Archive for October, 2010

LOTRO Festival Skeleton Horse

9
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in ,

As you’ve probably guessed from the title, I finally won one of these beauties from the Fall Festival.  And what’s even more shocking is that I won it on my Warden!  I’m still opening the chest daily on my other 3 characters, but I’m not nearly as concerned about winning it on them.

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And to further confuse things, I was not wearing the Horseshoe at the time as I forgot to put it back on after my 4-man SG excursion.

I really do like the look of this horse, and LOTRO’s horse artists are getting better and better with each festival.  I can’t wait to see what else they have up their sleeves.

 

4 Manning Sammuth Gul (SG) Hard Mode

10
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in , ,

After finishing up a quick run through Sword Halls, the three of us decided that we were in the mood to try something a little more adventurous, so we proceeded to see who all was around and interested in running SG.  After a bit we were only able to find one other, but we figured we’d give it a shot and see what happened, worst case it would be a fun wipe.  I went in on my Warden and we had a champ, burglar, and rune-keeper to round out the foursome.  I actually think that’s pretty optimal for trying this out as you have tanking, damage, crowd-control, and healing all in hand as well as the important fellowship maneuvers from the burglar.  Many of the groups I’ve read that have done this use a Captain as their rallying cry can be very helpful in SG but I’m not sure what I’d remove from our group to bring in the Captain.  Much to our surprise, things actually went very smoothly for the first two boss fights and we even made it through a couple triple pulls of sorcerers.

I also learned a new “trick” on the second boss and that is that while in the “safe cubby” out of the lightning area you’re still in range for Warden taunts so you can hit him with Goad which I used to keep agro on myself.  I don’t normally slot the shield mastery so I can’t build Conviction from range, but this really is the only fight I’ve run where that might be handy – and since I can use Goad, that seemed to work very well.

Now approaching Gorothul is where things got a little more interesting.  All along I was worried about the stairs leading up as there are a handful of mobs including the summoning Sorcerers and the punting Loremasters, and with only 4, I expected it to be a little dicey.  Well, we started off pretty well but ended up getting a couple of unlucky punts and popped a few of the bone piles.  There are 6 bone piles in the room, and we had popped 5 of them!  It was quite the spectacular wipe, but we managed to get down almost all of the nasty guys so were able to regroup and continue.  I’m not sure I’ve ended up in a situation with more mobs then what we had on us at the end of that.

Gorothul was another fun experience as even with a full group he can be challenging with all the adds.  It did take us a couple of tries, but in the end we were able to get him down.  I found using Defiant Challenge actually quite useful in this fight as it helped snap things off our runekeeper enough to him to get heals off.

The last boss is pretty easy in my opinion, even for four of us.

This was probably one of the most enjoyable nights I’ve had in LOTRO in a long time as it was a good group and we were really pushing ourselves to pull this off.  Anyone else try this with less folks or have any suggestions on group makeups?

 

LOTRO – Warden’s New Skill in November Patch

10
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in , , ,

I’m not sure how I missed it in the notes, but Warden’s are getting a new skill with this patch.  The skill is called Never Surrender, trainable at level 47, and is available when someone resurrects you in-combat. It allows you to transfer 20% of the total group threat at the cost of your masteries and all but 2 ticks of your HoTs for a duration of 5 minutes.

This is HUGE for Wardens in group instances where they’re the only tank as this allows us to get back into the fight and actually tank as we can jump pretty much to the top of the threat list with some significant penalties but nothing that I’m too upset about.  We can still be healed by others and use all our gambits, so I’m very pleased with this.  This takes away one of the main reasons groups don’t like to raid with Wardens as their main tanks as if they screw up, the Warden has a real hard time doing their job for the rest of the fight.

And just so you know, I did have something EXACTLY like this in my tell the community team thread on Wardens, so the devs do listen!

 

LOTRO November Update Bullroarer Patch Notes

1
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in ,

Ok, bear with me as these are quite big.  I was expecting a number of things but this is pretty big.  So I’m going to start with the big items and my initial thoughts in this post, and then when I have a chance to go through them all I’ll post more thoughts.

First up, this is a gameplay patch with no new content, however there is a lot in here that really hits many important areas.  I’m perfectly fine with this as long as the next content update comes quickly after the new year.

I highly suggest checking out the full patch notes here, but here’s my quick take on them.

  • The Free portion of the game expands to include
    • legendary items
    • Level cap is now 65
    • Moria, Mirkwood, Lothlorien, and Enedwaith regions
    • Still need to purchase quest packs and/or classes as appropriate
  • Fixed the Swift Travel bug affecting previous subscribers
  • Barter Wallet Introduced that can hold
    • Skirmish marks
    • Anniversary Tokens
  • Task systems introduced (Dev Diary Soon)
    • Free repeatable quests
    • Uses existing trophy drops
    • New deeds and rewards
    • available starting at 8
  • Reputation Mounts Buffed
    • 250 Health
    • Reduced Crit Damage
    • Can block, parry, and evade while mounted
    • And New ones are coming
  • Erid Luin Revamp (Dev Diary Coming)
  • Vault and Shared Storage revamps (Dev Diary)
  • Character Renames in Store!
  • Runekeeper and LM buffs
  • Loremaster and Minstrels can use red/yellow on Fellowship Maneuvers from range!
  • Crafting Ingredient packs.  Applies to certain recipes only apparently
  • Farming Revamp

Not to mention some very cool “Little Things”:

  • Right click to report someone
  • mouse over LI Tracking display to see the stats on that item
  • players can be summoned out of housing and private instances
  • captains and mustering now pull into and out of dynamic layers
  • new consumables for each class

I’m not sure there’s anything in here that doesn’t sound very cool or get me excited.  The Barter Wallet is a great start and will really help out with not only inventory space, but vault space as well.  I’m also a horse junky so those changes are very welcome and it does make me wonder about mounted combat and Rohan!

Sure some may say these are bug fixes, but you know what some of these like the Fellowship Maneuvers for Minstrels and Lore-masters will be a HUGE bonus for them.

I’m intrigued by the task system as this sounds like a quest based grind such that free players will be able to “quest” through content they don’t have quest packs in.  Actually I think this is a great idea as some folks really don’t like quests but want the grind to go faster.  And if you’re grinding a kill deed, why not grab some tasks to make it more productive!

Overall this update really is all about making the game more enjoyable for us all as it adds and fixes a bunch at end-game and really creates the possibility of seeing all of this game for free!

 

LOTRO – Upcoming Crafting Changes from Kate Paiz

12
1 year ago
by DocHoliday in

Kate Paiz certainly is keeping busy as ZAM has posted their interview with Kate held recently after the launch of F2P.  Much of it is similar to what we’ve seen in various other interviews but there were two interesting parts to me.

She talks about the most and least popular items in the store, although it just goes to show you the power of viral marketing, as the most popular item became a a “Best Seller” due to the test team buying it on various toons and servers while stressing the system.  I was very surprised to see crafting recipes that low as I would’ve expected folks to grab that one recipe they’re missing from a set, or just trying to fill out that tier.

But for me the biggest item in this interview is the change coming for Crafting in the November update.  Now I will admit that there still isn’t a whole lot of information about this change, as it wasn’t in her Producer’s Letter, but I’m a little puzzled by it.  In the interview Kate mentions that players will be able to buy ingredients from the store to fulfill a crafting recipe.  This leads me to believe that if I want a certain tier of crafting, I can just drop a bunch of cash and get there.  Now I realize this could be limited in all sorts of ways and you’ll still need to do the crafting quests to advance but it still seems a little weird to me.  And of course these could be very expensive such that it really isn’t feasible to use it as a leveling tool.  Or even looking outside the experience aspect, will we be able to buy critical items or other rare items from the store?  Certainly a good tease in the interview, but I’m very interested to see where this goes as I think they could be starting to approach that “pay-to-win” line, depending on how this is implemented.

Needless to say I’ll be anxiously awaiting the patch notes for the November Update and checking it out on Bullroarer when it comes back up later this week, as posted by Sapience.

 
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