Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

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

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

Deed	Where	Value	Time to complete
Farms of the Shire	Guide Page	5	Complete while working on Slayer deeds
Sights of the Shire	Guide Page	5
Wolf-slayer	Run a pattern between Dora Browlocke's farm and the Wolf Den just north of it	15	15
Spider-slayer	The quarry at Scary, including the cave	15	15
Goblin-slayer	Either of the goblin camps in north Greenfields	15	15
Brigand-slayer	The path by the waterfall near just southwest of Woodhall	15	15
Harvest-fly Slayer	The Yale-height near Stock; clear the hill, scour the fields nearby, repeat	15	15
Travel time			30
Total		85	105
If the Slug-slayer deed is included, add 15 Turbine Points and 60 minutes to the total.

ERED LUIN

Deed	Where	Value	Time to complete
Places of the Dwarves	Guide Page	5	Complete while working on Slayer deeds
Elf Ruins	Guide Page	5
Rath Teraig Exploration	Guide Page	5
Scouting the Dourhands	Guide Page	5
Goblin-slayer	Orodost, the fort across the road from Noglond	15	15
Wolf-slayer	around the pond in Nen Hilith	15	15
Spider-slayer	the webbed area just beside the south gate in Rath Teraig	15	15
Brigand-slayer	run a patrol around Kheledul	15	15
Hendroval-slayer (title only)	Kheledul and Vale of Thrain areas	5	Complete while working on Brigand and Goblin slayer
Travel time			45
Total		85	105
Add 10 points and 30 minutes for Advanced Hendroval-slayer

BREE-LAND

Deed	Where	Value	Time to complete
Ruins of Bree-land	Guide Page	5	Complete while working on Slayer deeds
History of the Dunedain	Guide Page	10
Barrow-downs Exploration	Guide Page	5
Brigand-slayer	Blackwold Headquarters	15	15
Spider-slayer	tunnels and Sprigley's cellar in Archet	15	15
Barghest-slayer (title only)	northern Barrow-downs	5	10
Neeker-breeker Slayer (title only)	Midgewater Marsh and around the pond in Andrath	5	15
Travel time			30
Total		60	85
For Advanced Neeker-breeker and Barghest-slayer, add 20 points and 45 minutes.

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!