Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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Runekeeper Nerf Details

The Devs over at LOTRO took time to talk about the widely anticipated Runekeeper nerf.  Posters on the boards have been crying for a RK nerf ever since Book 7 went live.  Even posters who are not actually calling for a nerf are effectively asking for one when they brag about feats such as 12 runekeepers finishing the turtle raid in a exactly 64 seconds.

So is Turbine going to nerf runekeeper healing or runekeeper DPS?

When turbine discussed the details of the nerf, it appears the healing will remain strong.  DPS and power-consumption will see changes however.  Some specific RK skills will have their damage reduced, or effectiveness limited in Book 8, and all RK damage skills past level 30 will see an increase in power cost.

It’s too early to tell how this will actually play out.  If Turbine implements a nerf to tactical damage at the same time as nerfing RK, the net effect could be a massive nerf to DPS.  Yet if Turbine doens’t go far enough, we could still have the same old complaints.

Moria zones

I want to talk about the Moria zones in Lotro.  I don’t want to get into all the things the expansion changed, but just the zones themselves.  Personally, I think Moria is too safe.  When the fellowship ran through the place in the book and movie, it was filled with armies of goblins.  When my character first entered Moria, I immediately talked to the stable master inside and saw I could ride a goat to the next “town” of Dolvien View.

I understand why they want towns inside Moria.  The outside world is built with quest-hubs in mind, but it doesn’t work in Moria.  Instead, they should have styled Moria after Goblin Town.  Goblin Town requires you to pull and kill goblins each step of the way to get anywhere.  There are some quest-giving NPCs in the prison, but it never feels like the prision is a “town” where you’re safe.  You fight your way in, talk to them, and fight your way out.  Goblin Town feels like a goblin-infested adventure behind enemy lines.  Moria doesn’t.

Nerf the Runekeeper

Nobody likes to be nerfed.  That’s a given.  Part of the joy in playing these games is watching your character get stronger and stronger.  You kill bigger and bigger things until you’re able to solo the gods themselves.  But when the nerf-bat hits you, you can’t solo the gods anymore, and you get the opposite of the joy you felt at leveling up.

But sometimes, nerfing is a good thing.  In Lotro, I’m playing this Runekeeper.  This chick heals great, deals the best damage in the game, can restore her own mana, and has a number of stunning abilities as well.  I find this character to be so strong that I’m actually looking forward to the nerf.  It’s silly for both hunter DPS and minstrel healing to be secondary to the same class.

The big question I keep wondering is, “Which will they nerf?”  The healing or the DPS?

Lotro’s Legendary Item Grind

The whole time I’ve been leveling up, I kept hearing about what a grind the legendary item system was.  People complained about it and I said, “Do you really HAVE to have the best weapon in the game and does it have to be max level”  Now that I’ve spent a couple weeks working on my legendary weapons, and it’s time to reflect.

Yes… the legendary item system is a grind.  I’m beginning to wonder if running Helegrod 300 times while hoping for a super-rare drop is actually a superior system.  Let me explain why my feelings have changed a bit.

The task of getting  a super-rare drop is running an instance.  You’re hanging with friends, you’re killing big monsters, and you’re watching the loot pop up like a slot-machine.  One of my kin-mates put it like this, “The rarer the drop, the bigger the rush when you get it”.  The only drawback is being forced to wait for a group who wants to do it.

For my legendary weapons, I’ve been doing solo instances over and over again.  Even if I want to hang out with a friend to do the instance, I can’t.  I need to just be all by my lonesome the whole time.  The instances are not particularly challenging either.  I notice when I play these solo instances, I usually become quiet on my guild’s teamspeak server.  I just sit there playing the instance in silence.  At it’s core, the solo instances are not fun.

Do I have to do all this grinding to be capable of tackling the content?  No, no I don’t.  Yet that is my perception alone.  I’ve already been refused admission to a turtle raid because of my equipment.  Psychologically, that makes me want to be as close to the cap as possible so that I feel sure I am an asset, not a burden, to a group.  So I grind my little weapon away… trying to get better relics, trying to get higher level weapons, and trying to get higher deeds.

WINNERS

I have chosen the winners (it was not easy) of the 5 retail keys for “The Lord of the Rings Online™: Mines of Moria™ Complete DIGITAL DOWNLOAD” as part of our five year anniversary celebration and they are as follows:

Merimet
Genda
bonedead (I’ll pass on the trade offer though!)
Sean
yunk (I’m not positive yunk was entering but his comment was epic)
yunk has passed so the new winner of the 5th and final key is: Rocqu

I will contact you via the email you used to post in the thread. If you would like to pass, let me know and I will choose one of the runner-ups.

Thank you so much to Turbine for donating the keys and congratulations to the winners!

– Ethic

When Bigger is Better

One function of levels is to spread and pace content, and to guide you through it. If you have an epic tale spread across 1000 quests, you can make a game with 50 levels and have each award 5% of a level. The earlier parts will have simpler gameplay, the middle ones can transition to using skills more strategically, and hopefully you avoid making the ending “difficult” by pumping up the numbers.

Some players in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ have been complaining about leveling too quickly. If you stack rested experience with recent bonuses and the new leveling curve, you move through some levels very quickly. If you want a quest to be challenging, you need to plan on hitting it soon, because you will outlevel it within the week, at which point it is green and gray content. Mowing through grays can get boring.

