sammyfreak said:
So no Raids in places depicted in the book yet? Thats sort of a bummer.
In a review i read it was mentioned that the leveling system is a bit dull. How does it work?
Mines of Moria expansion is coming out soon. Supposedly you battle with the Watcher in The Water, and see the release, or at least the events leading to the release of the balrog that Gandalf eventually fights. I'm sure there are other things too.
You do do some non-raid quests that are with or assisting the book characters, or take place in famous locations. ie- Tom Bombadil, Weathertop, Halbarad the Ranger, Elronds sons, etc, some others I forget. There's even an instanced quest where you have to go on a walk with Frodo and let Gandalf know how he 'feels'. It is kind of weak, but it was better than nothing I suppose.
Oh yeah, there is one quest along the river by the Trollshaws where you try to catch Gollum after you set a fish trap.
Leveling is just done by questing for XP. Killing mobs gets you XP too. In the beginning of the game you didn't want to do quests too far above your level or you would run out of stuff to do before you hit lvl 50. I never really had that problem.
The reason is that turning in high-level quests (quest level higher than your characters level) gets you more XP, but turning in low level quests gets you less XP. The problem was that the high-level bonus didn't make up for the low-level loss and you would be short much XP when you ran out of quests.
Like I said, I didn't have this problem. I think it was more of the 'power-levelers' who wanted to hit 50 quick and then go park their horse outside the Bree Auction house and show off.
I'm pretty sure that with the added content over the last year and the new quest hubs they added have really lessened or made this problem disappear.