Tip Time: Naming Help

Tony posted this on January 10th, 2010. It has 1 Comment »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2539

While there are always peo­ple who name their char­ac­ters some­thing goofy like “blade­ofdeath”, a lot of LOTRO play­ers seem to like to name their char­ac­ters some­thing a bit more fit­ting. Unfor­tu­nately, the game’s been out for so long that many of the more obvi­ous names are taken, includ­ing any real vari­a­tion of the sug­ges­tions Tur­bine offers when you make a new character.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of name gen­er­a­tors and related tools. I won’t pre­tend to know which ones are more true to the lore than oth­ers, but I think these can get your thoughts going. Read the rest of this entry »

Tip Time: Shadowfoot’s Paw?

Tony posted this on January 4th, 2010. It has 3 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2521



Fighting Shadowfoot

Fight­ing Shad­ow­foot: Shot by Gul Dukat


One of the nice things about the search func­tion on MMeOw is that I can tell what peo­ple look for once they get to our site. I thought it’d be smart to base some of our Tip Time entries on these searches.

Today’s Tip Time involves [Shadowfoot’s Paw].

Shad­ow­foot is a named wolf that wan­ders around the Old For­est. For most he’ll be a push over: he’s only level 13 and doesn’t have any obvi­ous strengths. What’s unusual about him is that he con­sis­tently drops mul­ti­ple [Shadowfoot’s Paw]s. These are not grayed out as ven­dor trash.

A while back, items used for crit­i­cal suc­cess chances while craft­ing were largely gath­ered from mobs. Some of these were extremely spe­cific and came from cer­tain notable ene­mies. Things have been stream­lined since then. You might still have some of these items, but they can be traded in for the cur­rent crit­i­cal craft­ing items with var­i­ous NPC traders. I spent some time look­ing at what they offered and Shadowfoot’s Paw wasn’t on the menu.

It’s not for craft­ing. I’ve yet to find a quest that specif­i­cally asks for [Shadowfoot’s Paw] either. I thought that per­haps this was one that man­aged to slip by unno­ticed; how­ever, I also found a thread on the Euro­pean LOTRO forums from 2008 that dis­cusses the gen­eral use­less­ness of this item.

Maybe it’s just play­ing off our assump­tion that every­thing in a MMORPG has to have a real use. Some­one wants bargh­est eyes, after all. Don’t ask me.

Has any­one found out some­thing about this I’ve missed?

Tip Time: Advanced Quest Guide and Tracker Usage

Tony posted this on November 21st, 2009. It has 2 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2425

Today’s Tip Time involves the Quest Guide and Quest Tracker. Through nor­mal game­play var­i­ous quests will be added to your Quest Tracker. Most peo­ple know that you can con­trol the appear­ance of quests in the Quest Tracker through your Quest Log. A quick way of get­ting there is just by click­ing the rings next to your quests in the Tracker.

What you may not know is that you can also right click the rings next to your quests.


Sub-menu for the Quest Tracker

Sub-menu for the Quest Tracker


This gives you a small menu of addi­tional options:

  1. Show in Quest Log: Opens up the Quest Log with this quest as the focus. This is the same as left-clicking the quest ring.
  2. Lock: Locks the quest in the Quest Tracker and pre­vents it from being replaced auto­mat­i­cally as you col­lect new quests or fin­ish objectives.
  3. Set Who Note: Sets this quest as your note in the Look­ing for Fel­low­ship dis­play. This way oth­ers can see what you’re focus­ing on.
  4. Find Oth­ers on Quests: Finds oth­ers through the Look­ing for Fel­low­ship dis­play that are cur­rently doing this quest. Help­ful if you need a group, but it pre­sumes they’re pay­ing atten­tion to the LFF dis­play. Unfor­tu­nately, many peo­ple do not.
  5. Set as Quest Guide Focus: Sets the selected quest as the focus on the Quest Guide, mean­ing that the arrow in the radar will focus on that quest instead of what­ever it was focus­ing on pre­vi­ously. This is quite use­ful because oth­er­wise the Quest Guide will auto­mat­i­cally change focus depend­ing on your position.
  6. Remove: Remove from the Quest Tracker and Guide, but not from the Log.
  7. Remove All: Same as above, but affects all quests in the Tracker and Guide.

I didn’t real­ize all of these options were avail­able early on, but they can be quite useful.


Tip Time: Super Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Tony posted this on November 5th, 2009. It has 5 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2348

I think most peo­ple are aware of the basic key­board short­cuts in LotRO. K for skills, L for your quest log, I for inven­tory and so forth. There are oth­ers that are a lit­tle less obvi­ous, likely only used by those who bother to look at the in-game key map­ping menus. I thought it would be nice to cover some of the most use­ful ones here. Obvi­ously these are using the default key mappings.

Auto Loot

Auto Loot auto­mat­i­cally takes all items from a corpse, assum­ing you have room. This can be enabled by default in the UI Set­tings menu, but if you’d rather leave it off you can use Shift+Left Click to do it as you wish. Use­ful when you have tons of inven­tory space and don’t want to waste time. Slayer Deeds come to mind.

Detach Tooltip

Hov­er­ing over almost any­thing in-game dis­plays a rel­e­vant tool tip. If, for some rea­son, you don’t want that tool tip to go away, you can press H. This detaches the tool tip and con­verts it to a nor­mal box. You can move it around as you please.

Autoat­tack Toggle

I’m sure every­one knows that the num­ber keys han­dle the skills you’ve placed in your quick­slots. What about your nor­mal attack? Just hit ~ (tilde) to ini­ti­ate it. This was some­thing I didn’t real­ize until I was in the game for a few weeks. Quite use­ful. If you have a ranged attack and are far enough away (assum­ing you don’t have “run to tar­get on attack” enabled in the Options), this will ini­ti­ate that as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Docholiday, the Warden’s Warden

Hobbit and Redhead posted this on November 2nd, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as Guides, Tip Time, Warden.

Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2341

His blog has been men­tioned before but bears repeat­ing. If you play a War­den, you should be read­ing Docholiday’s blog.

Today’s install­ment on tank­ing gam­bits is pure gold — Auc­tion House gold, the best kind.

Cheers,
Hobbit