Rise of Isengard is less than a month from launch, and it's
time to start preparing. The obvious thing to do is to stock up
on consumables, crafting mats and class items, and now is a fine
time to start playing the markets (i.e. the auction house) to
build up a bankroll for later. It's also a good time to run lots
of skirmishes to pad your barter wallet with plenty of skirmish
marks - run Barrow-downs Survival 12-man once a day for a few
days and you're good to go. But the other, less-obvious thing
you will probably want is plenty of Turbine Points.

This is nearly as important for VIPs as it is for F2Ps. VIPs
don't need to buy quest packs or unlock swift travel
destinations, but there are some excellent LotRO Store potions,
Legendary Item enhancements, interesting cosmetics and loads of
other things that will come in handy when Rise of Isengard goes
live on September 27. And to buy these things, you will need
Turbine Points. The wealthy slackers of the world can buy TP
with real money - either through the store or via game cards at
a number of physical retailers - but the rest of us
hard-working, cash-poor types can earn them the good
old-fashioned way: by grinding deeds.

"But, Gunky," I can hear some of you saying. "Grinding deeds is
tedious and time-consuming. Surely there must be a faster way!"

Fear not, fellow penny-pinchers! There is a way, and while it
does involve a small bit of "grind," it is far less horrible
than, say, hunting down stealthed bog-lurkers in the marshes of
the Lone-lands for hours on end.

Step One: Roll A Disposable Alt

alt="Disposable Alt" src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/135915">

Dwarf Guardians
make fine disposable alts. Using a ridiculous name, that's
just a bonus.

Some of us have character slots we aren't using for anything,
or low-level "experiment" or crafting alts that are just sitting
there collecting dust. These are the cannon-fodder we shall be
using.

If you have unused character slots, roll a Champion, Guardian
or Hunter. These classes work best for this exercise - they are
either sturdy enough to handle groups of mobs or deal enough
damage that the fights don't last long enough to be particularly
dangerous.

If you have no unused character slots but have low-level toons
you don't use, go with that. The less-experienced the character,
the better. They don't need gear or money, really, as long as
they have just enough to survive.

If you have neither unused slots nor low-level alts, you may
want to spend some points to unlock a new slot. A new slot costs
595 Turbine Points - a hefty amount, but you gotta spend points
to earn points, and this extra slot can pay for itself within a
few days by following the rest of this strategy a couple times.

Alternately, you can just roll your alt on a different server. The points are applied to the account, and all toons on that account, regardless of server, use the same store account. You may not be able to run the deeds with your friends (unless you convince them to join you) and you'll be a stranger in a strange land, but it's a viable option for people stuck with the basic 2-character F2P account.

If you somehow have no free character slots on any server, and all your toons are level-capped and deeded up... you probably don't need this guide.

Step Two: Method To The Madness

Method A: Find a Deeding Group

This can be a group of friends, a random PUG or whatever. To
speed things up, get at least two other people in a DPS-heavy
group. For best results, try to get one of them to bring a
higher-level toon (Champion or Hunter works best). If you can't
convince a small group of friends to earn roughly 50 Turbine
Points per hour, try advertising in regional channels. Deeding
is boring when you do it by yourself, but can be great fun when
you roll with a group.

Ideally, you will want to run with a very high-level character
tanking (see below). Find someone who needs the virtues from
these deeds, or who wants to farm the trash loot for a low-level
alt working on tasks in these areas, and who doesn't mind
patiently escorting a raw noob through these low-level areas. Or
someone who just wants to help for the sheer hell of feeling
super-powerful, taking sweet, sweet vengeance on the mobs that
once caused so much grief. Just about any high-level character
works.

This is the preferred method - it's less
technically-complicated, more social and usually less dangerous
than dual-boxing.

Method B: Dual-Box With An Alt Account

If you are a dedicated soloer, this method might work a bit
better for you. Make a second F2P alt account, roll a new toon
on it and get a few levels and some half-decent gear. This
doesn't have to be something you will use regularly, but it can
be handy to have an alt account for extra storage and the like.

Dual-boxing is pretty easy. All you gotta do is copy the
contents of your LotRO folder to a different location on your
hard drive. It's a pretty big folder, so you need lots of room
(around 13.5 GB currently). The folder to copy is C:\Program
Files\Turbine\The Lord of the Rings Online. If you have
installed LotRO on a different drive, change the drive letter.
For those of us using 64-bit operating systems, it's in the
Program Files (x86) folder. Right-click the The Lord of the
Rings Online folder and drag it, then select Copy from the menu.
This will create a duplicate of the entire game folder, complete
with its own executable file. Find the file TurbineLauncher.exe
in that folder, right-click and drag it to the desktop and
select "Create Shortcuts Here." You may want to give the
shortcut a different name than your "main" LotRO launcher icon.

