Following up on last night’s post, the table for the Journeyman Woodworker tier, using Ash Wood, is already a bit better furnished:
| Total Wood planks | Total Exp | How many to 840 | Total Planks needed | Total silver | Total Crafting actions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Champion Horn | 4 | 8 | 105 | 420 | 0 | 105 |
| Ash Weapons | 2 | 10 | 84 | 168 | 201.6 | 168 |
| Stout Ash Weapons | 4 | 16 | 53 | 212 | 127.2 | 159 |
| Heavy Ash Weapons | 6 | 22 | 39 | 234 | 93.6 | 156 |
| Parchments | 2 | 6 | 140 | 280 | 0 | 140 |
| Everything else | 4 | 8 | 105 | 420 | 0 | 105 |
* Updated to include proficiency
As with the previous table, the numbers assume that you already have Ash planks at the ready, so the cost of turning the raw wood into planks is not part of the price evaluation here.
Going forward, there are several more choices on what to craft in each tier. What remains true is that the faster you want to level, the more Rowan planks will be required. Most wood-efficient remains as always the first set of weapons in this tier – something that we will see later is also verifiable in the Expert tier, and, I suspect, will not change all the way up to master at the very least.
As Longasc mentioned in his comment on the last post, these tables are obviously only directly useful in this form for someone wanting to speed-level woodworking – something that should become very simple to do on a low level alt after the new patch goes live. If you level the craft in parallel with a character’s natural progression, it is best to blend in the higher level weapons as you need them.
You will get most benefit, in fact, if you are able to speed level to proficiency with the plain ash weapons (using 56 ash wood planks), then craft critical equipment for your use. The weapons for instance have quite a nice edge over the normal versions, and the same goes for the musical instruments. Critical equipment also tends to sell quite nicely on the AH (provided it is not completely flooded of course) and can recoup quite a bit of investment if you buy the wood planks instead of collecting them yourself.
What is the most efficient selection of recipes to get woodworker to mastery? Browsing around, I found only either out of date or incomplete information. Some initial material I found online looked promising… and then I went in-game to verify it, and saw that in the meantime, all recipes had been normalized.
What’s a blogger to do? Research the stuff myself, of course. Whether you want to level woodworking with the least wood, the least money or the least time, the table below should help you decide.
Today, we’ll look at the simplest table of them all, the apprentice level using Rowan Wood planks.
| Total Wood Planks | Total Exp | How many to 660 | Total planks needed | Total silver | Total Craft actions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rowan Weapons | 2 | 10 | 66 | 132 | 105.6 | 132 |
| Heavy Rowan Weapons | 4 | 18 | 37 | 148 | 59.2 | 111 |
* Updated to account for proficiency level
Crafting the normal, level 7 Rowan weapons takes least wood but more money and time. Picking the Heavy Rowan weapons instead saves on time and money, but will require 21 more rowan. If you gather them yourself, the time savings will be lost with the foresting work
When I recently ranted about the problems that mismatching armour would do to a fashion-conscious character, reader Longasc reminded me that Lord of the Rings Online actually had a great system to customize every toons’ appearance, Outfitting.
Of course, me being my usual slow-witted self, I needed some serious twitter coaching by the same Longasc to finally get it. And now I’m totally taken by the system.
When the game first introduces you to Outfits, you get a free cosmetic circlet with the gift pack every new adventurer obtains at the end of their Intro. And I tried that one out immediately, of course.
How does that work? Besides your normal character equipment screen, you also get currently two tabs for outfits, a series of duplicate slots that will accept cosmetic items – gear that is purely decorative in nature and has no stats.
After receiving my first gifted circlet, I promptly equipped it in one of those outfit tabs… and noticed that it would remain in my inventory. As bag space tends to be at a premium (isn’t it always), I promptly banked the thing, and dismissed the whole system as more or less useless.
Say it ain’t so.
And indeed, it isn’t. The system is way better than that.
What I finally understood was that cosmetic items remain in your inventory because they act like templates: drag them onto your character’s outfit panel, and a copy gets created that dresses your toon accordingly. Then you can send the same cosmetic item to another of your toons and equip it. Which is nice. But it doesn’t stop there.
