I’ve noticed there’s been a bit of a lull in LotRO blog­ging across the board. In some ways I am glad that I’m not the only one relax­ing and neglect­ing my “duties”. I’m in Chicago, so when the nice weather finally hits it’s really hard to ignore it.

I’ve spent some time reflect­ing on things that cre­ated some­thing of an uproar in LotRO–land. “Uproar” is prob­a­bly an exag­ger­a­tion, but it was cer­tainly more heated than most dis­cus­sions related to this game. Aside from spe­cific class con­cerns, the things that come to mind are the new self res­ur­rec­tion abil­ity and the Quest Guide.

I’ve given my opin­ions on them before and my thoughts are largely unchanged. For me, the self res­ur­rec­tion skill has been more of a ban­dage for dumb deaths than any­thing game break­ing. The dread you get after using it is gen­er­ally too crip­pling to allow you to go right back into the thick of things. Most of my mob-related deaths are within aggro range, so as soon as I come back I have ten Gob­lins on my butt. Need­less to say, I don’t get very far.

I always wel­comed the Quest Guide and over­all I think it’s worked out pretty well. I like that it shows you the vicin­ity for many search quests, as opposed to the exact loca­tion. I also like that it is selec­tively con­trolled by Tur­bine … For exam­ple, in Evendim there’s a quest where you have to find a hid­den trea­sure. The Quest Guide points you in the right direc­tion for the first part, but for the rest of the chain you have to use the quest text’s clues to get you where you need to go. I think this is one ben­e­fit of it being devel­oper handled.

I’m sure your mileage may vary with both of these. I am inter­ested in hear­ing if anyone’s opin­ion changed one way or another on these now that we’ve had a good amount of time with them.