Casual Stroll to Mordor

Welcome to part 3 of my Warden’s Guide series. If you missed the first two parts of this guide you can check them out here: Part 1: Gambit Lines , Part 2: Mastering Masteries This installment of  ”A Warden’s Guide” covers the Potency and Battle Memory mechanic/skills added with Rise of Isengard. Potency Potency is [...]

Orion is active in the forums and that usually means sneak peaks of changes he’s working on with classes

How this escaped my notice until release is unknown to me but the Minstrel class has a new instrument available to them with Update 5!

The last time I played my Minstrel, I said that I would put her aside until I reached 75 on my warden and Lore-master. While I leveled my warden immediately, I decided to level my minstrel to 60 before leveling my lore-master to the new cap. Yes, I am still wearing the outfit from the [...]

Where other classes got some minor upgrades with the release of ROI, the core mechanics of the way minstrels operated were fundamentally changed. After getting my minstrel to the new level cap and having the opportunity to run solo and in groups, I’d like to make a couple of comments on how I feel that the changes have affected minstrel gameplay.

With the release of Rise of Isengard, it was time to take my hobbit to Isengard. Therefore, I am placing my younger characters aside as I return to my main warden.

When I first started playing LOTRO and saw that the primary healers were called “minstrels” and played music to restore health, the first thing I thought was, “That’s stupid.” I had similar reservations about the captain as a healer.

I’ve heard Lore-masters complain from time to time that they don’t like being thought of as nothing more than a battery for their group, as if they are only there to supply power on demand. Well, now they can rest easy because captains can now step up to the plate and be generators for their [...]

Like many people playing minstrels, when I first logged on to LOTRO, the first thing I thought was “O.M.G. What the heck happened to my buttons”?

Mae govannen, friends! So you want to be a healer?  Did you find a calling to help little hobbits cure their need to deliver pie and mail all over the shire?*  Or perhaps you saw too many men slaughtered on the Fields of Fornost?  Or were you like me and asked yourself one day, “Why [...]

When Attack at Dawn and The Icy Crevasse were released, the main character for my blog (Spear and Skirmish) was in the middle of Mirkwood preparing to assault Dol Guldur. Despite this, I decided to handle the two new skirmishes promptly. The upshot of this was that I needed to select one of my other [...]

In the latest episode I briefly went over the changes of the Lore-master, once again proving how the deeper intricacies of the class evade me! However, thanks to Iinferno we were able to get a bit more information about the pet, how it looks and its function.

Every player has some classes that they play well and others that they find challenging. For me, the Champion definitely falls in the latter category.

s your warden starts getting into the higher levels and you finally start to get a feel for how to build your gambits, it all gets shaken up once you earn your “Masteries”.

For my recruit-level article on the hunter, I ran with my Landroval hunter. For the footman levels, I am returning to my main hunter on Windfola.

There are a lot of gambits to remember but it turns out that most follow a pattern in which all gambits of that pattern serve the same basic function but at different levels of effectiveness.

I have gone through various aspects of building a Champion. I discussed the builds, stats, armor selection, skill sequences, but it occurred to me that I never really spent time discussing how playing a Champion is different from other classes. You can’t really play your Champion like any of the other classes or you will die. A lot.

In this post, I will list the instruments available, how mentoring works and where minstrels get these skills so we can spread the joy of /music across Middle-earth!

With the release of the new raid armor sets and a few new heavy armor drops I decided to update my Champion Armor Spreadsheet.