To really get the full grasp of what Turbine has done here, one needs to spend some TP and get at least one shared wardrobe expansion of the Lotro store. And BTW, they’re on sale this week, which makes it a good time to grab them if you got any Turbine Points to spare.
Shared Wardrobes come in 10 slot increments and are, as the name states, shared among all your characters on the same server. They work the same way as your character’s outfit panel, in the sense that you will copy an outfit into the wardrobe while the original remains in your inventory (and you could for instance resell those after you copied them to the wardrobe).
From there, you can again simply drag and drop a cosmetic item from wardrobe to character panel and create a new copy. Fair enough. But where the system starts to shine is when you add the various dyes available in the mix.
If you apply a dye to an outfit in your inventory, it takes on the new colour scheme while losing the previous one. Straightforward. However, if instead you apply the dye to an outfit in the shared wardrobe, it will get added to the selection of colour schemes for the same outfit.
From there, you simply select what colour version you want for an outfit and drag it into your character panel and voilà, you have a wardrobe with up to almost two dozen different colour choices for every single piece of outfit available (and every piece still only uses up one space – my wife’s dream come true if this was possible in Real Life).
Of course, Turbine also thought of the people who would apply dyes to the cosmetic item in your inventory instead of the wardrobe, and if you do that, dragging the outfit with the new colour onto the wardrobe adds the new colour to the existing schemes. What’s not to like?
As the picture comparison above shows, I’d rather have my little hobbit warden looking the part instead of a stocky shire farmerwoman who just fell off the haystack. Only remaining concern: I need to find cosmetic pants, shoulderpieces and gloves.
While I’ve made cynical observations about loot drop in MMOs before, in an amusing twist of fate, the invaluable Casual Stroll to Mordor today blogs about optimal profession spread between four alt characters in LotRO. As coincidence has it, I made another observation on this very matter last night.
“The valuable resource you just found can only be collected by your one alt located on the other side of the world.”
True fact.
In my first attempt, I gathered the relevant information from the Lorebook and lotro-wiki, for the sake of convenience. Unfortunately, when playing my Warden the next time, I found out that the in-game tooltips didn’t always match the external data I had been using. In particular, the previous table displayed several HoT with a 12 seconds duration and my superficial analysis was based on that.
In-game, however, the HoTs only last 6s, at least for the two I can verify with my low level warden.
Luckily, one of the cool features your class trainer offers is to see all your class skills complete with their tooltips, including all of those that you won’t get for another while. And even better, all effects that scale based on your stats or level are also scaled down to the present character’s level.
Which gives me a new table as presented below and a first approximation on the relative efficiency of each HoT. Approximation because I only have two data points to look at so far, at level 14 and 16. While this isn’t enough to work out precise formulas for each gambit, it at least gives a certain indication of what gambit produces how much healing:
| Skill | Gambit Length | Total healing / level | Healing / Power | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| War-Cry | 2 | 2.1 | 1 | 6s |
| Impressive Flourish | 2 | 2.1 | 1.2 | 6s |
| Persevere | 2 | 3.2 | 13-15 | 6s |
| Safeguard | 3 | 5 | 2.9 | 6s |
| Celebration of Skill | 4 | 5.8 | 5.1 | 6s |
| Restoration | 5 | 6.7 | 6.7 | 6s |
| Fierce Resolve | 3 | 2.7 | 1 | 16s leech |
| Resolution | 4 | 2.7 | 1 | instant leech |
| Exultation of Battle | 5 | 5.4 | 2.3 | 16s leech |
Source: In-game tooltips, 8 March 2011. Note that “Power” reflects on the power stat (aka mana in other games, not the notion of potency)
Absent from this table is Conviction, which I understand is a quested gambit and would obviously not appear here.
As mentioned, no HoT lists a 12s duration at present, and I did verify by playing that everything I had access to would only tick for 6 seconds, so that part is consistent. Later on, the Warden can unlock traits that add ticks to his HoTs, and that may be the reason for the differing data gathered from other sites.
I’ll have to gain a couple of more levels to start figuring out the formulas which give the exact healing per level, so this table will probably be revisited again some time in the future. Until then, the approximation should be sufficient.
One thing that both Lord of the Rings Online and WoW have in common: the garish fashion sense that results from collecting the gear from quest rewards, skirmish tokens and crafting.
