly outfits for festivals. However, my captain only wears black because I'm a roleplayer who has not come out of the closet yet and I like to think that she's a serious person who only does serious stuff. You can't yell and shout on the battlefield to motivate your fellows and expect to be taken seriously when you look like this:

"Now for wrath, now for ruin, and the world's ending!" is one of the things that you are definitely not going to hear from this person. Nuh-uh. No way. Never. Now if I get another horse, like my black heavy war-steed, and put some shiny armour on...

Yes! I am not afraid of anyone! I could fight anyone, no matter if it's an orc, a troll or a balrog! I could even face the trolls from GLFF in that outfit! I am so awesome! Riders of Rohan, to meeee! Yes!!!

... except no. I put my amazing black outfit on, got my huge black horse and went to Bree-town and that helped to put things into perspective.

Was it my unusually big horse? Was it my heavy armour? The huge two handed sword? My title? I will probably never find out, but someone definitely clicked on my character, walked up to me and still thought I was a man.

From now on I shall be known as Sir Tuljak the Strong.
/sigh

Fun times in Eaworth

Firstly, I'd like to say that the current "endgame" in Rohan is horribly dull. I can understand that it's mostly aimed at your average casual solo player and raiders with no life are a minority in a game like LOTRO... which is terribly sad because most of my friends happen to be raiders with no life and quite a few of them are taking a long break, since currently you can only quest and do skirm raids (booooriiiing!).

However, you can do some of those quests with your friends and/or kinmates to make them more entertaining.

Guess who couldn't get up there fast enough and had to wait until someone else bought a summoning horn from the LOTRO store (that'd be me). Also, guess who fell like 20 times and landed outside the city walls twice (yup, me again). 

I saw at least 3 deaths in Eaworth that were caused by that tower. 1) Someone missed a jump (perhaps because Jara pushed him?), 2) someone jumped on Moose and accidentally fell off, and 3) Moose didn't aim for the river when we all decided to jump down. 

Final score:

Beacon of Eaworth: 3+

Citizens of Middle-earth: 0

Until next time!

To Rohan!

So a lot of people have had the chance to chill out with the Rohirrim for about a week now. Sadly I have been busy with not throwing stuff at other people in real life, so I could not play as much as I wanted to play, but I have seen just enough to know how it is.

The landscape is really nice, I really like my new horse, hunting warbands is a good way to kill time and the music is amazingly beautiful... however, not everything about Rohan is that great.

Q: "Hey, random male blonde man! If you could use five words to describe your homeland, what would those words be?"
A: "Dire. Our mission is dire."
(dammit, voice actors with repetitive lines!)

On a completely unrelated note - you can buy a new cosmetic item for dwarves from the LOTRO store and it's amazing. In case there are people who have not seen it yet - here's End with his pimp outfit (and my thoughts about his newly created dwarf alt).

Stay classy, everyone!

Welcome back, End!

... yeah, maybe I should've posted that a week earlier, but I don't think he'll mind. We're glad to have you back with us, noob.

Why no one should ever roll a captain

I'd like to apologise for not posting anything in the last few weeks. I have been busy in real life.

I've always thought of myself as a hunter but in the last few months I have mostly been raiding and doing instances on my... captain. It's not really that surprising, considering that we lost our regular captains in late winter due to some rather unfortunate circumstances. And since Dz disappeared mysteriously some time ago, our group now usually gets their buffs from either me or Ve.

At least now no one can question the necessity of taking me to our raids. It's quite nice. However, if you're a cappy, you probably know that there are some downsides to playing a super awesome support class.

So here are a few things that always annoy me when I'm on my captain.

1. After a wipe everyone but you takes a short break.
You, of course, are not going anywhere because there is some serious buffing to be done and you might as well do it while everyone's AFK to not waste anyone's time. It's even more fun when you're the only captain in your raid!
(Look at that, I can't draw a straight sword anymore. I have a curved sword. A curved. Sword.)

2. People don't understand that there's a max range for everything.
It's probably quite annoying from the healers' perspective as well, but nothing - and I mean nothing - beats having to switch between groups a million times just because someone didn't realise they weren't close enough to get motivated and then whined because they weren't buffed. Well, whose fault was that?
Ohh, you found a way to climb on top of that lamp post. How interesting! Could you come back now and let me give you your crit buff?

3. No one actually waits for buffs.
Sometimes I feel invisible because I shout and yell and scream at everyone else, yet they pay no attention to me and run off before I can even pull my amazing buff dagger out. It makes me sad.

4. You need a million weapons.
Did you think you could get away with having just one emblem and one weapon? lol nope! My poor captain has 5 fully maxed legendary items and I'd still like to find a decent 1H sword for healing because I found an amazing shield at some point and would like to use it for something (although I guess my current main sword is already good enough for healing). Unfortunately I think it's not going to happen before Rohan, /sigh.

