VIP Gift: Steed of the Eldar

I couldn't help myself - the limited edition Steed of the Eldar that is gifted to VIPs who log in between February 6 and March 13 looks really nice and would be very useful for all my characters, so I re-subscribed to LOTRO. I don't regret it - Standing Stone Games seems to be making an effort to enhance aspects of the game, such as housing and quality of life things like binding phials of flower extracts from North Ithilien to account instead of character, so I'm happy to support them and look forward to the new and improved LOTRO of 2017.

Steed of the Eldar

Steed of the Eldar warsteed appearance set (caparison and halter dyed navy)

A Quick Guide to Reputation - Gondor

Here are some comments and suggestions on earning reputation with various factions in Gondor.

Dol Amroth

• Questing, deeds and tasks in West Gondor
• Defeating warbands in West Gondor 

Men of Ringló Vale

• Questing in Ringló Vale, Central Gondor
• Orcs and Roving Threats in Ringló Vale drop rep tokens

Men of Dor-en-Ernil

• Questing in Dor-en-Ernil, Central Gondor
• Corsairs, Haradrim and Roving Threats in Dor-en-Ernil drop rep tokens

Men of Lebennin

• Questing in Lebennin, Central Gondor
• Corsairs, Haradrim and Roving Threats in Lebennin drop rep tokens

Pelargir

• Questing, deeds and tasks in Central Gondor
• Defeating warbands in Central Gondor
• Epic Battles (Retaking Pelargir, Defense of Minas Tirith, Hammer of the Underworld) 
• Some Volume 4, Book 3 epic quests

Rangers of Ithilien

• Questing, deeds and tasks in Eastern Gondor
• Defeating warbands in Eastern Gondor
• Some Volume 4, Book 3 epic quests

Defenders of Minas Tirith

• Questing, deeds and tasks in Old Anórien
• Defeating warbands in Old Anórien

Riders of Rohan

• Questing, deeds and tasks in Far Anórien
• Elite mobs (such as Mordor Uruks in the Beacon Hills) in Far Anórien drop rep tokens
• Defeating warbands in Far Anórien

Host of the West

• Questing, deeds and tasks in North Ithilien
• Defeating warbands in North Ithilien

Linux Graphics Drivers and LOTRO Performance

While debugging why LOTRO crashed on me in Linux, I made an important discovery which has led to a huge improvement in performance.

So, LOTRO froze while my character was just running through the Southern Bree-fields in Bree-land. I could move the mouse but the computer wouldn't respond to keyboard or mouse activity and I couldn't open a terminal or anything - I had to hard reboot the computer. The next time I logged into LOTRO, a similar thing happened to a character in Ered Luin, just running along, then the game froze and wouldn't respond. This is no good, what's going on?

I checked the PlayOnLinux debug file and found a lot of messages about a problem with wined3d - so maybe it's a DirectX graphics issue. I also googled the situation of running a Wine program that freezes and makes the computer unresponsive. Somebody suggested checking the system logs as they claimed that the problem must be deeper than Wine to cause the computer to become unresponsive. I checked the system logs (Linux Mint conveniently has a Log File Viewer available from the menu) and found a message about a PGRAPH engine fault on channel 6, then on the next line it said that lotroclient.exe was using channel 6. Then there was a message about "reboot crash terminate-all-tasks memory-full-oom-kill". So there was a memory overload? I looked up PGRAPH and found out that related to nouveau, the open source graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. Someone else had got a similar error message and they were advised to check the size of their swap partition to make sure they did have plenty of memory (at least 3GB was recommended). I checked mine - I've got 8GB which should be enough. I found some bug reports for nouveau causing this issue dating back to 2014 - apparently still not fixed. Finally I found someone who said that they changed to using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver instead of nouveau and the problem went away - their applications didn't freeze anymore. Hooray!

They said to change graphics drivers, select the recommended NVIDIA driver from the Driver Manager (also readily available from the Linux Mint menu) and reboot. I did that and the next time I logged into LOTRO I got a message that it had detected my computer hardware could support DirectX 11 and did I want to enable it? Wine doesn't support DirectX 11 yet, so I said no and the client crashed to a black screen. Fortunately, I could close the client and do some more research. I found a report that you could go into the LOTRO UserPreferences.ini file (in the [home]/Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online folder) and change the settings about DirectX. There, I found out that my game had been running with the UseHighResolutionGameData=True. Well maybe that might account for some of my low frame rates! I set that to False. Down in the [Render] section, there were options for GraphicsCore=D3D9 (good: it's using DirectX 9, which is supported by Wine), and HavePromptedForD3D11AtStartup=False and HavePromptedForD3D10AtStartup=False. We don't want to use either DirectX10 or DirectX11, so don't prompt us - I changed them both to True to make it think it already had, saved the changes and went and launched LOTRO.

