Month: December 2009

So far, I have had almost no fun running any skirmishes in groups. The scaling is ridiculous.

Solo seems balanced for you to level your soldier alone. You would not have much trouble running them without your soldier out. The bosses drop easily, and I face harder fights in normal quests. Move up to small fellowships, and the repetitive fights are still trivial, even more so given that some of the fights are against two normal enemies. The encounters are also easy, although some of the lieutenants are fairly absurd (exploding for most of a squishy’s health). Then the boss appears, and that fight seems to be balanced for a full group of six, on the assumptions that all your soldiers are leveled fully and that your group learned to coordinate well despite never needing to before that one fight. Even that would not be a problem were it not for the suicidal NPCs that do not seem much tougher when you have a group going. Beating everything in a skirmish is not bad, but the NPCs actively run into fire auras, shadow DoTs on the ground, and anything else that can hurt them, while wanting to tank.

I feel as though I am forced to solo enough skirmishes to level up my soldier to my level, and then only join groups with others that have done so. In six to eight months, this part will be a smaller problem, when most main characters have decent soldiers, although alts will continue to be suicide in group skirmishes. Until I am willing to put in that time on every character I play, and ruthlessly kick anyone who has not, any group skirmish seems like a huge waste of time. It takes 30-40 minutes to test that because the very last fight is the only challenging one. That would be less annoying if you could re-try that fight after seeing what went wrong, but the NPC dies, so you fail and must start over. Putting a half-hour of grinding trivial trash between every re-attempt is a problem. More than half your marks come from clearing the last fight and getting the daily bonus; why risk getting only a third of the full reward in a group when you can consistently get the whole thing solo?

It is a worse situation than the normal problem of needing your friends to level to the cap before you can play with them. Not only may your characters have a level difference, so do your soldiers, and you all need to level your soldiers solo unless you are happy losing at the end and only getting 1/3 of the reward when you play together. Even if you are the one at the cap waiting for your friends, you still need to solo grind to bring up your soldier.

I joined a group for the raid-sized Siege of Gondamon skirmish. The last fight was turned up to three arch-nemesis class enemies, two of which had fiery damage auras. Conveniently for our raid, one of the flaming dragons went into anti-exploit mode despite fighting on a flat surface, so we took down the other and the boss. When it exited anti-exploit mode, it reset into drama mode and never exited, so the raid just stared at an un-attackable enemy until everyone quit.

: Zubon

The secondary problem with LotRO’s legendary item system is grinding, particularly for relics. The main problem is its randomness. Every item gets random draws from the pools of legacies, with a random number to start, of random tiers (which can now be upgraded). The ideal weapon will have the four best legacies for your class/playstyle plus a couple of other good ones. Three of four is good, although you may need two specific ones and then either of the other two. Anything less than that is trash. Almost everything was trash under the previous system, and you still go through a lot of trash to find something worthwhile.

The nice thing about lotteries, however, is that sometimes you win. For those of you who do not know LotRO or the Hunter class there, the image is of a really nice bow, almost the best possible in the present game (before upgrading). Second Age weapons are hard to come by right now, and there are no level 65 First Age weapons yet; this will be my Hunter’s bow for the next three months, probably the next six to eight months, and possibly until the level cap rises.

I dodged what was the worst part of the LI grind under Mines of Moria: churning through in hopes of a good one. I could use a similarly nice legendary melee weapon, but she already has a good Third Age. I still have grinding ahead of me, since I can level it to 70, upgrade any or all of the legacies to tier 6,and grind grind grind relics. My best setting combined into a caster relic instead of the setting I wanted, so I have a bit of work to do there. Upgrading one legacy rank by one tier costs 75 Medallions of Dol Guldur or 1950 skirmish marks, which I estimate around 5 hours of efficient play per legacy per tier, with four free from leveling the item (I don’t think I will need to spend 45 hours and take them all to tier 6; only so many points to spend). You can see that I already turned the one useless legacy into a Fate bonus, using the free scroll from questing.

Yeah, I’m kind of bragging. Getting a bow like this a week after hitting the cap feels like beating the system, and it is about a 33% DPS increase over the bow I had been using. A Second Age may not differ from a Third Age except for a few DPS, but it is nice to get something that is about as good as it gets.

: Zubon

I have said before that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ needs a currency tab instead of having the barter items take up inventory slots. I am probably at fault for not throwing away the old stuff, but I thought I would inventory what I still have in my vault. I know there are at least a dozen more more barter token types. Continue reading Barter Currency Wallet

Our friend Green Armadillo has asked us to mention Turbine’s most recent inspiration in promotions: that Dol Guldur is “the most challenging 12-person raid ever devised.” I might go on to add: EVAR!!! How challenging are your 12-person raids, Blizzard? I didn’t think so.

: Zubon

The graphic on that splash screen is pretty sweet, however. All the pictures of Nazgul-on-flying-beast are.

UPDATE: CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED. Winners will be announced soon. Thanks!

It’s a caption contest! Choose one of the six images linked below and then send me an email with the caption image number and your caption.

I’m going to limit it to five entries per person but please send them all in one email.

Five winners will be selected by me as the sole judge, based purely on how hard I laughed.

Each winner will receive a free Siege of Mirkwood upgrade key. Note: the keys are for the North American accounts (Turbine run servers). So while technically anyone can use them, they’ll only update your account if you are on the US servers.

Caption 1
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Caption 3
Caption 4
Caption 5
Caption 6

Contest Ends December 31st, 2009 at midnight Central time US (or when I fall asleep that night, whichever comes first). That means sooner is better than later.

Thanks to Turbine for the upgrade keys. And good luck to you!

– Ethic