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The Gamespy review really pimped the deeds stuff where you gain abilities by accomplishing objectives rather than by straight levelling.

I played LOTRO a tiny bit in beta but my machine's RAM limits made me stop playing rather quickly.

Do people like this system? I've always really enjoyed it in what few places I've encountered it. Tactics Ogre for the GBA being one of them. (Although the game kind of sucked overall)

Having just spent two hours running pies around hobbiton to get a deed (and the accompanying "Pie Runner" title), hell yeah, I like it a lot.

I guess it's sort of like WOW talents, you get certain slots that open as you level, except you have to earn the traits to put in the slots through doing other things. And once they're in a slot, you can add levels to them. They're mostly quest oriented, in one way or another. You get +1 to a virtue for doing so many quests in an area. Or for doing a chain series of quests. Or from touring all the farms in the shire or all the ruins somewhere or whatever. Some are available to everyone, others are specific to classes or your race. (The racial ones all have a fairly easy one where you can overcome your racial stat weakness.)

Usually I'll level and then take a peek at what I'm close to getting. And maybe I'll have one more place in an area to visit or I'll be just this close to a "kill critters" type one and go find some and grind them.

A lot also have titles associated with them, like the badges in COH. That was the hook that got me into LOTRO. I loved the badges, I like the LOTRO titles even more.

 The power levelers who screamed through on quests are going be a bit gimped at 50 compared to those who did some deed grinds. The other night I sat in the lone lands and killed 50 goblins that were gray and green to get a extra point. I use mine to boost stats my gear doesn't, it pays to have some to switch around.

Its a different game.  You can play it the same but at its core it is a different game. You can scream its the same diku but it can be different,  You can bend classes using  deeds and no one has figured out how to power level these to the omgpownereser. its a small thing but in this game small things add up.

I like them, although I think some of the class specific ones have their conditions a little too high. Use Battle Shout 1,000 times? Arg...

I love them, but they become unfun if you concentrate too much on them and develop a "get them all" mentality. Especially on the killquests, I gave up on Slugs in the Shire. Too rare for their own good.

But the other deeds you accomplish more or less during your normal gameplay (concentrating on certain skills during combat, farming for money against the right enemies, etc).

*laughs* the slugs are on my list, the title is too good to pass up.

I always knew Numtini was a dirty Pie Runner!

I got off the fence and picked up a copy of LOTRO yesterday. 

I got a Pie-Eating Champion title and a Fly Swatter title. Gee, I am sold, this game rocks.

They took out the Dwarf Tosser title in one of the beta phases :cry:

If they ever move things so you can PVP in towns, I'm going to go create a monster and kill the hobbit at the hobbiton bridge twenty or thirty times.

Heh, that bridge hobbit sucks.  It's part of why my burglar isn't a pie runner yet.  He is Dodwise of the Quick Post though, and that's pretty dang nifty.

The deeds are great, IMO.  There are some that result in traits that are rather assy, but if you look around, you can find ones that are very useful and rather nice.  My biggest trait peeve right now is that the hunter class trait gained from the lv 15 quest is 65s to equip and provides tenths of a second induction time bonuses for two powers.  0.1 and 0.2 seconds faster just isn't noticeable....not to metion 65 silver to equip.  Ouch.

The hunter one is notorious. There's a lot of little fixes like that which they need to get onto and shouldn't, in theory, require much more than a few changes in tables.

If there is any rhyme or reason to the bridge hobbit I'm unaware of it. Sometimes she's there and just blocks you and then sometimes she's not. And I've stood at the bridge waiting for her to go away and had the timer run out.

What about the "uppercut" Champion trait? An attack that deals 15 damage. Fifteen. As dangerous as a loud laugh.
It's ok if they nerf the champion, but this trait is simply brokenly useless. And I am sure there are more like that.

I thought uppercut was a human racial trait.  I know that most races get some lame attack as one of the racial traits....could have sworn that uppercut was the human one.

Deeds are awesome.  I don't get them all, but I do focus on getting the ones that benefit my class.