The game loaded fine and I got back into the game world and everything ran so smooth and looked better than ever! I checked the frame rate and it was at least double what I was getting before! I went from around 25-30 fps just running around to over 60 fps. I know my computer isn't the best, but that's a huge improvement.

A few weeks ago I was trying to tweak performance in LOTRO and I downloaded the free Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 software for Linux. I tested my system (when it was using the nouveau driver) and was appalled - it really struggled with the animations and was very choppy. I tested it again after changing to the NVIDIA graphics driver, and the results were much better. Here's a Before and After report:

Jan 2017 - using the nouveau graphics driver

Feb 2017 - using the NVIDIA graphics driver

So, final conclusion: low frame rates and freezing in LOTRO may be a symptom that the graphics driver is not ideal. Nothing against the team behind nouveau - it's great they're developing an open-source alternative, but NVIDIA still knows how to get the best performance out of their hardware.

Website Update - Guides Condensed

Hi. Just a quick note to mention that I have been spring cleaning (it's summer here, so maybe I'm late or really, really early) and condensed the list of guides on the right hand side but the guides are all still available! There's even a few new ones added recently.

I now have a Class Guides section that has links to my guides and other community guides for each class.

All the crafting guides are now in the Crafting Guides section, so if you want information about farming, scholars, how many ore you'll need to process to reach Master Anórien Prospector, or galleries of armour and weapons that can be crafted, this is the place to look.

I hope this makes the site a little more streamlined and easy to navigate. Thanks for visiting and for your feedback.

Work in Progress

While Myndariel relaxes in the gardens of North Ithilien, I have been playing a few other characters.

My second Beorning has just got her starter legendary weapon and is eager to head into Moria. I think she expects it will be a nice cosy cave to hibernate in after questing in the cold Misty Mountains and Forochel.

My minstrel has finally left Moria and is trying to earn the respect of her distant kin in Lothlórien. She's not fond of the "run to the orc camps and back" over and over again, but she thinks her instruments sound purer and more poetic in the Golden Woods. Or maybe everything just seems brighter and better in the sunlight.

My little hunter-scholar has been out and about hunting for artifacts and recording how many and where she found them. Her results so far are shown in the Scholar Artifacts page. It's a work in progress and it means exploring pretty much all of Middle Earth, but she's enjoying it, even if there are a lot of giants involved (some of the best places for T4 and T5 artifacts are in Giant Valley and Giant Halls respectively). She's found a few treasure caches along the way too which is a nice bonus.

My free-to-play characters are feeling the TP (or I guess LP for LOTRO Points now) grind to unlock more content. My captain has quested through the Lone-lands and done the Epic Quest in North Downs but isn't high enough level to do the Epic Quest in the Trollshaws, so she will have to go back and do slayer deeds etc. in the starting zones. Or I could start a new character on another server, do the Ered Luin deeds which are fairly quick and easy, delete them and rinse and repeat. It's going to be a looong journey.

My characters on Arkenstone are all in one kin, and when I was visiting my house there the other day I noticed the kin house next door was up for sale - in fact the neighbourhood was looking rather empty (I hope my former neighbours found nice new homes in Cape of Belfalas). I hadn't planned on getting a kin house, but what an opportunity! So now my kin have a mission to collect more housing decorations. I guess Bingo Boffin adventures, and Hytbold, Dol Amroth and Minas Tirith dailies are on the schedule for the foreseeble future ...

Level 105 Gear - Update 19

I previously looked at the different sets of armour available at level 100, so now that I've reached the new level cap of 105, we will look at the new options available. Ozraid has covered some of the sets that were available from instances in update 18, so I will mainly cover the gear from North Ithilien and other sources.

Instances

For more information, see Ozraid's guide.

Gear from Osgiliath instances scale up to level 105. These are trait tree specific (3 sets per class), have set bonuses and do not have essences.

Gear from Pelennor instances scale up to level 105. These are class specific (1 set per class), have set bonuses and 4 essence slots.

Gear from Featured Instances scale up to level 105 and are also known as Recollection armour sets. These are class specific (1 set per class), have set bonuses and 2 essence slots.

Raids

Throne of the Dread Terror is a 12-man raid at level 105. Armour and Jewellery tokens can be exchanged for gear at the Master of Battle Lore (Pelennor Rewards Vendor) or their associates (Sage for light armour, Scout for medium armour, Warrior for heavy armour). Armour is trait tree specific (3 sets per class), have set bonuses and 4 essence slots. Jewellery is divided into will/agility/might categories and T1 jewellery has 2 essence slots while T2 jewellery has 3 essence slots. T1 gear is prefixed with "Lesser" and T2 gear is prefixed with "Greater".

You can also get level 105 class-specific items (such as a legendary lute for minstrels) with 1 essence slot, and off-hand items.

