A few weeks ago, Turbine gathered questions from players so that they could choose a few to answer. Well, the answers are out. Most of the questions felt like they were planted to highlight features we already know exist in the Mirkwood mini-expansion. Sapience admitted to answering a dev-written question during a dev-chat back in June, so I’m not too surprised. But that’s not the point of this particular blog entry. This is about gear-gating.
One of the questions they chose to answer was about radiance gear-gating. Currently, if you have 5 dread you will cower every few seconds which interrupts all your skills and movement. The interrupt happens so often that you can’t get through the inductions of any skill which lasts more than a couple seconds. Because of this barrier of cowering vs not-cowering, people refer to a particular raid as “requiring” enough radiance to get you to 4 dread.
As of the mini-expansion, you will not cower at five dread anymore. Instead you will cower at eight dread. This change makes the absolute radiance “requirement” seem more mushy. A person be level 65 and run Dar Narbugud with just four pieces of +10 radiance without cowering. Of course, doing so would still mean you would have seven dread. Just how bad a debuff is seven dread?
Taking a level 65 into DN with only four pieces of +10 radiance would mean you would have seven dread. All your skills would operate as if you were back to being level 60. Your morale would be shot down to half of normal and your out-going damage of your lower-level skills would be penalized an additional 30%. A level 65 who thinks they are safe going into a raid five levels below them because they have the “required radiance” might be a bit surprised at how bad a debuff dread is.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the change to cowering is a great step in the right direction. Instead of an absolute gear-gate, it’s a much more mushy and murky barrier. The barrier is still there, of course. As long as a helmet can raise your maximum morale by 20% and jump all your skills up by a couple levels, you’ll find raid-leaders will have to decide how much dread is acceptable for each member. Now you can be mad at your friends for not letting you raid with five dread instead of turbine.
Radiance has always been from day one a solution looking for a problem.
@Jules For the most part yeah. Radiance isn’t bad, and gating raids for the sake of “raid clusters” isn’t bad. Combining the two mechanics and combining them with equipment is nonsensical design decision that just won’t die. :[
@Suz Short, informative, and sweet! /thumbsup
Yep, while this might allow your raid group to squeeze in the occasional under-geared member to make up the numbers, it just isn’t feasible to have key players operating at 7 dread, so this relaxation of cowering probably won’t change things a great deal.
More significant might be the comment about reducing the entry level gloom in raids and stepping it up gradually at later stages, which I took to mean that the entry to DN might be, say, 60 gloom, the wings for the next 3 bosses 70 gloom, and the wing for the last 2 at 80 gloom. Something like that.
Very helpful post Suz. Perhaps you can help me with a related question – What exactly is the relationship between Dread/Hope and Gloom/Radiance. Is it merely that the Gloom radiance are 10 x Dread Hope or are there additional effects?
The radiance/hope and Gloom/dread thing can get more and more complicated, the deeper you want to delve into it. I’ll start simple, and work my way towards complex.
You get a buff or debuff depending on where you are on the hope/dread scale. It’s the same scale, just that hope is positive and dread is negative. 1 hope and 1 dread will cancel each other out.
10 radiance = 1 hope. So 10 radiance cancels out 1 dread.
If you see something about 140 gloom, know that 10 gloom = 1 dread, but many people on the forums mix these terms up, so I usually just say “dread” to keep it simple.
Right now, there is absolutely no difference between 10 radiance and 1 hope. None. Soon, radiance will stop giving you a buff when above 0. It’s a stealth nerf to radiance outside of raids. Currently, everyone is walking around in the 21st hall with +5% extra morale. Popping a hope-token in an non-dread area will get that 5% buff back you normally get for being positive on the hope/dread scale.
Most people don’t realize that dread/hope always round down. So 15 radiance will make 2 dread be only .5 dread. That rounds down to 0 dread. So 15 radiance is as good as 20 radiance in an instance. This means in a raid with 14 dread (watcher) 45 radiance (plus a +5 hope token) is required. 4.5 hope + 5 hope = 9.5 hope. 14 dread – 9.5 hope = 4.5. Because it always rounds towards 0 (never up), 4.5 becomes just 4 dread, which is the same debuff you have after you die/retreat.
By the way, the +10 radiance you can buy with destiny stacks with hope tokens and radiance armor. If you get all three +15 radiance items, you will have 45 radiance without wearing any boots or other armor with radiance on them. If you put on the +10 boots from the grand stair and spend some destiny to buy the +10 radiance buff using destiny, you will be able to run grand stair without any shoulders or helm. Yeah, running DN with no helm or shoulders = sweet.
Long story short, if you have hope tokens and destiny to spend, then 35 radiance from armor is required currently for watcher, 55 for DN. Of course, the dread debuff is so nasty, that you will always want more radiance to make a fight easier.
OMG, sorry for the wall of text!
also, little of that will be the case after book 9 as they’ve said that radiance will be separated from hope and only serve to cancel out gloom. ;-}
Right, to radiance not giving “hope” but still canceling “gloom”, that’s what I was referring to when I said:
“Soon, radiance will stop giving you a buff when above 0. It’s a stealth nerf to radiance outside of raids. Currently, everyone is walking around in the 21st hall with +5% extra morale.”
heh. ya caught me skimming. ;-P
I still cannot understand that Turbine is mixing content gating so much with special gear. Moondog548 put it nicely, it is such an unholy marriage of mechanics, sigh!
Why not use the more classical “attunement” quest/raids/instance model?
This kind of gating highlights underlying issues with the instances you need to gear-farm to progress to the next instance. It is almost like admitting they are totally worthless the moment you got the required radiance gear for the “big one” there.
Give people a reason/carrot to play the lower tier instances, too, instead of forcing them to do them just to progress, never to come back again except if a guildmate begs on his knees to help him.
I took a look at that chat log…. why didn’t they do a better job of answering that planted question? The whole point of cheating at a Q&A is to throw yourself a cream puff you can knock out of the park. Saying “we’re going to do something that won’t make all of you happy, but we won’t say what yet” defeats the purpose.
Radiance: making me wonder whether that $20 for the expansion (i.e., to ever play LotRO again) is worth it.
Radiance is only an issue for raiding. If you don’t want to raid, you need never worry about obtaining a single piece of radiance gear, and you will still be able to see more than 90% of the content.
That’s like saying “Being underage is only an issue if you plan to go in the bar”. Granted, a lot of people enjoy not going to bars, but if your weekend outing with friends includes a heavy dose of bar it might throw a wrench in your fun.
That’s true. I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a huge pita if you do want to raid. However, not everyone wants to raid, and I wouldn’t want to see those people deterred by all the radiance-bashing.
I doubt people read KTR trying to find out if they wanna raid or not. We’re quite critical of raiding, overall.
Still, good point unwize.
Why do you feel that you have the power to take away our debuff Didnt your mother tell you thats defined as stealing taking something away that you gave to us in the first place i rather enjoyed the morale and damage boost and at most it was only 5% i liked not have to deal with dread from death or other mobs no i feel like a punished kid that is scolded for the parents mistake wtg turbine you missed the mark there