For me, one of the most exciting aspects of the F2P launch was the introduction of Lua Scripting.  I posted one of my beta videos a while back and was very excited about the Dev Diary as well.  Now that I’ve finally gotten things a bit more squared away on my characters, I’ve grabbed a few of the Plugins and have things rather set up for me, although I’m still tweaking things.  I’m still not completely sure I’m happy with the placement of the BuffBars Plugin but that will come with more group play.

Before I get to the UI, I did want to remind Warden’s to head up to Forochel and grab the Warden muster up there, this vendor is in the main tent in Suri-kyla.

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For now, the 3 best Lua resources are the Live Forums, LOTRO Interface, and LOTRO Plugins.  The all have many of the same plugins with documentation, instructions, and places for feedback.

The first plugin I’d recommend is the Plugin Manager as it allows you to more easily manage all your plugins.  Since the entire Lua system is still in beta, there’s still no automatic way to load and unload plugins, so this is the best solution.  However, to make it a little easier, I also added a couple of buttons on my UI to more easily do this each time I log on.  In the chat window, I typed in the following:

  • /alias add ;PlugMan /plugins load manager
  • /alias shortcut ;PlugMan 3
  • /alias add ;LM /manager
  • /alias shortcut ;LM 3

I pulled these from the very helpful forum post on macros and aliases and the lines above basically make 2 aliases and put them on your shortcut bars.  Now what I did was move anything off the 3 button such that I could map it there (easier then remembering the numbers higher then 10 as to which was which) and then move the new buttons to where I wanted them to be.  Certainly you can tweak the names there, but hopefully you get the idea.  This way when I log on, I just click the two buttons and my plugins all load up.

After the PluginManager, for my Warden certainly the Travel Window plugin is very handy.  This allowed me to clear out quite a bit of my quickslot bars.  And finally I’ve used the Palantir plugin for the morale and mana displays with the BuffBars plugin to help out with buffs and debuffs.  This also allowed me to get rid of the character portrait panel by shrinking it and moving it behind the mini-map.  I certainly don’t have everything totally mapped out the way I like, but here’s how I have things set up so far.  I leave the top right area open for my Vent overlay so that’s why it is blank.  I’ll post some videos here as I go, but I was fighting with my computer and my own user errors so take a peak at the below snapshots in the meantime.

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