The T2 gear can be upgraded at the Herb-master in North Ithilien to "Supreme" gear.

Questing in North Ithilien

Some of the Epic Quests in Volume 4, Book 7 offer level 105 essence gear (chest and cloaks) and North Ithilien essence boxes. Quests in North Ithilien also offer typically ilvl 222, 2-slot essence gear.

North Ithilien Flora Bartering System

Flowers can be picked all over North Ithilien to obtain phials of extracts that can be exchanged for gear at the Herbalist. The armour has 4 essence slots and jewellery has 3 essence slots and they are fairly easy to get (but getting the necessary essences may take some time). Note that medium armour comes with vitality, not agility or might. Legendary rings can be bartered from the Herb-master.

Tier 8 North Ithilien essences can be obtained through epic quests, normal quests and by turning in four Ithilien Essence Fragments obtained from repeatable quests to the Herb-master. These essences can also be used to create Wild Essences through crafting professions, which can then be exchanged at the Herb-master for more powerful Ithilien-infused Essences.

ilvl 246 Ithilien Armour	Light	Medium	Heavy
Head	4 Essences 652 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 968 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 1254 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Shoulders	4 Essences 652 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 968 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 1254 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Chest	4 Essences 2169 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 3220 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 4174 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Hands	4 Essences 1054 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 1610 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 2087 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Legs	4 Essences 1808 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 2683 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 3478 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Feet	4 Essences 869 Armour 90 Will 442 Morale	4 Essences 968 Armour 90 Vitality 422 Morale	4 Essences 1673 Armour 90 Might 442 Morale
Appearance

ilvl 246 Ithilien Jewellery	Will	Agility	Might
Earring	3 Essences 225 Will 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Agility 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Might 589 Morale
Necklace	3 Essences 225 Will 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Agility 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Might 589 Morale
Bracelet	3 Essences 225 Will 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Agility 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Might 589 Morale
Ring	3 Essences 225 Will 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Agility 589 Morale	3 Essences 225 Might 589 Morale

ilvl 258 Ithilien Jewellery	Will	Agility	Might
Legendary Ring	3 Essences 237 Will 1401 Morale	3 Essences 237 Agility 1401 Morale	3 Essences 237 Might 1401 Morale

Throne of the Dread Terror raid gear upgrades

T2 raid gear can be upgraded at the Herb-master (see the raid section above).

Epic/Big Battles

You can get level 105 jewellery (no essence slots) from participating in epic battles such as The Defence of Minas Tirith, but the Stars of Merit vendors currently only offer level 95 or 100 jewellery.

Skirmish Camps

Skirmish Camps offer level 105 (ilvl 213) armour, off-hands and jewellery (Pelennor Guardsman's set) with no essence slots for marks and medallions.

Crafting

Unfortunately, crafters cannot make level 105 gear currently, only the wild essences, but there has been talk of a possible crafting update in the future.

World Drops and the Auction House

And of course there are the usual random world drops that can be obtained and sold on the auction house. I have noticed that there doesn't seem to be much level 105 gear available on the auction house, but what is for sale is fairly cheap.

Myndariel's Journey to North Ithilien

Myndariel has been questing through Central and Eastern Gondor this week and finally reached level 105. She really enjoyed the quests, especially helping Nimithil in Ost Anglebed and the Five Sisters of the rivers. Unfortunately, she has done bits and pieces of quests here and there throughout Gondor and Anórien which has kind-of spoilt the flow, like skipping pages in a book then going back to them later.

The pretty Mere of Gilrain in Central Gondor
Roamingstar, Maiden of Gilrain, protects these waters

Found this random sandcastle on a sandbar near some marooned corsairs
I guess they were bored - or plotting to destroy more cities

I also got caught up with the epic quest line (spoiler alert) - wow! - doing all the quests for the preparation of Minas Tirith's defenses, then going and recalling scouts from Talath Anor and gaining the Rohirrim safe passage to Pelennor Fields, then the epic battle itself and finally the aftermath and recruiting soldiers to support Aragorn - it took several hours but they were awesome hours that flew by with a sense of wonder and urgency - like when you get to the best part of the book and you just can't put it down; you can't wait to turn the page and find out what happens next.

Escorting the Rohirrim

The Rohirrim arrive in time

The battle at Pelennor Fields

Éowyn confronts the Nazgûl

Golodir's vengeance

Aragorn banishes Gothmog

Minas Tirith survives

Finally, I travelled through Osgiliath and into North Ithilien and was instantly impressed with the beauty of the zone. The ruins are picturesque, it's wonderful to see blue sky and I love finding flowers to pick all over the place. I have yet to find out how to get the new gear, but I look forward to finding out and exploring and questing through the region more.

North Ithilien at night

Aelin Veren

Happy New Year and may 2017 be a great year to enjoy Lord of the Rings.