5. Your raid leader will never leave you alone.
Dear raid leader, you're talking to the whole group, yet apparently 11 people get "etc" and I get everything else. I know it's because my big skills are actually pretty significant, as opposed to "RKs, use that group bubble thing" or "hunters, you should... pew pew more, I guess", but it's still unfair. Stop picking on me! D:

6. Scary thought: 20 wipes x 12 people x 2 buffs per person = 480 wasted buffs
I tend to get very frustrated if people wipe the group for moronic reasons. OH, I WONDER WHY. Stop dying, guys, or next time you'll all get 5% Motivating Speech from me instead of the usual 10% because I'm sick and tired of going "crit... crit... crit... parry... crit... oh god, someone wanted focus... crit... switch me, please... motivate... switch back... crit... crit..." so often.

So the next time you receive buffs from your group's captain, please think of all the pain we always have to endure. Thanks!


In other news: we beat ToO shadow T2 3 weeks ago, Lofarr and Blue joined our kin (oh cookie cookie cookie!), my warden hit lvl 75 a couple of weeks ago and Sato got addicted to running Dungeons of Dol Guldur over and over again. Hooray juice!

I love facepulls!

Things that usually happen when people get too close to some huge trolls/orcs in a raid:
1) they facepull the whole room and get aggro on everything,
2) they die,
3) everyone else dies.

Keep an eye on your W key, running too far ahead never ends well.

In other news: I won another Worn Symbol of the Elder King yesterday. So far I've kept only one of the five symbols that I've won. Amazing, isn't it?

Communication issues

We all know - well, at least the raiders do - that communication is a tremendously important part of raiding, no matter which MMO you're playing. Always check and double check if everyone knows what they're doing, where they should be standing, who should be rezzed first and so forth. Failing to do so usually means that the group is going to experience a very painful wipe.

Of course everyone in my raid group knows that... but that's not what I was going to write about.

So once again we were running T2 shadow. We had gathered a very solid group of players - fortunately most FCers had decided to show up and were actually there for the raid - and were standing in front of the first trash pull in the shadow wing, waiting for our raid leader to give us instructions. He told us what we had to do and did a ready check.

"Hey guys, why didn't you CC/heal/DPS/tank when I said I was going in?"
Yeah, well, about that...

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL:
"Ward, did you accidentally mute your mic again?"
*awkward silence*
*crackle* "... oh jeez, that was my bad..."

Well done.

Real life T2C on farm!

As most people who read this blog have probably noticed, I haven’t posted anything meaningful in the last five weeks. That is mostly because I was working on Real Life (T2C). I completed it roughly 8 hours ago and now I can finally come here and explain where I have been. I have to warn you and say that this time I’m probably going to write a longer post than usually, i.e. definitely more than 1000 words, so if your ability to understand long written texts is somewhat limited, you may want to ask someone to help you. 

 

As an introduction I should probably mention that I am a university student and I study linguistics. It’s not a very practical thing to study, really, and quite a few of my friends have asked me why I chose linguistics if there are hundreds of more useful things out there, ignoring the fact that studying something like, say, engineering or biology does not automatically make you a winner. No offence to any engineers or biologists out there. 

Okay, that’s not important. I was supposed to find an excuse for my absence. So: in the last five weeks I have been writing essays...

 

... studying for exams...

 

... and working on my final paper or thesis or slow and painful death, however you wish to call it. 

 

Of course the final paper was what caused me so much pain, drove me crazy and made me go from depression to euphoria, from euphoria to depression, from depression to euphoria, and finally from euphoria back to depression in less than 30 seconds at least a thousand times per day. I can’t even count the number of sleepless nights during the last month, occasionally I simply forgot what sleeping more than 2 hours in a row feels like. 

So yeah, real life was not very kind to me. But I’d like to thank my real life friends and kinmates from LotRO for all the support! Sometimes I felt like being sent on an absolutely hopeless quest, kind of like Frodo’s task to deliver the One Ring to Mount Doom. The other day I actually tried to imagine my kinship as the Fellowship of the Ring! I would be Frodo, of course, because I am the most important person around here, even though I whine a lot and struggle with seemingly trivial tasks. In my imaginary alternative universe I’d have the task to deliver my paper to my department on time.

 

And that’s where it gets kind of tricky. You see, I can’t imagine anyone from Fightclub as Gandalf, Legolas, Aragorn or Boromir, even finding a proper Gimli would be an awfully challenging task. However, this place is full of people with a very hobbit-y mindset. I mean, everyone talks about cookies, stupid jokes and silly pranks all the time, there are no truly epic warriors here. I guess it’s not that bad, so fine – there will be only hobbits in my fellowship.

