Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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In Further Praise of PUGs

Another virtue of pick-up groups is that many are better than my guild groups. My kinship, while a fun bunch, is not a great late-game guild. We have horrific wipes on bosses that I beat with PUGs the day before, and it can be tiring when half the group needs an explanation for every significant fight. We have a great many level 60s these days, but I doubt we could field a team to raid The Watcher.

One advantage of joining many PUGs is that I learn different ways of approaching fights. I can learn from people who have done it before, and I get experiments with many group types. I am the bee, flitting from PUG to PUG, cross-pollinating before heading back for honey time.

I recall my first guild trip through the Sixteenth Hall. Two people had never been there. Two enjoyed it and ran it frequently. The last member and I ran it frequently with PUGs. The moment that stood out was just before the second boss. For those who have not done it, there are two identical rooms, each with a wheel to turn, each with a large group of elite enemies, each with a bunch of ground objects that spawn more enemies. The guild plan seems to have been sending someone on a suicide run to get each wheel, rezzing afterwards. I did not even ask before starting my standard PUG plan: AE root, the ones immune to root come, we fight them around the corner (away from rooted archers), finish off the rest, and avoid the ground objects when getting the wheel.

This is not to say that I have learned nothing from the guild. They are very good at Skumfil’s hard mode, granted again with a two-suicide plan to make the rest of it easier. But I wonder at times if I might be happier with a group that actually puts things on farm mode.

: Zubon

In Praise of PUGs

Most of my pick-up groups have been rather good. I have clearer memories of the horrid ones, but my non-guild groups almost never fail to accomplish their objectives, and few have really serious problems along the way. The problem is that the good groups blend together: teams succeed similarly, but each fails in its own unique way.

Continue reading In Praise of PUGs

Annoyance

I’m running Volume One, Book Ten on my Minstrel. You know when is a really lousy time to add small group content? Immediately after a forced solo instance. You know where is a really lousy place to add small group content? On three different points around Lake Evendim, for which there is no faster means of travel than swimming across a freaking lake.

Bringing your players together through shared adversity annoyance?

: Zubon

Turbine’s Fail-ikul

To be clear, I hate the name of this post, but it kind of wrote itself.  Can’t argue with that.  The new lair raid for Volume 2, Book 7 is unlocked on many, if not all, the servers now in Lord of the Rings Online, and the gate crashed open the wrong way, on many accounts.

First, the design.  I think that the monster turtle in Filikul was supposed to be designed as a kind of tank-swap.  The raid boss, Nornuan, hits with an unremovable DoT on the player it is attacking.  The trick is to not let this DoT stack because every time it does it does more damage over time and the duration refreshes.  By having multiple tanks the DoT will not get to the point where the damage cannot be healed through.  There is also a “time limit” DoT that the raid boss applies to all the players.  This latter also-unremovable DoT keeps stacking until it cannot be outhealed and the raid wipes.  It seems like an okay base design, but the raid is basically a DPS fest.  A raid full of hunters and champions, with maybe a token healer, is all that is needed.  Without massive DPS, the party will just wipe from the “time limit” DoT.

Second, the bugs.  The loot from this raid is pretty nice.  There are First Age weapons, radiance gear coins, and a pretty nice trophy.  If working, the short raid can be done once per week.  The raid lock was not working properly, and the raid went on ultra-farm mode with people burning through the turtle every 5-10 minutes.  Saturday night became the night of First Age fun.  Turbine locked the raid on Sunday pending a bug fix.

Finally, is the sinking feeling that this raid was hurriedly designed and not really tested.  The classes that were less desired, are still less desired, and the current “gods” of Middle Earth, the hunters, the champions. and now the runekeepers, are all the more desired in group play.  It is very unfortunate that Turbine is going this direction for their high-level dungeons.  All the tricks and shticks of the utility classes are being ignored, and even the holy trinity has had two of its corners sanded down.  Lore-masters, I feel your pain.

