Last night, or shall I say early this morning, I had another fun play session in Lord of the Rings Online. This time I was playing my new hunter a human female names Laurwynn.

I went with human again for two reasons:

First my daughter wanted “my girl” to look a bit like her. We played a bit with the elves, but could not get a good hair color.

Second, I have never played through the Archet area post burning and I wanted to see how the story their continued. So Laurwynn became a human, and dove into Middle Earth.

But this time things were different, I had friends with me. Well at this point not actually in game yet, but they were in vent with me and playing their own characters. Running through the same starting zones solo was instantly made more fun having friends to chat with. And once we met up it was even more fun.

As for the hunter, after seven levels I am not sure I enjoy her as much as my champion. Right now I feel as though the game mechanics are fighting my tendency to play solo. What I mean is, the hunter is a ranged DPS class and thus I naturally feel stronger when the baddies are not up in my face. Yet there are several factors that seem to be constantly giving the baddies time to move in.

These factors include:

• The cool down on my trap. Its so long that I can not use it every fight unless I want to wait.

• The set up time for my trap. The time it takes to drop a trap feels to long, purposely slowing the fighting pace, and encouraging me to just skip it.

• The actual trap hold time is not reliable. This may be simply due to my level, but I dont seem to be able to judge how long a trap will hold a baddie.

• The forced wait time between my abilities. I click “barbed shot” , and “swift bow”. Barbed shot starts to ‘cast’ and swift is queued up. Barbed fires, but instead of Swift starting to cast (the progress bar filling up) I auto attack. Ok that would be fine but instead of Swift then starting to cast after the auto attack fires off there is a pause about 1 second long and then Swift starts. That dead time, between auto and swift makes me CRAZY, and it happens between every special ability giving baddies lots of extra time to get to me.

Sure I have a couple of melee abilities, and they seem to do the job but I want to shot stuff. I suspect once I start grouping with a melee friend most of my problems will evaporate, but why make me group to enjoy my class’s power.

They just need Lower the cooldown on traps, Make them settable in combat (as long as the hunter is not being hit), give them a consistent duration (ideally with a timer bar), and remove the dead space between abilities. Then Hunters would still prefer groups to force baddies to stay away, but could enjoy the power of ranged combat more when soloing/duoing with another caster.

Ok enough QQ for me, on to some praise.

I really like the look of the world, though I my old thoughts on the “real” looking world eventually seeming dull may still hold true over time. I also thing Turbine does a great job in these early areas of “setting the stage”. Each POI has a mood/tone to it that is set by they way the designers placed objects and lights. Great work.

I am digging the tradeskill breakdown of professions. They build in some dependancies, but still allow a solo crafter to make some progress. I chose Explorer for Laurwynn’s vocation, it totally fit my idea for her character and it allows her to make some clothes for her self and her Rune keeper buddy, who took up cooking and farming.

Next time I think I will chat about why I am feeling a bit bored with WoW, and why I think Lotro is filling that gap so well. I mean last night I spent four hours in Lotro last night, far more than I initially thought I was going to, so I know its doing something right.