It's a nifty idea, and the titles are fun too.

Dwarfs get headbutt.  It also does low damage, despite the likely location of a Dwarf head relative to most humanoids.

Right, uppercut is human. My bad.

And it's completely useless anyway. Completely. I feel insulted everytime I look at it. I even tried to delete it.

Meh, not entirely useless, you got some xp for earning it.  Heck, if every race gets a lame attack and then other, niftier racial traits, that's not too bad, I guess.  Sure, it would be cool if every trait was useful, but there's some polish issues like that.  Overall, I enjoy the game, haven't felt insulted by anything, but the useless traits are kind of lame.

I guess it matters less w/o pvp, but ANY differences between classes/races/whatever increase board whining by an order of magnitude.  That's why Bliz threw in the towel on pallies/shammys. 

Uppercut isn't completely useless.  I used it the other night to kill a mob that had done a stun on me that blanked all my attacks but uppercut.  Granted I had enough hp to survive until I was unstunned but it was still a nice find.

Well, killing a mob with a 15 damage attack is a fluke if you ask me. Anyway yes, maybe that's the point, as most mobs don't stun you but disarm you, meaning you can't attack (but can move) for a short while. I guess uppercut is the only attack that works in those situation. Still, 15 damage is a joke.

So is the dwarven headbutt. And I suspect all the other first race deeds. Its just flavour. It says "Humans are manual labourers, Dwarves use their heads", nothing more, nothing less.

Some of you don't fell happy when they can't conjure a tempest in a teapot once in a while.

No you are right. As a flavour skill I like it. I didn't see that from such perspective, but now I think you are right after all.
Still, being a wasted trait slot, it is forgotten pretty early.

If you look at the stats buffs you get from deeds and work out how much it takes to make a 1% difference in damage, hit, avoidance or anything that matters significantly to your character, then they all are pretty meaningless. I wish I'd copied a post from the beta boards where a guardian did the math for us, but he essentially proved that even most stats on armor were a complete waste of time to get. I vaguely remember the number for a 1% rise in crit for instance as being 30 agi. Similar numbers held up for might/dps and whatever stat control's hp and power regen. Dodge and Parry seem to need about 30 agi to gain 1%. 1 vitality gives you a whopping 3 hp.

On the plus side this appearanly means you can grind deeds naked and save on repair costs as armor value has very little effect on how hard you get hit as well.

I could not disagree more. At level 29 I just spent the last two days leveling all my slotted traits up to level 3 and 4and have seen a significant improvement in my game. I can pretty much chain kill mobs 4 levels above me now with very little downtime. I will get some hard numbers on my power and morale next time I am near a bard but at a guess I will say the traits give me a good 10 - 15 % boost just on those, and gave me a hand up on a lot of my other skills as well. Best way to grind traits though is level up then go back and spend an hour or two on greens and grays. Tonight I plan on finishing the enmity of the wargs which gives me insta travel to Bree on a 1 hour cool down.

Well that'll kinda save me 100s later on when I get that as a wayfaring skill (sure I bet the cooldown is shorter, but hey, horsie at 35.)  It also means I could finally change my map to a different location like Trestlebridge or Ost Guruth.  Of course, this assumes that it's a human or breeland trait that I somehow missed.

ETA -- Ahh, not till lv 29.  Oh well.

Some hard numbers

I currently have slotted

Virtues - idealism - 4, charity - 3, loyalty - 4, wisdom - 4 , valor - 3
Racial   - uppercut (worthless), Man of the 4th Age, Tactics and Might
Class    - Medium Armour, Light in the Dark, Heralds Hammer

With these I have Morale 0f 1071 and Power of 1105, removing them I have Morale of 856 and Power of 908. 215 more Morale(health) and 197 more Power (mana) so in real terms I can stand there and take three or four more hits, or drop 3 or four more heals on a group. On stats my might went from 82 to 79, Agility did not change, vitality dropped from 66 to 54
,will went from 137 down to 102, fate dropped from 97 to 85.

