Gandalf, dwarves, just missing Mr Baggins!

Today's post is part 2 of the tale of my first steps into the world of Lord of the Rings online, the only MMO that I have any interest in playing, because I am a sucker for that sweet Tolkien juice.

I am still working out the camera controls.

My first moments in middle earth, and I am immediately accosted by a behatted fellow and instructed that I need to hang out with him for a bit. So here we are, presumably starting out in a flashback, for a couple of cameo appearances from Thorin and Company so that we can get our first big hit of that I'm really in the Lord of the Rings feeling. Then I meet my first non-canon character, who Thorin evidently trusts despite his name being Dourhand, so I'm pretty sure that I can can mark him down as someone I'm going to have to fight before the end of the tutorial right now.

Maybe I'm not a great listener, but it took me quite a few goes to get used to the targeting system used for both talking to folks and attacking things in LoTRO. My first forays into the mines to fight some rats is an even worse struggle with the controls for targeting and camera controls than usual, but thankfully that's utterly irrelevant since it seems like my character heals fast than these things can damage me and I have 100s of hit points, so there's plenty of time to experiment. I experiment a little with my skills, too, since they're available even though I haven't been told about them yet, but none of them seem all that much more effective that just clicking on heads and waiting for things to die just yet.

After fighting a good number of rats and getting to watch the cinematics for a bit, I prepare myself to help Gimli fight a mountain troll, which seems like quite an escalation for a level two character, but at this point it seems like I'm going to need something that big to provide a challenge. Just as I'm about to leap into the fray Gandalf saves the day, though, so I don't get a chance to find out just how many hit points a hit from something like that can do to me. I'm guessing it's a lot, but presumably I'm going to have to fight a lot more rats until I get to that point.

The timeskip ends suddenly, catapulting forward in time, and I'm a bit worried that I missed something in the tutorial, as I only got the very basics of talking to NPCs, using the inventory and hitting stuff with my knife, still nothing about using skills, grouping up, interacting with other players or anything else. Then I hang out with the sons of Elrond for a bit and realise that I'm still in the tutorial, such as it is, after all when I finally get some skills training, which consists of buy skill, press button, profit. Welp, that's something, I guess.

I get lost on my the way to my first quest that doesn't have a flashing icon right in front of me when I go for a run down the mountain. Eventually I more or less work out the basics of using the minimap, but I'm sure they could have made things more obvious; already the lack of some quality of life features that people talk about when discussing LotRO are becoming evident.There are some mobs down here, but they're very passive, I can sit there and beat up their friends right next to them and they'll just sit there politely until I decide it's their turn to be attacked. I assume that this is just a setting for the beginning areas, because otherwise walking around middle-earth is going to prove to be very boring very quickly.

Sure, they're evil, but you have to admire what they've done with the place.

I complete a couple of basic fetch quests and meet up with Dwalin and Dourhand again, and surprise surprise, it looks like the fellow with the obviously evil name has some kind of dark secret cult thing going on over here. Guess I'm going to have to break that up soon, but for now I get to play it friendly with everyone. Dwalin and his buddies send me to fight some poisoned bears and I collect some antidotes to heal up some fellows who've suddenly gotten very sleepy while fighting off a bunch of meanie dwarves, and then I take a rest myself (unsure if this was a new mechanic that I was being introduced to) and Galadriel takes me off to a cutscene dreamland for some sweet cinematic prophetic visions. All properly epic.

Somewhere along to way I pick up this ridiculous hat, which isn't very dwarvish to my eyes, but is very minstrel, so of course I equipped it and immediately headed off to the mirror to make sure it's tilted at just the right angle to properly accentuate Wolomur's manly face. I'd previously been thinking of him as more of an ancestral voice of my people kind of guy, but am a bit worried if he wears this hat too long he might not be able to resist suddenly morphing into a rakish fop like every other bard I've ever played as.

As I level up and have to choose a specialisation, this seems like a good place to stop for the week. I'm assume that I'll decide on the Warrior Skald path, since I'm likely to be playing this game solo and that seems to be least party-focused of the options, but at least thematically I'd pegged him as a Watcher of Resolve fellow, so perhaps I'll go that way in the hope of making myself vaguely useful to a group somewhere down the road since none of that looks even vaguely useful to a solo player. If there's any old LotRO hands out there that have any advice before I next venture out into middle-earth again, do let me know.