If Bilbo could see me now, why, he’d be talking about how he (with maybe a very little help from a certain gray-robed wizard) kept three trolls arguing until morning light turned them all to stone. He wouldn’t approve of what I do at all, why, not one little bit. “Un-Hobbit-like!” he’d yell. “It’s just not how things are DONE!” he’d exclaim. “Even the Old Took would think twice! And then twice more! And then have a good smoke about it!”

Me, I’m a modern Hobbit. When I see a troll, I don’t run and hide or try to reason with it. I don’t fret about my crops and fields or worry what Sam’s Gaffer might be muttering about me over his ale at the Green Dragon. I crouch. I aim. I throw. I leap.

I’m a Warden of the Shire. Why are there no trolls in the Shire? It’s not because the climate isn’t right, or their migration paths have shifted to the North, or they have suddenly decided Elves are tastier.

It’s because I kill them all.

I was stunned by how familiar Lord of the Rings Online still is, even after all this time. I played the game a few weeks before it went live and a month afterward, and since they let people from the open beta take their characters live, I have all my beta characters. Some are still at the level 15 beta cap, some further advanced. I’ve been taking my old main, Lysistra, a level 33 Captain, on little tours of Middle Earth to get reacquainted with the world, but mostly she has been farming materials for crafting, and doing some crafting. All my old crafters — Dera, the Metalsmith; Eraindiel, the Weaponsmith; Dina, the Jeweler; and Lysistra, the Tailor — have been woken up in order to start producing gear for anyone who wants. I chose Historian as Ettie’s crafting profession. This gives her the Scholar and Farming professions, as well as Weaponsmith.

I switched Ettie to Historian when I took a look at the Auction House and found absolutely nothing I could afford for dyes. There were very, very few on the market and almost all of them sold for far more than 100 silver.

Mudflation has clearly taken hold in LotRO. When I played before, the Auction House had plenty of items for characters of all levels, a nice selection, but now even the first thing a crafter might make to skill up is being sold on the Auction House for many, many times more than it’s worth. The items that are actually useful — skillup items are useless, but every tier of crafting can make things better than most drops, and rarely, better than any drop. The prices for THOSE items, nobody can afford. Since the recipes for those items are uncommon drops, and for the best things, extremely rare (and one use only). New crafters are unlikely to be able to make these things for themselves.

My original plan was just to play around with alts until I got familiar enough with the game to pick up where I left off with Lysistra, in North Downs, on the brink of traveling to Evendil (or whatever it’s called. It’s well known that Elves are just as confused as Hobbits about Elvish place-names).

With good friends thinking about starting new characters, I started a new one as well. After some waffling about who would play what, I elected to go with one of the new classes, the Warden. Wardens are your basic commando class. They sneak around, find their target, build power for a devastating javelin shot that stuns the enemy, then leap out and follow that up with a devastating hit. Past that, they build gambits from their base attacks that add effects like bleed, heals, taunts, knock-downs and such to their regular strikes. Very similar to the EverQuest II rogue classes, including the ability to tank fairly well. They even get a >200 point IN-combat health regeneration buff.

I wasn’t surprised to see many fellow Wardens running around the newbie fields.

I reached level 15 Sunday, and am just on the edge of starting Book 1, Chapter 1 of the epic quest. That will have to wait, though, a few days for people to catch up. The whole point of playing with friends is to do the fun things, like the Epic quest, together.

The game hasn’t sat still for the past two years. The Chicken-play quests are sometimes hilarious as they send you off to the edges of Middle Earth as a level 1, eminently edible chicken, dodging high level monsters with such devastating chicken attacks as Possum Impersonation, Bob & Weave and Paranoia. There’s appearance armor (Ettie in the first picture is wearing some. Well, in all the pictures, but it’s hard to see in the others). There is player housing, which is pretty much continuously sold to players from level 10 onward, even though its price is way beyond the means of most new players. Combine the cost of a home with the cost to furnish it and make the payments, and you’re talking a really deep money-sink. I would hope that there is a faster way to travel to these homes, because they are WAY out of the way. If my home in EQ2 was so far away that it would take a good portion of a play session to even get to it, well, I doubt I’d visit much.

Travel in LotRO is still EXTREMELY slow, in keeping with the lore. The people who give the quests, though, think nothing about sending you all over the place. Running so slowly. Wardens get a run speed buff, another of the cornucopia of talents that Turbine has showered on the new class, but even with that running… S-L-O-W. Plus, the game still stresses my computer as much as it did two years ago. Bree is still an exciting slide show.

A crafter from a really friendly Kinship was sending weapons to people Saturday; I got a spear which, at level 10, was FAR better than any other weapon I’d found before or since. I sent them a gushing thank you note because, what an incredibly kind thing to do! Why would a Kinship even care at all about random guildless low level characters? Especially someone playing a Flavor-of-the-Month class such as Warden?

This time through the newbie area makes all the old adventures come back. I remember exactly what the grind from here on is like. The terrible, endless killing in Midgewater Marsh and Lone Lands and North Downs. The trilogy of terror that drove so many people from the game, and drove me from it as well. The horrible, horrible grind that is crafting, requiring exponentially more materials every tier for less and less progress (and each tier must be done twice!).

LotRO was the game that enshrined the grind. Maybe playing with friends can ease the pain.

Loping Plains hasn’t seen THIS much action since the Freethinkers threw that Christmas party and the Pumpkin-Headed Horseman barfed seeds and pulp all over Mayong Mistmoore. Everyone was talking about that for months.