Take this for what it is worth, but those are hard numbers. I would say that the guardian that posted that the deeds had no effect had his head firmly up his ass. I have most of mine slotted for will (power) and health as a minstrel who is splitting his time 60% solo 40% group. Other classes would want to use different traits and I may even switch mine around when I know I will  doing a lot of solo or grouping.

Where you get to go after completing the level 29 trait "Enmity of the whatever" depends upon your race.  Dwarves go to Thorin's Gate, Elves to Rivendell, Hobbits to Hobbiton, Men to Bree.

More details here on traits.
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Traits (http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Traits)

The guardian post he refers to was about how armor doesn't mean much as you raise your level.
The problem with the guardian post was that it was comparing his armor 700 to his champion brother around 300 or 400.
Basically, he was saying that from 700 to 400, he was only getting hit for 5 more damage. Considering the fact that the monster was hitting for 55 instead of 50, i wouldn't consider it as useless as he was saying it is.

That said, armor is only used to compute the %resists. Common mitigation % is what's really interesting and what tells you how much you're going to get hit for.

For example, the greater barrows' boss can drop a spear (don't know if he has more items on his loot table). That spear is using Ancient damage instead of Common, which makes it a lot more interesting than a greater dps spear that does common damage.

p.s.: about the deeds, you couldn't be more wrong if you think they are useless. My guardian friend got all the vitality/will/morale boost deeds he could. At level 30, he has 2200 hp which is more than some level 40 guardians that levelled as quickly as possible. Now that he has enough hp, he can start focusing on block% increase and items that helps his mitigation more.

I'm impressed by what Deeds accomplish. They're basically a tonne of tiny and casual miniature 'dings'. I was skeptical if the game would rely on them too much but so far that hasn't been the case; they genuinely feel more like a nice bonus on top of what I was expecting.

LotRO has a whole has really executed a lot of small things like that well. In terms of game design--and surprisingly so--it's probably the most valuable new game I've played in a while. Little things like Deeds, how the change from Health to Morale changes the vibe of 'melee healing', the music system, the quickly developed and not too difficult but story and scripting heavy chapter instances, etc... There's just a lot of small improvements that fine-tune the WoW model very well which I hope to see in future MMOs.

What is the distinction between health and morale? When I played in beta it seemed to me that it was the exact same thing.

Also can you slot in which deeds you have active or are they all permanent?

No difference between health and morale, really.

You have the nifty mood modifiers, but health = morale.

You can swap out traits (the end result of deeds) at the bard for a fee that varies depending on the trait.  Racial and class traits cost more to slot than virtues. 

Nothing in terms of actual gameplay. Where the difference can lay is just in its vibe. The sort of atmosphere or feel of it. Consider your classic fighter class. In a lot of games, a big self heal can often feel odd. "Too magical". But with Morale, it just makes more sense. It's a very subjective thing so it's not something I've seen a lot of folks touch on. But as someone that's always felt pretty strict about how or when heals feel right in past games for physical classes, Morale replacing Health is just an interesting twist.

Hope and Dread is the same way. It has a small affect on gameplay, but with that aside, it adds neat atmosphere to the game. It's another little interesting detail that really isn't that major, doesn't have all that much of an impact as a whole, but for the gamer who cares about atmosphere it can add a nice dose of flavor.

In the very least it's sort of refueled both areas a little for innovation. I don't think I've questioned HP/MP for a while but the last couple months it's been one of my favorite topics to casually brainstorm on.

Kyan is right. You don't die and get endlessly resurrected. You're forced to "retreat because your morale is too low to keep on fighting." It makes the game seem more...real in a weird way. Just that one change in terms. And you don't have a stat penalty or xp debt. Your heart is filled with dread after your loss so you fight a little less well than you did before until you shake it off. (the timer wears out.)

It's basically all immersion stuff. Honestly, somehow this game is much more fun than it felt in beta. I don't know why but I'm totally addicted to it now.

The only place that falls down is when you, uh, fall down. From enough of a height to "retreat" instantly. But other than that, it's very flavorful.

I think CoX has numbed my instinctual dread of heights.

