LOTRO Leveling

I've one bad game practice left over from City of Heroes being my first MMO, so to speak. I can never figure out when it's time to leave one zone and look for the next zone for my level range.

Couple that with my completionist tendency to want to get every single exclamation mark quest done, and this has been making me quite miserable in LOTRO where half of the quest chains are for small group fellowships, complete teams or even raids (the sad part of being 45+ and near the old level cap.)

After completing most of the doable quests in the Misty Mountains, I had been down to a bunch of ferry message quests leading towards raid quest pointers, and a instance meant for small groups but kinda vaguely soloable aka Goblin-Town.

I had a fairly okay time attempting to do quests in Goblin-Town, but soloing in an instance meant for small groups to complete and supposedly a big boss at the end for a full fellowship meant very often getting in over my head. Dying is exceedingly irritating in LOTRO since you spawn far far away from where you were, with a hefty repair bill to boot.

With the help of a third-party website map, I got far enough to complete one or two quests, but certainly not all of them at one go.

For some reason, this mechanic makes me a little grumpy. It reminds me a lot of the raid mechanic. Walk into an instance, fight the best you can to go far as possible, wipe miserably due to one reason or other, respawn, rinse and repeat. Like an oddly linear dungeon crawl.

Meh. I'm used to instances being completable at one go. City of Heroes, Guild Wars, singleplayer games like Fallout 3, etc. The dungeon oughta be doable. Having bits and pieces of a dungeon be accessible mildly irritates me. I can see the game design reason - you want the same map to provide content for soloists, small group parties and full teams, fair enough, but it's a little directly rubbed in the face that a soloist is never going to see all of this one dungeon.

I would much rather a group dungeon that I would never bother setting foot into, and a solo dungeon that I could handle myself. Or perhaps the same map, but with different spawn sizes and different rewards.

It's the plight of the soloist in LOTRO. Yes, we have content for you. It's the first half of anything. Keep doing all those first halves of stuff, and you'll level. Promise!

Grrr.

So eventually I gave up and decided to make the long ride past Rivendell, the Trollshaws and into Eregion - the first buffer zone before the Mines of Moria, apparently meant for 45+ to boost up to 50 before entering into the mines proper.

One long ride later, I was in a better place. Instead of zones that reflected the old level cap and quests that tried to funnel people into group content, Eregion's first town has a bunch of quests that resemble the lowbie leveling zones. You know the sort...

Small town quest hub. Bunch of Kill X numbers of Y mobs. Pick up Z numbers of items from the ground or from the Y mobs you're already killing. Methodical. Sorta boring. But eminently doable and rewarding. You get to fight stuff. (And count 'em.) You get an xp reward and some usable items at the end. The stuff that you killed provides vendor trash to sell for $$$. Grindy, but the sense of progression/achievement is a lot more obvious and mollifying than my aimless galloping and carting of messages across white snow.

Not perfect, of course. Some of the kill quest numbers are quite high, given how little xp they award. But more tolerable than achieving nothing at all between running to and fro timesinks.

I saw a LOT more people in this one part of the zone than in the old 45+ zones. Which, I suppose, tells you how nasty those old zones were. Me being a nooby idiot, I had no clue, while the veterans leveling alts have made beelines towards the more easily achievable quests.

Blah.

Someday, I need to make myself more soloable alts. But the Guardian is so high, it seems a waste to not keep playing her. :/