Back in Rivendell, Bilbo Baggins asks me to find Gollum's cave. Dude, I was just there. I even blogged about it on Fidgit.com! Man, if I had 5 copper pieces for every time that happened in an MMO, I could buy an epic mount.

Read today's Lord of the Rings Online game diary after the jump.

So Bilbo wants me to find Gollum's cave. However, I can't go back into Goblin Town alone. Not at level 45. These goblins are too tough for me alone. Which is thing #37 I hate about MMOs. You'd think a goblin would be a goblin. But, no. The power of a creature depends entirely on where it's placed and whether the developers want you to go to that place yet. I can go back into the North Downs and wade through those goblins without breaking a sweat. But I can't go into Goblin Town without plenty of help. It's the same with worms, orcs, bandits, wolves, bears, spiders, and so on. The type of creature matters less than the ground on which it stands.

Besides, I'm ready to move on from the Misty Mountains for the time being. I pore over my quest list and discover a bunch of dangling quest lines that were too low level back in the North Downs and the Trollshaws. I even have a quest left over from the Lone Lands. Time to clear that out. Like any good quest list, once it's neatly trimmed based on my current level, my path is clear: Angmar or Forochel. Lord of the Rings Online is great about letting you level in your choice of a couple of different areas.

I've had my fill of snow in the Misty Mountains, and I understand that Farochel is more frozen wastes, so it's back to Angmar. I've done pretty well for myself out there. I'm fitted with a nice set of armor from one of the tribes of hillmen in Angmar. They're a scrappy bunch. The evil cities in Angmar are occupied by hillmen and orcs. There are statues here that radiate dread, which has a detrimental effect on character stats and even causes a brief visual disorientation. LOTRO teaches you this early on when you meet Nazgul at the very beginning of the game. Dread is like the tangible reek of the Witch-King. It usually means you're on the right track.

My map is bound to a settlement in Angmar called Aughaire, flooded with blood red pools. Out here, it's barren and perpetually night. Something strange is happening in the sky. The clouds squirm. There's a weird whistling wind, like music slightly off key. The entire area fairly crawls with evilness. This is clearly the place a witch-king would come from.

The developers at Turbine gave Angmar a great update several months ago, putting in new quests, creatures, and even settlements. When I was previously in Angmar, before the update, it was the site of probably two of the most difficult quests I'd encountered. The first was a difficult trek through tunnels full of cave worms to fight a bunch of giants. Even the entrance to the caves was difficult to get through, requiring a weirdly timed jump to avoid getting caught on a rock outcropping. I failed that quest many times, even with good groups who knew what they were doing. The second difficult quest was to collect fire drake eggs from narrow mountain passes where the drakes respawned nearly as quickly as you could kill them. What's more, each egg was only available to one person at a time, so you had to multiply the number of eggs you gathered by the number of party members doing the quest.

But now Turbine has fine-tuned Angmar. The difficult edges are smoothed out a bit, and those quests aren't nearly as difficult as they used to be. What's more, there's a lot to do up here. I creep thorugh the city of Dun Covad alone, working my way through orcs and dread statues and accidentally finishing up four quests in one trip. Hello level 46! But soon I'm comfortable enough that I'm ready to try someplace entirely new. Farochel, here I come.

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