LotRO releases new skirmish dev diary for Volume III: Book 1

They get repetitive if you do them 1000 times. Anything gets repetitive if you do it too much. The new Rift skirm is alot of fun. It's pretty short which is nice if you just want to have some fun for 20 minutes. The new 12 man raid skirmishes for DG are nice for the casual raider. Not everyone has full radiance gear to run real raids so these shorter, casual raids are a nice way to have fun with 12 people. Skirmishes are really designed for the VERY casual player. People can get decent rewards from skirmish vendors, especially the new armor and jewelery, and it doesn't take a large time investment.

Yeah, like I said, I just don't find them fun, these are boring on the third run through, let alone the 1000th

Forsaken Inn in the Lone Lands would be perfect. Go out of Bree South gate, and keep following the road, it's quite far, but a good quest hub to get you reacquainted with the game, since they recently had a revamp to the whole zone.

@Mr Angry

Thanks for the tip

Remember, you can always ask questions to the 'general public' by using "/advice MESSAGE". This way you will talk in the 'advice' channel. Lots of people there ready to help you out! Also following the epic quest will help you out a great deal, it will guide you through places, places, quest-hubs, and level appropriate content.

Happy Gamin'!

I bought a lifetime sub for LotRO shortly after MoM came out and I don't regret it at all. This game took me several tries to get into (that was before they revamped the whole level 1-30 experience), but is also the one that keeps calling me back once I "got" it. In fact, I felt that the lifetime sub was such a value that I bought the one for CO as well. Oops!

Regarding Mr. Angry's hatred of skirmishes I have to disagree. Yes, they are repetitive if done too much but isn't that true of anything? LotRO has often received complaints due to a lack of end game content or dungeons. The skirmish system is really a form of dungeon. It has some big advantages, though:

1) They start becoming available at 30 and then scale to your level. You can always go back to your favorites and they will remain as challenging as the first time you did them.
2) You don't have to travel to them. You enter from anywhere and return to exactly where you left.
3) You can adjust the difficulty to increase the challenge and rewards if you want.
4) They scale (and change to an extent) to your group size. Solo, 2-man (with this update), 3-man, full party, or 12-man raid.
5) Everyone gets a henchman. This means that at any group size you're going to take on bigger challenges than you normally would with that group.
6) They don't take massive amounts of time, so it's a lot easier to get groups together.

A steady diet of skirmishes would get old very quickly. But doesn't the same hold true of dungeons and raids? That's the thing that always kills WoW for me -- once I get to max level I get tired very quickly of seeing the same dungeons over and over again. The skirmish system has been designed to let them introduce new ones very quickly, which is why we're seeing four of them in this update.

I agree that skirmishes should not be a replacement for new zones and quests, and the previous dev diary gave clues that Turbine feels the same way. It sounds very much to me like skirmishes are going to be the key to making things like Helm's Deep work. With this next update the game is going to be making the first steps toward heading south and it won't surprise me at all if about the same time this update goes live they'll be announcing the Riders of Rohan expansion as well. Hopefully we'll also see a new zone in an update before that; the diary kind of hinted that we might. But regardless, if skirmishes are indeed the key to making Helm's Deep and other epic battles happen then I'm all in favor of the groundwork that they're laying now. The more they push the system and tweak it the more options they'll have when the really big stuff comes!