Turbine is refreshing the Lone Lands with Siege of Mirkwood (SoM) just as I start my no-alt character reboot. my expectations are high after playing Bree before and after its refresh. Now I don’t want to level up a new character and have to go through the old Lone Lands. December 1st is so close and yet so far!
Why the reboot? Repeating content and abusing spreadsheets led me to abandon my gang-of-four-alts approach based on a great LOTRO Wiki article about crafter interdependence. It maps out the minimum 4 vocations needed to cover all 10 professions, so I built a team to cover all races and professions:
- Elven Rune-keeper Tinker
- Human Lore-master Historian
- Hobbit Hunter Woodsman
- Dwarf Champion Armorer
I noticed that tinker and historian complemented each other nicely, and that pairing combined well with rune-keeper and lore-master. Historian’s farmer can level up without quests; an alt historian could supply the main’s cook without character leveling. I could run my main up to 60 and 6×6, then run the alt all the way up with a long enough break for old content to feel (or actually be) new again.
Ideally I’d run one character and suck up the cost of ingredients for the off-profession via the auction house, but I just hate paying for things I can mine or grow myself. It’s also a problem that both the elf and human characters have long histories outside of LOTRO that need continuing. The elf as historian has the advantage of Return to Rivendell for access to a superior workstation, but otherwise it’s a purely subjective spreadsheet-immune decision. I don’t do well with those.