 

Seems good enough so far, except that Ward would be an extremely abusive hobbit, encouraging me in a very discouraging way and discouraging me in a very encouraging way. Jerk. Kam and Jara were a lot more supportive.

 

That’s pretty much how it really was. I guess it worked, though, because I did finish it on time, sort of, and I survived all the other things that seemed to be determined to make me want to commit suicide. 

But of course, the worst part of my seemingly impossible task was thrown at me today: I had to give a presentation about my thesis. I almost didn’t sleep last night, I couldn’t eat anything in the morning, I couldn’t do anything because I was terrified of that presentation – I just lay on my bed and tried to think happy thoughts. I wasn’t very successful.

 

Finally I got up and talked to Jara, hoping it’d make me feel better. He sounded a bit too cheerful, so I gave up and tried to play Freecell. I didn’t win any games today. Sad. 

At 1 PM I walked out of my front door and tried to cheer myself up. I suspect I had my typical sad smile on my face again, but I couldn’t really do anything about it. 

 

Eventually I got to the building where I had to go, found room 438 (that’s where my presentation was going to be) and walked inside. It was very much like entering the Vile Maw without radiance gear before they removed radiance from LotRO – if you don’t remember that time, you’re a bigger newb than I am – and my heart was almost instantly filled with dread. 

I whispered „Good day!“ to everyone in a barely audible manner, because my voice had suddenly disappeared, and stumbled towards the back row. I found a free spot, sat down, whimpered quietly and popped the real life equivalent of a hope token: I logged on to Skype with my phone and IMed a kinmate of mine, another one of those people who seem to think like hobbits. He made me feel a lot better. Thanks, Jara!

 

I was also delighted to see my friends had decided to show up, even though I never asked them to do that. I assumed they wouldn’t remember my presentation, but they did! 

 

 At 2 PM it was my turn to talk about my thesis. I can’t really remember anything about it, but I hope I didn’t have the „oh god, I am going to die“ look on my face. I really tried to look confident and when I felt that my strength was not enough, I imagined Jara in the back row and thought of squirrels, as someone else had suggested. „Vowel harmony has been lost in all of the words that were borrowed – Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve! – and not only in the nominative case...“

 

And suddenly it was over. „Is that it?“ I thought to myself and chuckled quietly, thinking that this question almost begged someone to shout „THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID“ from the back row. I congratulated myself on completing Real Life T2 and held my breath, waiting to see whether I beat the challenge or not. 

Neither the reviewer nor my advisor had any kind words for me. „Steve! Steve! Steve!“ I thought to myself when they wiped my hope buff, desperately trying to keep a smile on my face.

When they told me my grade about a half an hour later, I felt relief. It was not as good as I had hoped, but neither was it as bad as I had feared. It was okay. My friends said it was okay. I think it was okay. I mean, that’s what I’m still telling myself to make the disappointment, guilt and bitterness go away. It is done and that’s what matters. I’m done here and I finally have my degree in linguistics.

And now I can play video games without feeling bad about unfinished papers and essays!

 Hooray!

In case there are still people who haven't noticed yet, I'm taking a short break from drawing silly comics. It shouldn't last longer than roughly three more weeks, unless something in this awful thing called Real Life goes horribly wrong. The raiding (or waiting for people to log on) takes enough of my time, I can't afford to waste even more of it this month.

I'm sorry.

On a brighter note: at least all the people in our raids can now make their stupid mistakes without having to worry about being humiliated on my blog.

lol what, RK rocks?

True story, real experiences, all true. We all learned a very valuable lesson on the 2nd trash pull of t2 shadow wing (in ToO, of course)...

Dear RK rocks,
lol what?

Sincerely,
the rest of the world

Useful/useless classes for raids

 I can understand that most people have never lead any raids (and probably never will), but let's just imagine for a moment what it feels like to be a raid leader who needs to assemble a group that'd be able to tackle T2 content in raids.

So you need a tank, maybe 2-3 tanks, amazing healers, good DPS and some support. All your kinmates are winking and say they're free to join any runs, but you know that some of them are worth absolutely nothing. Which ones to invite and which ones to leave behind? Decisions, decisions...

But worry not! With my brand new guide you'll be able to pick the right people with almost no effort at all! So this is my list of classes/roles in LotRO, ranked by their usefulness. The ones that you do not want in a raid come first and the ones that you really should invite are among the last.


WARDENS


Let’s face it – no one wants a warden and even more so if the warden is really bad at whatever they’re doing, be it DPS, tanking or whatever. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. The healer doesn’t like them. Even the bad hunters can point their fingers and feel superior for one moment. But staring at all their flashy skills and animations can be almost hypnotising, which is probably how wardens get into raid groups. Just pop a few shiny skills and get an invite.