So anyway, Ettie and I head over to Loping Plains to see what’s up. Some goblin over in Freeport was talking up stuff about some “really cool” thing over there, “a lot of fun”. So I asked the gobber if, like, I was going to die or something. “No, no, no, you no die,” said the gobber. “Be fun, you. You just go graveyard there, fun time!”

“Well, fun is good. Nothing is going to come out and attack me, right?” I asked. The gobber looked kinda sly. “No, no no, it just fun. Candy maybe! Fat hobbit like candy, yes?”

Pffft. Of COURSE I like candy. But I wasn’t going to say so to the gobber. “Maybe,” I told the gobber. “Gotta go.”

I sent a tell to Ettie. “Candy.”

“OMW,” she replied. And we were off.

We headed off to the Loping Plains, ran to Somborn and its cemetery, where we were attacked by — SOMETHING — that did 5000 points of damage to Ettie’s wolf, and then everything went dark.

FRIGGIN *(&#*(&# GOBBERS! WHY did I pick HALLOWEEN to start trusting them?

Some merchant had found us — get this — CLEAR on the other side of town, and DRAGGED us to his shop on the OTHER side of town. Sure, someone dragging the bodies of two unconscious halflings may not be the most uncommon site in the Plains, but don’t you think SOMEONE would have said something?

He tried to sell us some knick-knacks, but we weren’t buying it. We hoofed back to the cemetery, ready for battle, where a smug looking Proctor informed us that what had attacked us had fled into this abandoned looking home. Obviously, he would go in himself and discover the source of the evil, but he’d stubbed his toe on the way over and it looked like rain and his arthritis was acting up, so maybe we could go in alone?

Norrath, dear readers, is a world of people who call in sick when the cat looks at them funny. So anyway, we were still hot to find out what tried to kill us, so in we went.

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What takes two hours to do, results in a blade nobody will use, and no status at all?

That would be the signature quest that ends in Eitholi, Blade of the Fae. Here in the dressing room, since Etha — now known as Ettie — can’t wield it. Green glows are uber. Too bad the stats aren’t!

It wasn’t a total wash. Ettie got enough AA experience from all the subquests that she dinged 30 AAs, and, after finishing the Wisdom/Ritualist AA line, is heading down the Stamina line, which includes a very cute little buckler attack.

To be honest, I had no idea what the quest was when I started. YEARS ago, I’d picked up a quest from some fluttering ghostly angel thing on a cliff in Butcherblock, and just never worked on it. Well, back then, you had to understand the language of magic to advance the quest. A quest requiring someone to explore level 40+ zones to learn a language to do a level 20-ish quest? There was no way that was going to happen, so I just let it sit there in my quest journal.

Since I can’t level Dina any more, being at max level and max AAs, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Ettie, and it’s been a bit of a contest with myself to see how far I could get on this quest (“The Wind that Speaks Her Name”) before I got a group. Last night I got all the way to Greater Faydark, headed toward Crushbone, when I got a group invite for Deathfist Citadel.

I’ve done it before, I always have a couple of quests that need me to go there, so I’m happy to go. They didn’t have a healer and I didn’t think I’d have any trouble keeping a group alive there. Defilers are pretty good at their jobs, and their slows take the bite out of any fight.

So I was more than a little alarmed when the group started discussing if maybe one of them should switch to a healer, since they couldn’t find one.

I’m a defiler, I said. I can heal, you don’t need another healer.

The tank discussed switching to his warden.

I’m a defiler — shaman subclass, I’m a priest classs, you don’t need another healer!!!

But, said the tank, I need Fyst on this character, so I dunno.

HELLO??? Is this thing on? Can anyone read this message? Seriously, I asked that. I’m not even exaggerating here.

Someone piped up, and mentioned that he thought defilers were a cleric class, and the group had a healer.

I cannot COMPREHEND how people can play a game this long and not know the difference between defilers and inquisitors, or believe a defiler is a kind of necromancer. Maybe they should just change the class name to “Evil Shaman”.

Went through the entire dungeon, no deaths, dinged to level 43, it was fine, no problem. Yeah. Okay. NOW you know what defilers do. We keep you ALIVE.

Anyway. When I got out of DFC, I started in on the quest in earnest. Made my way to Crushbone Keep, found the sword that was stuck there, cleared a room of mobs so I could rez someone who was dead in the middle of it, did some of the badge collection quest from the zone, wandered off, and spent the next forty-five minutes looking for someone named The Witch of the Wood.

I finally backed off far enough to notice a climbable wall leading right to her.

I didn’t speak her language, so I went to Kelethin and learned the Fae language.

Nope, that wasn’t it. She spoke Fairy, not Fae. Because, I’d know the difference. So half an hour toward killing treants for Fairy language bits, and then she tells me a story about a Fairy who had gotten herself trapped in a sword, which had been stuck into a tree, and the tree had grown up around it, and I should go find the tree and the blade in it.

The tree had turned into a Treant who was menacing the cliffs above the Shores of Growth in the Nursery. He said, sword? Oh yeah, I have a sword, and it hurts like anything. If you could get some aviak eggs from Butcherblock, that’d be sweet. We can mix them up into some sort of magical Vaseline and it will slide right out.

Yeah. Whatever.

So another half an hour trying to figure out how to get up to that nest I could see stuck to the side of a cliff hundreds of feet above my head.

Turned out to be ANOTHER hidden climbable wall. Got the eggs, went back to the Treant, he decides he doesn’t want eggs after all, he just wants to kill me, so he attacks me. Occasionally he stuns me, but my faithful wolf, Cinnamon, takes over when that happens.

Finally kill him, I pull the sword from his splintered corpse, ding 30 AAs and add an exciting 0 guild status to my awesome total of 70.

Oh, well. At least it makes for a nice screen shot.