–Ravious
cowabunga

Blockage

For those of you just joining us, The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is the game of unnecessarily long travel times. Epic quests frequently involve spending an hour riding horses. As I type this, I am in windowed mode, riding from Rivendell to Echad Dúnann to complete Volume Two, Book One, which you may remember this from Tweety’s write-up. For those of you who did not click the link, you open the gate to Moria (yay!), get attacked by The Watcher (ooh!), open a trove of legendary items that you will use to fight him back (yay!), and then are sent a zone away and told to level up your weapon ten times before coming back (wut?). Each one-way ride adds 12 minutes onto the quest, which I am spending not looking at the game.

Having horse access is a valuable thing. Later, after I complete 40-ish quests in Eregion, I can take the instant travel horse there, but poor zone ordering means that comes after I really need it.

You can also get your own mount. I hit 35 on a third character today, so I sent him to do the mount quests. You must complete quests to unlock the ability to ride a horse, despite having ridden stable horses for thirty levels. First, walk to the horse farm to start the quest chain. There are no horse routes to the horse farm, because … they don’t have stables there? They give you a horse; take it to the nearest city and run back. They give you a horse; take it to a city at the far end of the next zone and run back. They give you a horse; take it to an outpost across another zone and run back. They give you a horse; ride an obstacle course within the allotted time. You are then allowed to buy a horse.

Because putting the carrot on a string is fun, but the real fun comes from repeatedly tugging it away just as he is about to reach it.

: Zubon

We Don’t Get Fooled Again

After perusing a few Book 7 threads on the Lord of the Rings Online forums, I hit an interesting node.  It seemed that people were thankful of the fact that Turbine added content to their subscription game.  Now, I am a thankful customer whenever I get my product or service without a hitch, but these posts were more in line with getting a free bottle of wine at a restaurant.  I was really confused that these people believe that this content update was not part of the subscription fee they had been paying all along.  As more and more games (and game playing) becomes a service, rather than a product, consumers should be aware of the service they are paying for and the norms with similar services.

Continue reading We Don’t Get Fooled Again

City of Falling Injuries

Last night I spent most of my time in Caras Galadhon, the city center of Lothlorien in Lord of the Rings Online. The city is built on huge flets, which are basically large platforms built above the ground on white trees that put the Redwoods to shame. There are two ways to get up the flets: a spiral staircase following the trunk of the three or ladders that port players up. Once on a flet there are no railings, no invisible walls, no last minute Prince of Persia ledge grabs between you and the ground far below. During my time played last night, I am pretty comfortable in saying that I had never spent a larger percentage of time being wounded from falling injuries.

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Forced Solo Content

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ has a surprisingly large amount of forced solo content. By that, I do not mean that you can solo it, or that it is too bothersome to find a group. The content is in an instance that you cannot enter in a fellowship. There are the six daily IXP instances, several chapters of the epic books, and steps in quest chains. Book Seven added six crafting instances, which are again forced solo. The three-man instances are forced small group content.

This is an odd way to train your players. I understand worries about people taking the easiest path, which is bringing too many people, but we already have hundreds of quests that people prefer to solo, with little evidence that they will bring six people to kill those eighteen orcs even faster. Do you want to train your players to spend multiple hours per day alone in instances? For non-hardcore players, that is their entire play session. It leads to the unfortunate effects seen with the opening of Book Seven: the outer areas of Lothlorien completely empty of orcs, as people solo them for the faction quests rather than grouping to share and speed things. You know that people around you are on the same quests, but we have been trained not to bother finding a group if it is possible to solo.

So far in Volume Two, there are three chapters that demand fellowships: 2.4.7, 2.5.5, and 2.6.8. I do not even want to count how many solo instances there are; I would guess at least fifteen. You can experience almost everything in Moria solo except the six radiance instances, and you need to visit those only if you plan to join the twelve-man raid. We do not need to force people to be alone even more.

: Zubon