City of Heroes, however, lets you keep almost all the content challenging no matter what level you are. Content is instanced, and levels scale. If you missed a story arc, hit Ouroboros and flash back to it; set your level lower with Ouroboros to make non-instance content challenging for your (new) level. You can exemplar down to play with friends, and task forces do that automatically. In the other direction, you can sidekick up, and Mission Architect can be rigged to auto-sidekick everyone. There is very little you can do at level 5 that you cannot do at level 50, and almost none of it is interesting.

Farming, powerleveling? Unlike many games, it will not hurt your City of Heroes character or make you miss content. You can always go back and do it, without its being trivialized. You can skip the entire game, but that just means you have the entire game as a menu before you, rather than whatever 10% is available at your level. Higher levels mean more content options, not just different ones, and you do not lose the old options.

Once again, I wish more games would learn the lessons that City of Heroes has been teaching for five years.

: Zubon

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

It has been about six months since The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, and I have been paying attention for about half of it. I did a series on my return to Middle-earth, leaving off about half-way through exploring Moria. Having had enough time to get burned out, what is my view now?

First, Moria really is a great locale. It is a huge space with a great deal of diversity. There are lots of interesting things to see. There are living flames, transparent spiders, giant turtles and toads, ancient ruins, waterfalls, an underground grotto, fungal invaders, and bottomless pits.

There are many quests and more than enough content to hit level 60. This includes several epic books, finding the parts of an ancient statue, realigning mirrors to bring light to the depths, following riddles all the way to Lothlorien, and fighting many goblins and orcs.

Once you run through those quests, you have probably done most of the fun stuff. It may go a bit past 60 if you spent your early 50s completing the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ content, but the content at level 60 is less varied and interesting than the content at level 50. Mines of Moriaâ„¢ pushed the endgame out a few weeks, but killed it in doing so.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

Fast Leveling in Older Games

Bug or feature?

Many games with expansion packs have started speeding their players to the end, so that they can be where all the other players are (and need to buy the expansion pack to advance). WoW does this most visibly, even before having you invite friends for triple xp and zebra love. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ made the early levels faster and started running nigh-continuous bonus xp weekends, weeks, and months.

City of Heroes may have done this with Mission Architect. Farming is more or less constant. You can pick the enemy best optimized for your character or make your own perfect foe. Grab friends, smash, repeat. A single run through a good farm will get you to level 20. This differs from normal powerleveling because Architect can be set up to auto-sidekick everyone to the same level range. You no longer need bridges, care in mission selection, or anything: pick your ideal enemy, fill a mission with copies of that one guy, and smash. If that is too hard, add pets that will increase your defenses.

City of Heroes, however, has no endgame. There are a few hard things to do at 50, but mostly you can just keep running missions. A variety of tools let you do pretty much anything at 50 that you could earlier, so it is always better to be higher level, but it is not as though you are raiding or something. Getting to 50 means being 50, maybe farming for those purples.

City of Heroes is, however again, very alt-friendly, complete with sales of extra character slots of more alts. Want to try a new character? Bam, level 20 in an hour, try a dozen new powers. Out of character slots? Bam, $20, 5 more. If people are racing to the level cap and re-rolling, that can only mean more money. Or they quit, but your most competent power-levelers are long-term players who came to peace with the lack of endgame years ago.

: Zubon

Best weapon in the game

One of my Kinship member said to me, “In the old days of Lotro, you would run Helegrod every week.  You might have to run it 300 times to get the best bow in the game, but it was worth it.  This new Legendary Weapon system is just a grind.”

Whenever people talk about “the good old days” in an MMO, they mean the good old days for them.  When you first play an MMO, especially your first MMO, you have way more tolerance for grinding.  There’s nothing particularly superior about doing a multi-hour instance hundreds of times vs doing a weapon-xp instance hundreds of times.  But in our memories, the old system is always better.  The old mmo, with less features, had more charm.

But for the newbies, the new is better.  The new is better, and old way is out-dated.

Swish Effect

You know what makes combat in an MMO really satsifying?  Yes, a deep combat system is important.  But right now, I want to talk about the sounds.

A lot of the classes that swing their weapons in Lotro make a “swish” sound no matter if they hit a target or not.  It’s not something you notice the first time you fight, or even the millionth, but at some point you play a character in Lotro or another mmo and you whack something and go, “Ouch, I think I heard some bone breaking!!”

As an example of the swish effect, I’d like to direct your attention to some bloody penguins.

First, the swishy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/penguin.asp

Then the more satisfying smashy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/bloody-penguin.asp

Notice how when you smash the penguins in the second link, it just feels more gratifying.  You get to hear a “splat” sound when you actually hit the penguin to begin with, plus the penguin makes “ouch” sounds whenever it bounces, and finally there are sweet “boom” sounds whenever the penguin hits a mine.

FFXI is great at having very satisfying sound effects.  Other games like SWG really drop the ball in this department.  With Lotro, it depends on which class you play and which skills you use.  One of the reasons I like playing my new Warden alt in Lotro is how satisfying the stabbing sounds are.  I really feel like I’m inflicting some virtual pain.