Here’s your MMO PSA for the day: Zoom in once in a while to check out the art and animation on the mobs you’re fighting. They can be pretty darn cool, like Mr. Way Too Serious, here!
As the countdown toward the new year approached, I knew I had a really difficult decision to make. If my 2022 theme was, indeed, to be “undiscovered countries,” then I knew that there was one part of my daily gaming routine that wasn’t going to fit — my adventures going back through the early game on the Treebeard server. I’d poured in countless hours into this character, getting her ready for Moria, but I think I was pushing off this decision for a long time now.
I’ve noted before — back when I initially rejected the idea of playing on this server, in fact — that progression servers like this lock you in. If you’re going to stick with the community and progress together, you’ve just dedicated yourself to nonstop effort. Even with the slower pace of Treebeard, I started to feel that pressure to keep going lest I fall behind. And when I looked at that and the fact that I didn’t really want to be redoing a whole bunch of older content, I chose to shelve the character and focus exclusively on my Captain on Landroval.
This decision, I do not regret. With the Captain’s wide-ranging toolset and the improved legendary items, I feel like I’m a very capable powerhouse to see everything I wanted. And what I wanted to see was wherever I had left off with my previous high-level Lore-master, which was the start of War of Three Peaks.
So what I’ve been doing is gunning through the remainder of the epic — the Black Book of Mordor and the start of Durin’s Legacy — to the exclusion of all of the side ventures in the zone. I hit level 131 by the time I was finished up in the Wells of Langflood, so I’m in a good position there. And for deeds, well, that’s going to be a bigger project to tackle piecemeal later on.
Langflood is just “fine” as a zone — nothing more or less than that. It feels short and not too visually or thematically distinct. Kind of a prologue for Elderslade, which is itself a prologue for Gundabad. The best thing I can say about it is that if you only do the epic, you’re in and out of there within 45 minutes.
There’s a weird bit in the epic, too, where the writers kind of went totally meta — LitRPG, even — as your character starts discerning the stats of everyone around him or her. It’s a bit cute but also distracting and nonsensical.
So, pretty much what I do here on Bio Break.
Bio Break 