LOTRO: The Angmar wall of doom

One thing you definitely realize when you go back through LOTRO’s Shadows of Angmar content is how incredibly uneven the zones are. It’s not terrible, mind you, but they do vary wildly in what they offer. Evendim, for example, had scads and scads of quests (being a post-launch zone added to fill out a level range), while Trollshaws offers only a handful. Trollshaws questing is so meager, in fact, that you’ll probably have to go with some of the dailies just to make it through the deed.

But hey, at least it is a GORGEOUS zone even still today. I love the autumnal vibe.

Misty Mountains is strange in that there are relatively few slayer deeds — just four! — but a whole ton of explorer ones. I usually love explorer deeds, but in this zone it meant an extended excursion in Goblin-town, which is my least favorite cavern space ever. At least there are some very helpful maps online to get you through the two deeds in a timely fashion.

Then I came upon — dun dun DUNNNN — Angmar. Now, up until this point on my Treebeard journey, I’ve been pretty dedicated to deeding my way up to the meta deed of every zone. But I just don’t think I can do it with Angmar. I did the questing deed, but I could feel my energy and enthusiasm sapping pretty quickly afterward. I didn’t want to spend over a week grinding mobs and trying to find vista points in this hard-to-navigate space.

The good news is that I really didn’t *need* to for any advancement. I was already level 47 and still had a few other zones from which to pick (Forochel, Wildwood, Evendim). I didn’t need any more LOTRO points (heck, I just bought two more wardrobe expansions to increase my account-wide cosmetic slots to 300), and I certainly didn’t need a ton more virtue XP. So I feel that it’s OK to skip Angmar, maybe leaving it there for some easy deeding in the future when I’m vastly overleveled.

It’s just a wall of a zone that usually breaks me, and I’m not going to let it this time.