Archive for May, 2010

Legendary Relic Farming

8
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in ,

After my recent issues (or concerns is probably more accurate) while raiding BG I’ve been taking a closer look at my Warden and trying to make her stronger.  Some of them I posted about the other day but I also wanted to work on my runes for my legendary items.  Luckily I happened to be chatting with an in-game friend about this and he tipped me on to a pretty nice method.  So I’ve spend the past day or so running the numbers and figured I’d post the results I have so far, which do seem to line up with his.

Previously I would save up or buy off the auction hall a bunch of crummy legendary items, equip them, kill a couple mobs, and then deconstruct them at level 2.  This is a pretty effective method but can become quite tedious.  A variation on this theme is to complete a bunch of Mirkwood quests (or the Moria mirror quests) that reward LI experience and in-between turn-ins visit the Relic Master to deconstruct a newly leveled legendary item.  Many of the deconstructs will result in just a couple of Tier 1 relics, but critical results will yield multiple tier 4’s so this can be very effective.

However, with the appearance of skirmishes I thought this might be a nice change of pace to my normal method.  I had assumed bartering for the highest level runic  would grant the best results, however my testing so far is quite the opposite.  I’m not going to claim that I’ve done a statistically valid test here, but my data combined with some others seems to be within the same ballpark so while your results might fluctuate somewhat it should be close, and as you’ll see the difference between tiers is pretty staggering.

I ended up running a bunch of skirmishes and bartered for Tier 1 and Tier 2 runics and then kept track of the results upon their deconstruction and subsequent combination.  That coupled with some spot checks of the higher tiers (I haven’t ground THAT many skirmishes) confirms to me that bartering for Tier 1 runics is by far the best option.  Higher tier runics don’t produce the same quantity output as the Tier 1’s do, basically it is a decreasing scale.  Also, when combining relics the crit percentage is actually quite high and can generate runes two tiers higher which isn’t possible for a runic deconstruction.  The chart below summarizes my data so far:

Runic Tier # per Decon Ave/20 1′s SP Cost
1 8.3 165.5 460.0
2 4.8 51.3 929.5
3 3 17.8 1073.0
4 2 6.5 886.0
5 1 2.9 918.1

So the columns are the rune tier, the average number of runes resulting from deconstructing the runic, the average result from my tests using just tier 1 runics, and the skirmish point cost based on these numbers required to match the output from the tier 1’s.  As you can see, Tier 1’s are far and away better then any other option and depending on your luck you can get some really nice results as my first test yielded a tier 7 relic!

The other nice part is that 460 skirmish points is about what I can get from running the Rift skirmish on Tier 2 difficulty (about 30 minutes) after I barter all the special marks and such.  Other skirmishes vary but I can get around that number relatively quickly.

So my daily plan now will be to run the rift skirmish for my runic batch conversions, check the AH for warden items, and run the Mirkwood dailies.  And pretty soon I should have a nice stock of the tier 8’s and 9’s that I’m striving for.

 

Fun times in Sammuth Gul

1
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in , , , , ,

I ended up getting in a late night Sammuth Gul run last night with a couple of friends.  Our group wasn’t quite optimal as we were lacking a traited healer and didn’t have any crowd control.  I think I was more worried about the CC then I was the healing (as you’ll see later on) as the loremasters in there are just downright nasty.  However, we had lots of DPS, and lots of interrupts which made this a fun and exciting run.  I was on my Warden along with a guard, captain, champion, DPS spec’d runekeeper, and a full warrior skald traited minstrel.  The trash really wasn’t too bad as we essentially had 4 off-healers in the group and with all the heavies we had lots of spare morale.  Our Minstrel was able to stay in War-speech for a good deal of the fights and only towards the end or if we got an unlucky pull did he have to drop out.  We had a couple of marathon fights with summoners and unlucky punts onto bone piles, but the ability of our guard to get conjunctions off was key to us being able to move as quickly as we did.

The only part that really worried me was the Gorothol fight as there’s just SO many mobs and things get very crazy in there.  As the adds started to pile up we were able to just grab everything in the middle with the guard and myself trying to grab all the agro and the champ and runekeeper doing as much AoE damage as possible.  Our minnie was watching out for the loremasters to keep them occupied, trying to keep alive, and trying to toss us the occasional heal.  Although, as the following log will show I did a pretty darn good job of keeping myself alive as all the adds are a Warden’s dream :)   After a while I think the guard and I had the agro shared pretty well but my morale bar wasn’t moving much at all as I just kept cycling through our life-taps and conviction.

CStats 2010-05-26 13-12-57-17

So over the course of the entire fight, I was healing myself for roughly 100 morale per second :) which surprised me when I looked at it considering I probably wasn’t healing at all for at least the first half or so.  Also, if you look at the breakout of my attacks you’ll see just how much more damage our gambits do versus the builders and has me thinking that I can slow down some and rely more on the masteries to build my gambits to save some power and I won’t sacrifice that much threat or DPS.

CStats 2010-05-26 13-15-26-03

But with critted food and power pots, I actually seemed to be in a better spot then some of the others in our group so that made me happy.  I’ve also noticed that since I have a larger morale pool I can actually drop down enough to use Darkness Before Dawn and not get destroyed.

