LOTR Noob welcome

[Mrkita]

I'm thinking about having a crack at LoTRO, so thanks for the heads up. but that leads to my question

What seems to be the nastiest server out there? cause I wanna stir things up a little bit if anyone has a crack at me for being F2P. But that's just me

I did hear that the scenery is really good, thats my draw point to the game. I actualloy wanna be able to run around and look at stuff without worrying that I wont be able to do anything

[Alabore]

I managed to download the client a couple days ago, and had some fun playing in the week end.

I rolled a few characters up, a hobbit minstrel, a dwarven guardian and an elven hunter.
The elven hunter proved the most fun for me, and managed to level it to 10 in a few hours.

From my quick test, I would say the game feels very different from DDO - I don't really know where to start describing it.
It plays like your typical MMO: only a couple fixed fights were instanced, the rest is common areas, filled with respawning mobs.
I had to struggle a bit killing some rares - people actively fight for resources - and the quests I've done so far are the "bring me ten squirrel tails" sort of affair.

Most of my time I spent walking around: navigating some areas takes a lot of time; Thorin's Hall is positively huge.
Time is a commodity there, and I see why vet players wouldn't want travel applied to DDO.
DDO is the game they play when travelling to their favourite gathering resources spot in LOTRO...

A perk of resources is, you can actually craft your gear: on my Hunter I took Explorer as its craft vocation, and I was able to create armour from scraps I had gathered around killing wolves and assorted hostile fauna.
Between crafting and cosmetic options, customising my Hunter's appearance was very easy - I finally had the chance to see how cosmetic slots worked, and it would be fun if they managed to add something like it to DDO - especially considering we can't zoom as far away in DDO, and we'd get to get a much closer look on them.

Basically: you get slots for different parts of armour, head, body, legs, hands, feet, shoulders and back.
You can equip your gear normally, but you can easily turn off its appearance in your character sheet - that doubles as you main inventory.
You also get secondary and tertiary inventory tabs - those are for appearance alone.
You drag the gear your want to use for appearance, and click on the "Show Outfit" button, to make that your main outward appearance.
That way you can, say, wear robes or outfits over your armour or switch between combat and social outfits for rp'ing reasons; your "AC" won't suffer.
Basic cosmetic options can be bought with in-game currency; variety was good and dyes available from the start.

Builds seemed much more cookie-cutter in LOTRO: game chooses your starting stats depending on race and class - you get the choice of buying skills as you level up, but as I played my Hunter, I realised it was exactly the same as the next guy teaming up with me for some goblin-culling, except for the outward appearance.
He decked his elf in grey and blue, I decked mine in green and tan.
Probably that helps players focus on action and rp'ing, since min-maxing becomes moot without that many options to choose from...

Speaking of action, compared to DDO, LOTRO does not require or accommodate for a game-pad...
I kept reaching for the block key a couple times, during combat, only to realise I couldn't actively parry blows, or dodge, or choose when or where to attack.
In a way, it felt very relaxing - if only I could get my own instance where to farm resources and raise my kill count alone...

I haven't tried using my main email for subscribing: I create a brand new account from scratch, and I'll be checking forums for info on how to add a LOTRO account to my DDO premium.
So far LOTRO seemed fun.
On one hand you can't really jump in for a quick dungeon romp - travelling takes time, and if you actively play it, it becomes a big time sink.
On the other hand it doesn't require the same kind of attention, and twitch game-style DDO tends to favour, and that felt terrific too - considering the plusses of nice visuals and engrossing music.
I could see myself playing LOTRO more - if they only avoided the "Fedex" kind of quests...

[LordMond63]

Scholar ability is a pita to level also. UGH.

I found that crafting was another area of LotRO that had its share of bottlenecks because some of the various teir resource nodes were more plentiful than others. For all of its flaws, I like the way Turbine did it there far more than the way they handled it here in DDO.

Now it might have changed but Silver, which was, IIRC, a Tier 2 material, sold for quite a bit more on the AH than did the Tier 6 metals because, whereas you had several high-level areas where the Tier 6 nodes spawned, there were only a handful of places where silver nodes spawned. I know that I took my Hunter to one of the areas where silver (and Barrow Iron- think that is the "common" tier 2 resource node) popped and spent a couple hours just harvesting silver and leather to make money on the AH.

One thing I think that LotRO did right was to structure crafting so that, when you selected a primary trade you also got two secondary trades that you could level up to a percentage (40% or mebbe 60%) of your primary trade skill level. I want to say that there was a couple of primary trades that had Scholar as a secondary so you could use a character who had Scholar secondarily to harvest materials for your up-and-coming Scholar.