Cooking for a Minstrel in LoTRO

or, masochism with a streak of stubbornness  are good virtues if you want to be a successful LoTRO crafter.

Well THAT was interesting..

So I switched my Minstrel to Yeoman. I did it so I could cook and tailor and not worry about farming mats on a toon that basically has the survivability of a paper doll. Its not too hard to level this stuff if you are in it just to get to top level. But, as I soon discovered, acquiring the ingredients in order to get what you want, say… level-appropriate buff food so you can reasonably solo content like other classes do without buff food, is a complete pain.

In order to get three full stacks of the best food I could make for my Rock-n-Roll healer, I ended up with Expert level cooking and Expert level farming. All I wanted was a stack each of trail food, cooked food and what they call fortifying food. It took me two days to do just that.

Yes, I said that right. Two days. I didn’t get any questing or actual progression towards end game content while I scrabbled and farmed and mixed ingredients and finally cooked enough food for three simple stacks. While I think the *idea* of the way LoTRO has done cooking is kinda cool (who doesn’t love real world comfort food like Steak and Eggs, Hearty Carrot Soup and Roast Beef Platters), its a total pain in the ass if you actually NEED this stuff so your healer can play the game at a level that other classes enjoy.

One of the more aggravating moments was when I was making Trail Food. Ingredients are not too hard to gather, but you need a campfire to make them – hence reinforcing the concept of being on the trail. I like that idea, its kinda gimmicky and cute. But in reality, its not so great. There are two ways to do it. You can buy all your stuff in advance and hustle down the road a few towns over to get to an area in the Shire (or wherever you craft) that has campfires. Then you cook the trail food. If you are missing  ingredients, you must run  back a few towns to the crafting area or your bank or the mailbox or god forbid the farm and then back again.

Or you can do it the way I did it. Make a campfire with the cooking skill that requires NPC purchasable kindling and raw wood (from a forester craftsperson) and cook right there in the crafting area. Only problem with that is the fire doesn’t last long enough to cook 20 pieces of food. And its not nearly long enough if you have to sort through your bags for a moment or have to grind flour real quick or whatever. So you gotta use a lot of firewood kindling stuff. It gets expensive when its wood that you cant cut yourself. And its annoying to think of the time and money you are wasting on all this just so you can level.

Top that annoyance off when you are crafting trail food item 19 of 20 and you are on your third campfire since you started, and the game bugs out not letting you make the rest of your trail food. So you gotta log out and in real quick and ya.. you saw that coming. The campfire died just as I was making my last item, and I got to make yet another one just for one last item in my stack.

Four campfires. Two days of farming and cooking, three bloody stacks of food that will be obsolete in 5 levels. >.< I get the feeling that the makers of LoTRO don’t really think things through at times… So, armed with fresh stacks of food, considerably poorer and my alts’  mailboxes stuffed with leftover foods I had to make to get to an appropriate level for my Minstrel’s needs, I set off back into the lone lands. I wont be back to craft for another few levels and fervently hope by the next time I need something I have sufficiently recovered from the trauma induced from making buff food for level 25.

I didn’t feel bad that the NPC was stuck in one of my campfires. IMO, she and all the other NPC cooks in this game are a little sadistic and probably deserves it.