And finally, we did get a symbol drop, which sadly I did not win, but at least it did go to my friend who hadn’t won one before.

 

Omission from my community post

0
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in

So I just realized as I was updating my iTunes that I forgot to mention another new community site when I posted on saturday. @CandaceVO has started up not only a new blog but a new podcast as well, you can find her blog over at The Green Dragon Inn and her podcast is available on her blog and in iTunes as well.  Her format will be a little bit different as she admits there are already good news casts out there (CStM, LOTRO Reporter, and LOTRO Cast), so hers will be more community based.  As much as I enjoy the other casts, it is always nice to have something from a different perspective.

 

My week in LOTRO

11
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in , ,

I didn’t get too much time in this week but was able to get into some raiding and group fun.  I also did some re-working of my Warden which I’ll get to at the bottom.

On Wednesday I JUST missed getting into a BG raid, which was just as well as I was already committed to one on Thursday :) so I ended up just messing around in game chatting with folks while waiting to see what was going to happen.  I did end up doing a quick run of DD with one of my kin-mates to finish off her class legendaries, which did have some interesting moments as you’ll see from the pictures below:

ScreenShot00016

ScreenShot00017

I ended up getting punted into the sticky walls and hanging out there for a bit :)   Since we were all well over-leveled it didn’t really matter but I can imagine for an on-level group that could be a bit of a problem.

Thursday was back into BG for another run at Durchest.  We’re still struggling with him and are trying to figure out what’s going on.  It may be something we’re doing (or not doing) on the tanking side, but that appears to be working properly for the most part until one of us dies.  I’ve looked at a couple of videos including this one showing hard mode but nothing terribly obvious has jumped out at us.  Maybe we’re just missing a combination of small things that when build up cause serious issues.  The other forum post I noticed which I thought was interesting was the following on Durchest’s heal. He has a heal that happens when someone in the raid dies, but he can actually store those up and save them for when he hits 100K.  Rather annoying, but does account for some seemingly random healing.

But all the struggles in BG have caused me to check out my Warden to make sure she’s at least properly geared out.  I ended up switching out Tolerance as looking at my logs I really don’t take that much tactical damage for Valor which gives me a pretty nice morale boost.  I then switched over to the Lothlorien Stalker’s cloak from the Lothlorien Preserver’s Cloak which cost me a bit of Might in exchange for power and fate.  I’m then going to see if I can get lucky and crit on the Greenwood necklace on my jeweler as that will be another morale booster plus some incoming healing, in exchange for some agility.  I also was checking out the various crafted relics and realize I need to find a supreme master cook who has kindred reputation with the crafting guild to make me the +100 morale rune as mine currently aren’t all that great.  I prefer that over the +20 vitality ones (which for tanks provide the same morale boost) as with my current stats I get real close to the stat cap when fully buffed.  I also need to get some more work in on relic grinding as the ones I’m using could stand to be a bit better.  With all these changes, I should be able to get my morale around 7400 and power at 2350 without buffs and without sacrificing my other stats too much.  Feel free to check out my character page and let me know if you see anything I could swap out.

 

LOTRO Community Projects and News

1
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in , ,

So there’s been a number of new (or maybe just new to me) projects and updates from the various community outlets and I wanted to highlight a few of them.

First up is another video from the EveNArtworkS folks I mentioned in a previous post with their amazing Warden video, this time highlighting one of my favorite classes to group with – the Loremaster! If you haven’t seen either of these, I highly recommend them as they do a great job of mixing the beauty of LOTRO with the music and the uniqueness of each class.

@Veneration has been pretty active of late not only putting together good forum resources for new players but also in launching and updating the LOTRO Network. This is a community site for sharing all sorts of LOTRO related videos as well as the site for the live stream of the LOTRO Reporter. @Veneration also has been streaming various in-game events like runs through the MIrkwood instance Sammath Gul.  All of the live streaming events are usually announced through twitter so it might be worth following those guys if you want to catch things live.  I usually try to catch the live cast of the LOTRO Reporter as its a good time with the folks in the chat-room.

I’ve talked numerous times about the tool CStats including recently on my post about my BG raid experience and there’s now a community resource not only for the continuation of the tool but also for sharing your logs.  If you’re interested in looking at others logs or in posting your own head over to the Lord of the Logs site. I’ve posted a couple and will be posting more as I get in a better habit of parsing my fights :)

The folks over at LOTRO Weekly continue to put out high quality stuff, and this is no exception as they’ve released the beta of a LOTRO Crafting Calculator.  This will allow you to see exactly how many materials you will need to craft whatever you’re working on.  There are some tricky things as there’s no way to account for crits or the way Farming works, but it really is a handy resource.  They’re still finishing it off, so it might not have every tier for every profession but I wish something like this was around when I started crafting!

And last but certainly not least, for all you fellow bloggers and podcasters you might want to check out Lunna’s forums post titled “Advice for new bloggers” as there’s not only good advice in her post but the thread has quite a few good nuggets in it.

 
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