Ok so I know its a bit stupid but when Dimzad, Aeowulf and I get together, Aeo named us Team Orange. He doesn’t know why and we decided not to probe too deeply into it 😛 We now group regularly with our friend Jaedwyn (minstrel) and Aeo decided we needed a new team name for the four of us. We haven’t found one that has really stuck yet and we keep forgetting which one we thought was *ok*. I think we settled on teal… *cough*
We all ran through the introductory quests and as soon as we got our warsteeds, we grouped up and started roaming looking for warbands. We were in a fellowship and soon found out that mounted fellowship combat required us to re-think our normal strats… The first thing we noticed is that it is very easy to lose your fellowship and/or follow the wrong players, especially at night-time. Having icons above our heads and STANDING STILL NOT GALLOPING AROUND WILLY-NILLY COS ITS SO MUCH FUN helped some 😛
We also found out the hard way that you seem to need to tag the named boss specifically, just tagging his adds doesn’t seem to work. I had assumed that if you tagged one member of the encounter that you would be flagged as contributing for the warband quest – I’m not sure that is actually the case. Its not me being lazy… in our group I often take out the adds first, while Aeo tanks the named and then I help burn down the named. We were also all flying about the place hitting or healing whatever we fancied, that tactic seems to work well for me but for the others (warden, minstrel, rk) it isn’t necessarily so. Anyways we need to experiment to find the best combat style to suit us 🙂
We haven’t run into any really scary warbands yet. The hardest one we found was still pretty easy – I only died as even though I knew I had aggro on the troll, I still thought it was the most excellent time to turn the UI off and start taking screenies 😛 I still need to look through and check the different stances. I am wondering if the trait trees will improve the experience for Dimzad though (RK), he was saying that although he thought mounted combat was fun, he didn’t really feel as though he was playing a rune-keeper. I felt a bit guilty because mounted combat and the hunter class is like a dream come true! Its fits together so beautifully and my solo strat of kiting with some jousting thrown in works really really well. I took down a 75k war band and adds solo and took hardly a scratch, in fact the only issue I had was running out of horse power but fortunately I could still auto attack with my bow.
There are lovely touches to be found though, the town of Floodwend is just beautiful, we saw a herd of horses galloping past and the landscape and skies are just breathtaking 🙂 The costumes on the NPCs are great as well, as is the quest text.
oh and if you hadn’t noticed: littleboyatschool + new expansion = more blogging 😀
OldStarShadow 
*cheers for team teal?*
From what I’ve been reading here and everywhere else, it looks really fun! Shame (?) I have other games on my plate right now. And spent all my money on them… Oh, well.
Anyway, strange about the boss tagging thing as your strategy seems reasonable enough. One keeps the boss attention while the others take down the weaker mobs so the fight goes easier. I wonder why they changed it so that strategy wouldn’t work.
Also, I hope Dimzad finds a way to make it feel more like a rune-keeper as mounted combat sounds really fun. 🙂
Lastly, but not least important, yay for more blogging! 😀
It is a huge amount of fun 😀 erm… the game is free to play (and the various payment options aren’t too bad) so you could try out if you found the time 🙂 although the war-steeds, currently, aren’t available until lvl 75 so that’s quite offputting 😦
they’ve introduced open tapping and I assume the change is to prevent a group standing there while one person tags/kills mobs and the whole group gets xp/loot/updates… I think though that perhaps some tweaking may be in order for the warbands and I expect that the system will be worked on as time goes on – so fingers crossed they can do something for these situations.
yes hopefully as time goes on, it will be more rune-keepery for Dimzad – we have had only one evening game play, so early days 🙂
I know it is free to play. 🙂
I still have a lot of other games to play too right now. Also, the thing that is making me tempted the most right now is the war steeds and for those I would still need to buy the expansion, no? Although, at the rate I go it would probably take a few months so at least my wallet might have recovered somewhat from my attempt at murdering it this month.
Ah, that makes sense. Hopefully they will tweak things around then so you and your group can go back to the usual strategy. 🙂
lol sorry – should have remembered your plugin post at least :O /slapshead
I just read on their faqs that you don’t need the expansion to take part in mounted combat, but a cpl of the trait trees are locked and I guess the rest of the quests will be unavailable too. that’s quite cool 🙂
No worries about that. That post was a long time ago and I haven’t written anything about LotRO since then. >_<
Oh, really? Hmmm… That makes it just a question of finding the time then! Thanks for looking it up. 😀
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