Now you can run two copies of LotRO at the same time on the
same computer. Both copies will share the same settings and will
use the same folder for screenshots, music and UI settings. You
may want to turn graphics settings down a bit, and will
definitely want to play in windowed mode at a smaller
resolution.

Log in both accounts and set the lower-level character to
follow the higher-level character. You can create a shortcut on
your toolbar to make /follow a clickable skill by typing
/shortcut # /follow (where # represents the appropriate
quickslot; the main toolbar is numbered 1 - 12, next one up is
13 - 24, etc). Click /follow on your higher-level toon and start
grinding deeds - you are now farming TP.

One caveat: having multiple accounts can be potentially
problematic. Posting on the LotRO forums using
multiple accounts can get you banned, so don't do it.
Please be sensible and responsible with this new-found power.

Strategy: All Aboard The Pain Train

This is a fairly simple strategy that almost always works for
low-level deed-grinding. In order to get it to work well, there
needs to be at least one high-level character in the group
capable of area-effect attacks. A Champion does this well, or a
Guardian, but a Hunter or Minstrel will do just fine. It also
works with a larger group taking the place of the high-level
tank - a gaggle of lowbie Champions, for example.

The high-level tank/ambush party picks a spot and waits there,
and the low-level puller guy runs ahead to aggro a bunch of
mobs. Once he builds up a good train - 5 or 6 mobs - he runs
back to the ambush, who pulls them off with a carefully-timed
area-effect attack. Time for a Crude Illustration!

5 or 6 seems to be the ideal number - more than that and the
tank's AoE salvo might not catch them all, or the cumulative
effect of ranged attacks, poisons, bleeds and slows may be too
much for the squishy puller to handle. This is why it's called
the Pain Train - the puller will take a beating. Have some
morale pots ready or a healer standing by.

Step Three: The List

Okay, to understand the list and why some things are on it and
others are not, you must first realize that it's all about
time-efficiency. This list is designed to be fast and repeatable
- the kind of thing you can finish in a few hours, then rinse
and repeat. The slayer deeds are all for the mobs with
densely-packed "dens," or small areas with a large concentration
of mobs and a fast respawn rate. They are all 90-kill deeds (30
for the title, 60 for the virtue), but not all 90-kill slayer
deeds are time-efficient. For example, in Bree-land, 90 spiders
is super-easy: head to the tunnels in Archet, clear it out a few
times, done. But killing 90 Sickle-flies requires farming the
same 6 or 7 mobs over a wide expanse of marshland with a lot of
running and searching in between, and takes an annoyingly-long
time. In the Shire, goblins are densely-clustered in the camps
in the Greenfields, and killing 90 of those takes 15 - 20
minutes or so. Slugs for the slug-slayer deed are spread out all
around the Rushock Bog and finding 90 of them takes about an
hour.

Exploration and Lore deeds are always easy, and can be
accomplished while working on the slayer deeds. They're not
worth much in terms of Turbine Points, but because of the very
little work needed to complete them, they make the list.

Time to complete is approximate and based on having a
high-level character in the deeding group; having all
lower-levels or no-one over level 30 will increase the time
required. Travel time includes the amount of time running from
location to location, waiting for respawns, plus additional time
to locate out-of-the-way exploration deed spots.

For best results, start out in the Shire. The landscape is less
hostile there and travel time is reduced. You can get a few
levels by completing the Shire deeds, which makes the other
areas easier and faster.

THE SHIRE

ERED LUIN

BREE-LAND

Grand Total: 230 Turbine Points in 295
minutes - about 5 hours (or 275
Turbine Points in 7.25 hours if the more
time-intensive deeds are included). That's just short of
50 points per hour.

Step Four: Rinse And Repeat

After burning through the list, delete the disposable
point-farmer toon, roll a new one and do it again. For extra
efficiency, make sure to save the slayer deed accelerator tomes
you get from each new character's starting gift packages. These
can be used to speed up the slower slayer deeds
(Neeker-breekers, for example, or Barghests) and earn more
points quicker. Repeat as often as required. Those tomes are
bound to the account, so they can be mailed or placed into
shared storage, but not put into housing chests.

Your mileage may vary with the list - some groups may
accomplish the deeds faster or slower than others. And Bree-land
has many more deeds that can be accomplished fairly quickly by
lower-level groups.

Have your own methods of earning fast Turbine Points? Let us
know in our forums!