I love the Shire. It is undoubtedly the best zone in the Lord of the Rings Online. The main difference between it and lets say a WoW zone is that it appears more alive. The NPC hobbits are moving around, giving a semblance of leading their own lives. You can hear them chatting about daily events, and there is even hobbit proposing marriage to his girlfriend, after which they run off to tell their parents. Even more importantly LotRO has a memory for what you did. Early you get a quest to join the local constabulary, the Bounders, and after doing a lot of quests for them you earn the titel honourary sherrif (sic). And from then on every time you pass a NPC bounder, they greet you by name. Things like that are a welcome change from WoW NPCs, who greet you as a stranger minutes after you finished all their quests for them.
But as much as I love the place, now that I can't farm any more, there isn't much to do for a level 18 minstrel in the Shire. I haven't done all quests there, there are far too many for that, but the remaining quests are all grey to me. So I decided to play my alt, the hobbit guardian yesterday. I leveled him up to level 9, mostly by doing the 12 post runs. These are easy to do if you know the place, and have the added advantage that you "discover" all the blank spots of the map in the process (which doesn't give any xp in LotRO, by the way).
If you remember, my guardian is the "son" of my minstrel, role-playing wise. Technically he's a twink. Guardians can only wear up to medium armor before level 15, and my minstrel as yeoman has tailoring besides farming and cooking, so I made the best possible medium leather armor for my guardian. That makes a big difference. This is a lot more clever than what I did in WoW, where I leveled my warrior to 60 first, and then started a priest. In all games tanks are the most gear-dependant class, and thus the best target for getting twinked. So leveling my healer first and twinking my tank with it works better than the other way round.
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