DPS MINSTRELS


Arrogant creatures made famous by a certain hobbit promoting mediocre LMs on our server. They do exist and I’ve heard they do quite well in Ettenmoors, but no one wants them in raids. „9/12 ToO shadow wing, need DPS.“ – „I can DPS!“ – „... you’re a mini.“ – „So?“ – „Why did you roll a healing class to DPS?...“ *crickets*
This is why they have to beg people to invite them anywhere.


DPS RUNE-KEEPERS


You’re a sad excuse for real DPS, shooting lightning from your fingertips breaks the lore, you’re pathetically squishy and you’re taken to raids only because you’re friends with the raid leader or because they secretly hope to convince you to heal.


HUNTERS


Worthless, useless, clueless. Their moms (or „mums“) wept bitterly when they told their parents they wanted to become hunters, their friends turned their heads away in shame and disgust, their dads refused to mention the hunter’s name in future conversations. „I don’t have a son/daughter!“ they exclaimed. Quite proudly, might I add. No one wants a hunter. They only pull aggro and break CC, that’s all they can do.


CAPTAINS


No one hates captains, oh no – they do far too many cool things to be hated!... but no one really knows what they do. You could save the whole fellowship in 10 seconds and no one would notice. You can shield the tank, pop IHW and LS (just in case), rez the healer(s), use ToN and RC for good measure... and everyone will thank the DPS RK for saving the day. Life just isn’t fair.


GOD MODE WARDENS


Elusive nearly mythical creatures with amazing super powers. Only tales of them remain and while yes, there have been reports of couple of such beasts on Crickhollow, there are no eyewitnesses to confirm their existence which means that a) our god moders are either so awesome that you die when you see them, or b) they simply do not exist. A few complicated equations involving lots of foreign looking letters have shown that the probability of having super powers is the highest when the warden is traited for tanking. For DPS wardens that probability is precisely 0.
By the way, the text on the parchment is written in English. I probably got a few letters wrong, but it should be alright. No one can read it anyway.


LORE-MASTERS


The misunderstood silly looking bear hugging people in bathrobes – yes, the LMs. We like their debuffs (even though most people don’t really know what the debuffs do and only admire the colourful icons under the mob’s vitals), we really like their CC, their heals and rezzes are okay if no one else is there to do it, their pets look rather cute (definitely cuter than RK pets) and usually they’re relatively nice people, except for when they’re trolling GLFF.


HEALING RUNE-KEEPERS


Long have the healing rune-keepers had to stay silent when someone asked for raid worthy healers, long have they been jealous of healing minstrels, long has their only supportive friend been their own pet rock... but not anymore. Try to befriend one because sometimes they give 10k heals to their friends for free, not to mention the zillion HoTs that they put on everyone, including complete strangers and their worst enemies. Rune-keepers are amazing now.


BURGLARS


Not much is known about the sneaky little creatures, but people like them for their ability to pop Fellowship Manoeuvres – this is how you spell that word, you bunch of  illiterate... things – and tend to avoid conflict with burglars because burgs might steal all your pies and cookies when they’re angry. I also heard they’re rather good in the Moors, especially near the rez circles.


CHAMPIONS


Did you want an amazing DPS class that is quite sturdy even when they’re in their glass cannon spec? Did you want a class that can (usually) pull aggro and not worry about dying? Well, you shouldn’t have rolled a hunter, then, because clearly you were looking for champions and their shiny flashy swords. Shing shing! And all your problems are solved. They can even yell a bit to add variety to their repertoire.


GUARDIANS


Look, guards are not loved because they’re so good. They’re usually loved because they’re the ones that take all the beating while everyone else does the important stuff. Sadly all the blows they take often destroy the last few brain cells they had, resulting in extreme arrogance, nonexistent intelligence and the illusion that they’re the most important part of the raid. Oh, silly guards, you’d be nothing without the other people in your group.


HEALING MINSTRELS


Hello hello, healing minstrels, we all love you very dearly if you know how to do your job, you always smell fresh and look fashionable and no one in the whole Middle-earth could ever resist the wonderful melodies you play on your wonderful instruments.
... Bagpipes do not count, they were clearly invented by Morgoth.


You're welcome.

C is for campfire

 May this picture bring good luck to both balrogs and FCers alike... we all know how miserable a raid can be without the incredibly useful bonuses that a hunter campfire provides.

In other news: I almost forgot the existence of this blog for 2 weeks and honestly, I will try to come up with something silly again. Soon. Soonish. 

I've got a theory

Dear members of Fightclub, friends and allies! Lately our raids have been disastrous, to say the least, and I think I finally figured out why it's like that. The problems start with the most basic things that a member of Fightclub should know...

Less cookies, more crowd control and cooperation? Yeaaaaah, I don't think anyone's going to give their share of cookies up for successful raids.