Rough Rider

I’ve not been playing too many games the past week or so it feels like. I’ve been slowly going through stuff in my room – what to take with me when I move, what has to get shipped later, what I’m just plain getting rid of. It’s very tedious and not super fun. I wish all my stuff could just sort itself! I also ran my first 5k race this weekend. My mother is very into running and triathlons, so for her Christmas present I agreed to run a race with her. My time was not so great so I’m not going to share it :P I ran about half of it and walked about half. I’m not in the best of shape, I’ll admit!

Nav finally got to level 74 though and that was very exciting because it meant Rohan time for Herefara! Nav and Herefara are both 75 now and we have our warsteeds. I am very excited to learn another class’s mounted combat system. Nav, though, does not seem to enjoy it quite as much. He still clings to the way of controlling the travel mounts and finds the warsteed very ungainly. It’s too bad because I love it so much! Hopefully with time and practice he too will learn to love riding down his enemies.

Most of my kin, Windriders of Rohan, also got together and completed a skirmish for the first time in ages! It was awesome. I remember when I first joined, we were doing Moria instances almost every night with our allied kins. Now it’s lucky if two or three people are on at the same time. So it was very serendipitous when six of us were on! Me, Nav, Swiftly, Kharrn, Brie and Tryll all did the Storm on Methedras skirmish. We failed one or two times to start but we eventually got it. It’s always so nice being able to play with good friends again!

Other than that I’ve just been doing my Hytbold dailies (and missing a few days here and there… oh well). I tried starting up a new coffee and tea thread in the Windfola forums but so far only two others have taken it up as well. If you’re on Windfola, come say hi and tell us what you’re up to!

Today I made a new warsteed and an outfit to match. I don’t have a name for his horse. The general theme I suppose is a rough-rider of sorts, or perhaps a slightly armoured scout. It mostly started with me really liking the colors of the warsteed hide (dark chestnut) contrasted with black and went from there.

Character Outfit:

Pathfinder’s Jacket – black

Walnoth’s Leather Leggings – sienna

Potent Battle Boots of the Mark – black

Heavy Plated Dunlending Gauntlets – black

Hyrde-Axle – grey

Horse Outfit:

Solid Warsteed Hide – dark chestnut

Simple Tail – black

Burglar’s Saddle

Burglar’s Caparison and Leggings – both black

Lazy (Yet Long) Sunday Post

This Sunday is particularly lazy. Sunday is usually my “get stuff done” day during the weekend, but today it’s just not happening. It’s a combination of many things: last week was the last of my midterms so I’m pretty burned out on studying (and by the way all my grades thus far have been As, which is quite exciting); today marks my first full week without coffee – I’ve heard that coffee is really only helpful if you drink it on a very regular basis, otherwise the crash you get in between basically negates everything so I’m trying to stick to tea for now; it’s cold and grey outside so I just want to snuggle in my blankets and watch Netflix.

Besides the aforementioned snuggling and Netflix (random Top Gear episodes, Black Adder II, Jumanji , Wild Wild West and The Big Lebowski were all watched this weekend) I’ve of course been playing LOTRO. Often the Netflix, fluffy blankets and LOTRO happens simultaneously. Cithryth’s at level 83 now. Nav is still 72 and my warden is still 68. Luckily though this weekend I got to play with all my kinmates, which doesn’t happen often anymore. Especially so since Brielen is transfering her main to Elendilmir. She has become quite the hardcore raider the past few years and her raiding kin has moved to “The Big E”. While I don’t agree with kins moving to other servers just because “there’s no other good people to recruit” on Windfola, I hope she has fun PvPing and raiding more over there.

I feel like rather than complaining that the smaller servers don’t have enough skilled people and then leaving, the raiding kins would do better if they took the time to try and teach raiding skill to newer players. Instead they often expect you to already know everything about the raid you’re going into. It’s like back when I wanted to start RPing. Rather than saying “Well Windfola sucks because there’s no RPers, I’m leaving for Landroval” I took a swing at ‘thinking local’ and trying to home-grow some RP on Windy. That was pretty successful before I quit. Unfortunately awhile after I went on my year-ish long hiatus, the Finer Things in Life event flickered out.

So while questing I’ve been on a screenshot spree. I love Rohan. It is the best looking region in the game, graphically. If they were to update Lothlorien to the kind of graphics that are in Rohan, it would be my favorite. But Rohan wins. I’m also still in love with my horse and mounted combat. It makes me sad when I see people in the forums or in-game talking about how terrible it is and how they hope it’s just a gimmick for Rohan and that Turbine will “Put it in the trash where it belongs” in coming expansions (that is actually something I saw someone post on the forums). If it weren’t for mounted combat, I would probably not be back playing. A lot of people complain that mounted combat takes away all the skills we’ve spent years learning and forcing you to use something else. I really think that’s a pessimistic way of looking at it. It’s just a new way of fighting. Just because they aren’t the same captain skills you’ve had for five years doesn’t mean they aren’t captain skills. They are just different and new captain skills in addition to your old ones. I think of the horse itself as a ‘skill’ with many subskills. Maybe that’s getting a bit reaching and abstract. But I’m not sure how else to describe it. I just don’t understand some peoples’ aversion to changing skills up every so often. A bit of change is good and keeps the game from going stale, in my opinion.

Oh, I seem to have gotten away from my point about screenshots and Rohan being pretty. Erm, right. Here’s an album of screenshots. I’ll probably add more photos to that as I go along.

I also made an outfit. It’s pretty simplistic but I think it’s good for ‘casual’ Rohirrim women or crafters:

Tactical Eastemnet Campaign Robe (olive), Lesser Arrow of the West Shoulderguards (olive), Fingerless Gloves (umber)

Another thing I’ve been doing this weekend is playing around with mounted combat traits. Originally I had been spreading my points out pretty evenly. At (horse) level 36, this is my resulting trait tree and stats (click to see the larger image):

Then I decided to try putting most of my points into one tree. Here are the tree and states:

It’s interesting to compare the stats. Besides the morale/power, they are exactly the same! Yet I find that I hit much harder and kill much faster using the “Test” build. Yet I still have the top speed, Trample skill and good turn rate. Looks like I’ll be making the “Test” build my real build!