Without much ado, Almaburg left The Shire on Sunday night. With a deep sigh, he crossed the Brandywine Bridge having completed ever Deed, Quest and activity there was to do in The Shire. The only exception to this completionist binge was the chicken quests that required leaving the shire. With this experience, I know that I grew as a player, and I think that I have a new found respect for The Shire.

There are a few resources that I would recommend if anyone else where to try this experiement would be:

On top of these two guides, I would recommend all of the usual LOTRO resources for classes and crafting.

Overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed the experience. As I mentioned before, I got a new found respect for the zone, and explored it in a way that I never had. What I also enjoyed about it was the slow pace. My experience with MMOs in the past has always been to try to level as quickly as I can. I would race for the end game, rarely reaching it, trying to “finish” the game. Why did I rarely reach it? I would burn out on the game. My focus on nothing but the next level would remove so many aspects from the game that I wouldn’t really get the true flavor of the game.

With LOTRO, it’s always been different. As my leveling was artificially gated by the fact that I could not out-level my wife, on any character, meant that I’ve always played a lot of alts. This has allowed me to see much more of the game than I would have seen racing my character to the level cap. Even then, however, I would try to find a way to level my character as effeciently as possible, and I wouldn’t focus on getting the most out of each zone.

With this experiment, I explored The Shire as I hadn’t in the past. In fact, I had tried to level a couple of characters through The Shire, but I would eventually leave to level in Archet and Bree. This time, I went through all of the quest chains and deeds.

One of my favorites was the Pie Deed. For those of you who don’t know this Deed, it asks you to collect pies from around The Shire and return them to Hobbiton. It’s a challenge because not only do you have to return the pies before the time runs out (it is rather generous though), you also have to avoid the “Hungry Hobbits”, which will make you fail the quest if you get too close. It’s a fun little Deed that asks you to do something more than kill 10 boars.

And that Deed is a perfect example of the design decisions behind The Shire. Although there are plenty of Quests and Deeds that require combat, there are so many that ask you to do something else that it is a great break from your typical MMO starter zone.

I would highly recomend that everyone try leveling through the Shire at least once. If you have the patience to go through the non-combat quests, I think that you’ll enjoy it a lot.

See you in-game!