--GF

One of the nice touches is that the NPCs will often say things like "I know this hasn't destroyed the <insert foozle here> but it will beat them back for a time" when you complete a kill x number of y type quest.  It's not a major thing but it was a nice way to handle the fact that you really haven't ended the great spider menace forever.

One of the big things I like are 'quest hubs'.  Little camps or a town where you collect 5 to 10 quests.  Then you go knock them all out and bring them all in at once.  Watch that xp bar move!

Something that I didn't notice anyone explicitly calling out that I really like about deeds: they capture the same zeal for stuff-doing that Achievements do on the Xbox 360. If you're not familiar, Xbox 360 games all come with 'stuff you can do' that next you Gamer Points. You do the stuff in-game and *blip* a little alert shows up saying that you've earned an achievement. Lots of developers have put these in as awards for either completing story stuff (progressing through the game), or for doing stuff you wouldn't normally do.

Same thing here: why would I kill all those wolves/bears/boars/slugs/goblins/midgets/clowns if not for a deed normally? It gives you an incentive bigger than xp for grinding. Absolutely awesome; hope it shows up in more games in the future.

One disadvantage to Deeds: I'm a completist about stuff like that. So I'm grinding like a crazy man. On the plus side I have lots of traits and titles now.

I do wonder how deeds will hold up when I make alts though.

I know that feeling Riggswolfe. I convinced myself that I can let kill deeds of those extremely rare mobs slide, though. For sanities sake.

No man should have to try to get the slugs in the shire title for that exact reason. 

The slugs-related deed (and any other that involve killing "rare" creatures) is vastly easier if one uses the old MMO trick of killing every single thing in the area.  As new things spawn, some (smallish) fraction will be slugs.

Unlike EQ (thankfully!) there don't seem to be any of those super-crappy "spawn once every x hours/days/weeks" mobs in LOTRO.

Yes, that's just what I was going to say.  I just got the slug thing because I wanted the virtue that comes with it.  I killed not only the slugs but also the gnats or flies or whatever they are, and anything else that spawned in the slug area.  Didn't really take any longer than any other deed to get.

The mobs were grey to me, which I think is the way to do it, because it's faster.

Except you kill the other mobs and somebody runs around behind you killing the slugs. That gets old after a while as well.

A challenging deed is the one to collect the 8 flowers of the Old Forest.  Some are easy, some are murderously hard!
Three elite trees surround one while others sit along the road.  I have seven but I MUST have that last one!

The ones that drive me most nuts are the class ones.  I actually adjust my playstyle so I can level them up.

Sadly I do too. Right now I find myself thinking "oh shit, that fight ended and I forgot to activate flurry!"

That's annoying, but when it happened to me, I shot a tell to the guy and asked him to please kill everything, not just the slugs, so that more slugs would spawn.  It's amazing to me how many people seem unaware of this concept.

I find it amusing that both the Shire slug deed and the Bree Barghest deed are for Determination and both deeds require you to kill mobs with low or shared spawns.  Typically, it's one of the traits I'm trying to level. 

They certainly both need determination, so as a Roleplayer I applaud the choice. As a human being I cry myself to sleep about it.  :-D

It certainly is good for my coinpurse, though. Since I kill everything there I made over 100 silver out of vendor drops. And I'm about halfway through.

Hear hear! The goblin killing deed quest in The Shire is an excellent place to get some cash. I went on the grind for about thirty minutes at level 12 getting good experience and drops and walked away with about 40s or so. Came in handy when I decided to start cooking.

For the first time today I really did a grind.  I needed 150 orcs for my Rivendell teleport skill.  So a'killin' I went!

Went to Ost Cyrn in Lone Lands and after an hour or so I got them all, didn't die once, they were green to me.

Here's a little surprising bonus; I sold 220sp of vendor trash!  Also, about 7 magic items (yellow) dropped.

So it appears to me grinding is a valid playstyle in LoTR.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I find allot of my deeds are come pleated through the course of..well...just playing. Some times i actively chase them, but not always...and every were i go..new ones are opened up.

This system is also highly expandable.