Thread: Which Quests to Do?

I'm confused about how I should go about doing quests. I'm an elf, and started in Ered Luin. Should I do every quest there before doing any in other areas? Because when I go through The Shire, I see loads of low level quests I can do there, but if I do all in Ered Luin, I'll be a higher lever than those quests. Will I ever be a level when I can't go back and do the lower ones?

So what's the best way to do them? Sorry if this is confusing, let me know and I'll try to explain my questions better.

Thanks

LOTRO has about 3 times as many quests as you need to level up. It will be very common for you to find lots of quests you haven't done which are now well below your level.

There will never come a time when you're unable to do the quests - the only thing that will happen in is the quest rings will go grey rather than gold, and if you choose to do the quest you will receive no XP for it. You'll still get to experience the quest and reap the other rewards, though the quest is unlikely to be much of a challenge and the rewards probably won't be very useful to your high level character.

What's the best way to do them? Depends on you. Some people like to do all the quests on their character even if they are low level. These people will go back to the lower level areas and do all the quests anyway. Others prefer to only do quests while on-level for them to maintain the challenge. These people are more likely to roll a new character and take them on a different path, experiencing new quests they haven't done before.

Completely up to you in the end!

That's exactly what I needed to know, thank you very much!

Originally Posted by Ozeagle

... the only thing that will happen in is the quest rings will go grey rather than gold, and if you choose to do the quest you will receive no XP for it.

This is a common misconception (even a dev posted this once in a dev diary), but the truth is that grey quests will still give XP. Very little XP, but I have gained entire levels doing nothing but grey quests.
I believe the confusion comes from the fact that there are some quests that do not reward XP at all, even when done on level.

There is another reason to do the quests in the other 2 starting areas (shire, archet/bree): deeds. There are several explorer and slayer deeds in each area along with deeds for completing a number of quests. I always take all of my new toons through all the starter areas to finish these deeds, both for getting virtues and turbine points. All these deeds take a lot less time than deeds in higher lvl areas (where I usually only finish the explorer and quest deeds and the slayer deeds that give me a virtue I would like to have).

Yes, as others have replied, quests will 'grey out' once they get too low for you, but will still be available. By default, grey questgivers will not show up on your minimap, however, there is a toggle which will put them back on again buried somewhere within the game options, if I remember aright.

As well as deeds, a lot of quests will give you reputation for a given faction, so an elf who wants to increase rep with the Hobbit's might want to run through the quests in the Shire as well, the same goes for Human rep in Bree.

Being a new player myself I would definitely recommend completing, at least, all quests and deeds in your first area. The reputation, extra TP and rewards set you up so well for everything else to come. You make a fortune in gold selling off unwanted drops, complete daily tasks really easily accumulating drops from the slayer deeds and professions are a breeze with the abundance of materials you can also collect along the way.

Some recommendations based on what I did to make things easier..

Use the wiki, it will help you out so much with regard to so many things, especially for level of drops for daily tasks and who takes what (know what to keep and what to sell).

For deeds I found this site invaluable www.burgzerg.com/deeds-codex/deeds-codex

Use your TP to get riding skill and buy your horse asap. (concentrate on slayer deeds to get the tp and loot every kill, sell all junk and you will get 500 silver really quickly)

Purchase vault space (after you have bought your horse). The 3 bag restriction is a pain but by using gold to pay for vault space first I found I could virtually empty my 3 bags before heading out, which is a much better long term option than buying extra bag/s imo.

The 2 gold cap I also found very restrictive, if anyone intends to stay as f2p I would recommend spending tp to unlock this early as well. You can then make full use of the Auction House and purchase even more vault space.

My biggest recommendation though is to buy an expansion pack or go vip. I bought the Mithril Edition for £20 in the end as it seemed the best option to start with because it opens other areas, gives you another char slot and gives you 2k TP to spend. Depending on how easy I can unlock other expansion areas with TP later, I may well go vip instead as it gives 500 TP a month which is pretty much the price to unlock other expansion areas, so could easily be the better option in the long run.

Originally Posted by wachkussen

Yes, as others have replied, quests will 'grey out' once they get too low for you, but will still be available. By default, grey questgivers will not show up on your minimap, however, there is a toggle which will put them back on again buried somewhere within the game options, if I remember aright.

That would be the Show Trivial Quest Icons setting under UI settings, if memory serves.

You will surely skip many quests and level up fast leaving many places untouched considering questing. But you will sooner or later visit accidently those untouched places because some questing paths will lead you there.
-Its good here in LOTRO that questing is not linear. You can go werever you want and there are many same-level regions to quest. For example , you do your questing in Lone Lands and pass the North Downs because its almost same level range. So no need to do them both on 1 toon, but maybe later you will wish to do unexplored regions with your other toons.

Cheers !

On some of my early alts, I picked up quests whenever I came across them, so for instance my elf hunter started doing a bunch of quests in Ered Luin where he began the game, then he needed to go to Bree for something, and I picked up several Shire and Bree-land quests for him along the way. I ended up with my quest log completely full and quests scattered across three regions and several quest hubs from each of those regions. This required me to clear out space in my quest log before I could do anything else, while at the same time making it difficult to clear out because it wasn't clear what I should be working on or where.

Now I'm following a different pattern. My character picks up all the quests available in one quest hub and works towards completing those. If that takes him to other hubs or other regions, I may pick up a continuation quest following in the same quest chain as the one I finished there, but I don't pick up any additional quests in those other regions until I decide I'm going to move my base of operations there. Only once I finish all the quests originating from a particular quest hub (or at least all those available at my current level), do I move on to the next quest hub and start picking up the quests there.

(The only significant exception to this is the Epic quest line. I try to do long stretches of that in a row, going from one quest to the next to the next, regardless of where they're at. So I've ended up sort of separating that from the landscape questing. In any given play session, I'm either doing landscape quests based on whichever quest hub I'm focusing on and ignoring the epic quests, or else I'm following the epic quest line and ignoring other regular quests.)

YMMV, but I've found this pattern works much better for me than my original pick-up-anything-whenever-I-come-across-it pattern. It gives me a more concise and focused set of objectives where I know what to be working on. I also manage to keep track of the stories better, since I'm dealing with a more limited range of NPCs and I can remember the local issues going on with their stories. That, in turn, adds to my sense of immersion, so I enjoy the game more.

Now personally, I'm a completionist, so I'm going to eventually get to each of the regions and all the quest hubs in each region, even if this means I'm doing a lot of quests after I'm over-leveled and they're grey and easy. The other common approach a lot of people take is to do just enough content with their first character to level him up while skipping a lot of other content, then create another character and level him up doing a lot of the content that was skipped on their first character. I'm guessing that focusing on specific areas would be even more important for those people because it would allow them to keep track of what content was done before and what was skipped, so they can focus on previously-skipped content when playing their next character.

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One region you might want to consider questing in even if you're over level is the Shire. There is a deed which rewards a hat that gives +2 hope. Very handy at low levels as an anti-dread tool.

Wow thank you all for all the replys. I've picked up some great tips from you all. Please keep them coming.

Thanks