Trolling

Travelling in the Trollshaws involves a lot of falling off of cliffs.

During my first trip through the Trollshaws I was struck by how many kill X of X quests were thrown at me during the ride to Rivendell. Looking back at it now there's something unintentionally funny about my original comment:

“Since I'm not, for now, being sidetracked by other quests in the region...”

Here's the thing – there basically aren't other quests in the region. There's a few, but almost every quest I picked up outwith the Epic Story was a kill X of Y. I was working on so many kill quotas I could have been back in Requiem, except enemies die rather less messily in LOTRO.

The Trollshaws has its moments. It makes a lot of use of vertical space, which is why there's so much sliding down slopes/falling off cliffs. It's also nice to look at and the music is excellent, but that's more or less a given in LOTRO. Having played through it now I'm even more certain that Evendim exists mainly to fill in the gap that this zone creates in the levelling path, and it's actually made me warm more to Evendim more than I did when I was running that zone. There's not much to the Trollshaws and the profusion of repeatable kill quests, complete with cut and paste quest text, feels like an attempt to make a small amount of content go a very long way.

The scenery is nice but it does get a bit samey, because with the exception of a few recognizable landmarks like the Fords of Bruinen there's not much to differentiate individual areas of this zone, and I could rarely navigate by sight alone. I relied on stablemasters a lot more than I usually do.

The north of the Trollshaws is basically Impassable Slopes: The Game. There's a lot of that oldschool MMO zone design where you have to follow a mob-strewn path that winds around for what feels like forever to get to a place that you'd have reached in two minutes if you could have climbed a steep hill, and there's little or no indication that you're going in the right direction because of the aforementioned lack of landmarks and a zone map that is utterly useless.

Most of the enemies up there are also elite mobs, and the tight terrain makes it virtually impossible to avoid aggro'ing most of them. Elites can't kill me – not one on one and definitely not when I have a few levels advantage over them as I did here – but it wasn't long before grinding through them started to feel like work.