Travel Notes

Traveling has an interesting blend of options in LOTRO. No big new ideas, but a synthesis of them. Options include

• Walking. Slow, but maybe not as slow as it seems. Though it might be affected by how fast your computer is, which would suck.


• Swift horse between starting cities. At 1s, this is the best travel deal in the game. Use it, leverage it, exploit it. For many levels, for several toons, I bound in Bree and would use this to go "home".


• Other swift horses. These are often level limited (must be level 30, etc.) and seem quite expensive (35s). But somehow, when you get to that level, they don't seem so expensive any more.


• Stablemaster routes to places you've been before. The cheapest of these is 5s. For a long time I avoided these because 5s was a lot. It isn't now. These are faster than a personal horse, and give you the opportunity to visit the little elves room while you are transported.


• Port to racial city. Men go to Bree, Hobbits to Michel Delving, Dwarves to Thorin's Hall, and Elves to Rivendell. Yes, Rivendell. The other three are pretty much equivalent because of the cheap fast travel between the starting cities.


• A horse. Costs a gold plus, and you must be level 35 and complete a couple quests first. It seems expensive, but right about that level you seem to start pulling in a lot more money. I scrimped and saved for it, and two weeks after I bought it, I had made the money back. These are a nice option.


• Port to house. This requires a travel ration, available for 2s at the Supplier. Not terribly useful as a transport option, but it could be worse. I think Bree is best in terms of pure location. The elf housing is the worst. It takes me 7 minutes to walk into Michel Delving and hit the AH from my house. Bree takes more like 5 minutes. Still, it was handy for certain things. I would port to house, sell, AH, repair, maybe do some crafting, distribute stuff to alts, and then map back to my quest hub.


• Port to kinship house. Requires a travel ration. Yes, if your kinship has a house, you get a port to it, too. I don't use it a lot, but it can come in handy.


• Summoning horn. Requires 2 travel rations, I think. Takes you to a dungeon. Can be very handy to let you go into town via map, sell, repair and then get summoned back. You just have to have one person stay at the dungeon.


• Captain summoning. Not sure what level they get it, but it also requires a travel ration.


• Hunter routes and campfires. Hunters have fixed routes that they can use to teleport their group to, and they can bind any one campfire in the game and port to it as well. This requires a travel ration or two.

The art people at Turbine really really know how to make terrain. It looks beautiful, and it makes things seem much farther apart than they really are. I'm constantly amazed at how they manipulate my perception of distance. There are so many times I find myself thinking of a 5 minute walk as an heroic undertaking.