To wit: 
Yes, unfortunately, that live embodiment of a complete lack of fashion sense in the middle happens to be my Runekeeper, waiting for a cooldown to finish to go and dispatch some undead creep. And apparently the undead are also immune to displays of bad taste.
LotRO offers a solution in the form of dyes that can be applied but I’ll have to confess that yours truly is a bit too stingy to spend money on that. The gentleman to my left, a guardian four levels above me at that time, was wearing a set. The lass on the right was level 40, go figure what fashion outlets they get in Rivendell.
Completely mismatched gear seems to be a common trait of several MMOs (and don’t get me started on the Subligar Men in FFXI…), almost to the point of becoming a reassuring feature that transcends many settings.
Food for thought: in the fiction works inspiring our MMOs, the protagonists usually start and end their adventure in the same armour (and often with the same weapons). In LotRO, players eventually get access to Legendary Items, a weapon and a class-specific accessory, which will level, can be imbued with effects and reforged as needed (but, I gather, still get replaced every so often).
I for one would be keen to see a game system where you start by creating the looks of your armour set at toon creation, then keep the same throughout your career, with enhancements no longer in the form of wholesale armour pieces dropping (hey, look, that tiny goblin just happened to have a blue mailshirt that amazingly fits my elf three times the size perfectly!) but rather an expansion of enchanting and gemming systems, where over time you reforge and mend and add in and gradually replace materials to your taste.
One can always dream. In the meantime, walking around like a poor impression of a clown or buying dyes off the AH seems to be the only way to ward one’s innards against unwanted spilling out.
Author’s note: The post below is based on incomplete and inaccurate information and does not reflect in-game reality. A more recent post supercedes the content below with more accurate information.
As has been noted before, the Warden’s Heal-over-Time skills do not stack, so spamming the one and the same skill with a HoT will lead to overwriting. The question then becomes how long each of those different HoTs tick away.
The table below is a first take on this. Obviously, the biggest missing piece is for how much each of these gambits does heal, and this will eventually make its way to a revised version. Still, for a first approach, here it goes:
| Skill | Gambit length | Hot duration | Initial heal | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Persevere | 2 | 6s | yes | |
| Impressive Flourish | 2 | 12s | yes | |
| Safeguard | 3 | 6s | yes | |
| Celebration of Skill | 4 | 6s | yes | |
| Restoration | 5 | 6s | yes | |
| Conviction | 5 | 12s | yes | Fellowship heal |
| War-Cry | 2 | 12s | yes | |
| Fierce Resolve | 3 | 16s | no | Leech (every 4s) |
| Resolution | 4 | 16s | no | Leech (every 4s) |
| Exultation of Battle | 5 | 16s | no | Leech (every 4s) |
Source: Lotro-Wiki, 1 March 2011
All normal HoTs tick every 3 seconds, all leech effects (Morale transfer as they are technically called) tick every 4 seconds without an initial effect, at least as far as I can tell.
When faced with hard-hitting opposition, keeping Impressive Flourish (Shield-Fist) and War-Cry (Fist-Shield) up seems to yield the most bang for a low-level Warden’s buck. The other HoTs last only 6 seconds, and on the face of my still way too limited experience, it’s hard to pull off even 2-skill gambits in less than that time. It appears the intention of the designers with those short-term HoTs is less to drive the player to keep a multiple series of different self-healing effects up at all time, but rather to propose a straightforward alternative to damage output: either you go for a Spear-Shield sequence for damage and interrupts, or for a Shield-Spear sequence for damage and healing.
Again, at this time, further analysis of this without having precise numbers to include both for damage and healing potency makes this a purely academic exercise. While long-term readers have humoured my empty theorycrafting for long, I believe hard numbers will serve everyone better. I shall revisit this topic another day.
To conclude on this series of posts, as promised on comments and Twitter (and thanks to Twitterer Longasc for the multiple plugs), here is everything on a single page. After completing the Fist gambits, I went back and added colour-codes to the other two and expanded the legend. I hope it doesn’t detract too much from readability.
I also have these on two different PDFs, each with a slightly different layout.
The latter has been made so that you can print each half on an A4 page and place them side by side.
I hope this will prove useful. This concludes this specific series of post, but if you want to read some additional comment on each gambit series and how sequences build up, you could go back and read the following posts:
