silveradept | (Reply)

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I played World of Warcraft for over a decade, stopped last year because my wife and I were frankly bored. We've now been playing Lord of the Rings Online for not yet 18 months and quite enjoying it, I think one thing in particular is everyone is a good guy against the forces of Mordor. No horde vs alliance, you're just fighting baddies and corrupt nature.

Anyway, the difference in achievements is interesting. In WoW, you got achievements by killing X of Y, but frequently that was it: nothing that exhibited on your character. I gained a weapons master achievement, and then they took away the need to master weapons and everyone was an insta-master. That was one of the many changes that I didn't like.

In LOTRO, we have Deeds. Kill 30 wargs in Breeland. Do that, you get some reputation points with the Men of Bree, 5 LOTRO points, and maybe something else or the other, maybe the title Bane of Wargs. Which you can now make your toon's name appear as Bob, Bane of Wargs. And you get Advanced Warg Killer deed: kill 60 wargs in Breeland, starting over at zero. Kill orcs, krabans, bandits, wights, etc. Use Weapon Skill X (varies by class), achieve X number of crits with skill Y, etc. You get titles for leveling up skills, for activating professions. One that I particularly like and have on some of my toons is Bob, Easily Lost.

But I'm easily amused.

Another achievement method is collecting vendor trash. Certain types of trash can be sold in different areas for area reputation and XP, which is a good way to gain faction rep. For example, before going into Moria, you must be exalted with Moria in order to buy a goat: normal mounts do not work in Moria. So you're probably going to do a lot of rep grinding for Thorin's Hall when you're in your 40s. But 40 Gilded Sword Sheaths which is worth rep in area A is only worth money in area F, so you need to watch what you keep and sell.

We played free to play for almost a year then started paying, which opened up a tremendous amount of content, but not all. With their Black Friday sale, I bought a quadpack of expansions that gave me four expansion areas, which I'll need, +2 character slots, 2 mounts to every character I have and create, and a couple of titles. And I got it for half off or more, it was an excellent deal. Unfortunately my wife couldn't buy it as she'd already bought one of the expansions in the pack, so she's going to have to piecemeal the others and she just found out that she needs one to progress past 90.