Archive for December, 2011

New LOTRO Armies of Isengard Screenshots

1 month ago

by DocHoliday in LOTRO, Raids and End-game

A few new screenshots were released today showing off the new instance spaces. The spaces highlighted in these shots are the Pits of Isengard, Fanghorns Edge, and Dragnakh Unleashed.

Sadly I’m still haven’t had much chance to get into these spaces so I’m living vicariously through these images and what I hear from others

Armies of Isengard End-game group instances lord of the rings online LOTRO screenshots Update 5

Instance finder experiences

1 month ago

by PB in LOTRO, Raids and End-game

I thought it might be interesting to put up a post for people to share their early experiences with the instance finder. While still in an early iteration, the IF is a pretty big change to the game and could have a big impact on how people play the game.

Personally I usually run groups with kin or friends, but have hit up the IF a few times in the past week when others were busy. My experiences have been generally positive, getting fairly quick 3-person groups three times, all 3 for fangorn strangely enough. Two of those groups cleared T1 while the other failed T2. I felt that group composition was reasonable, though as a lore-master I’m lucky to have some flexibility in retraiting for different roles. The failing T2 group was me a cappy and Hunter which might have been workable but just couldn’t get the tanking happening.

Personally I really like the concept of the tool but strongly suspect that it won’t really have its full impact until it becomes cross server. I also think people shouldn’t expect to be able to do T2c fears with the IF. T1 is designed for pug groups for a reason – keep T2 for groups you trust!

For all that cross server grouping has potentially negative social consequences, I think its needed for the tool to really work, especially if people want more restrictive features like non-random instances and more restrictive class makeup all of which will hugely add to queue time. I’ve already timed out on two queues and I can see that getting worse. Basically between kinships, glff and the social tab, there are already decent tools for putting together a group on your server. To really create a new quick/casual grouping option which I think is what the IF is trying to do, you need cross server matching. Kin and personal options will always be there, but if the IF went cross server it would really open up grouping options especially for people on low pop servers or off peak time zones.

Anyway what are your thoughts and what have been your early experiences?

End-game group hard-mode instance finder instances Update 5

Yule Festival Developer Diary

1 month ago

by DocHoliday in LOTRO

We got a little peak behind the scenes of the upcoming (still no official date) Yule Festival in today’s Dev. Diary.

One thing I did want to point out is that I appreciate seeing that some of the “newer” devs have worked their way up the ranks from places like the QA team, as Pinion mentions in his intro.

I’m happy to see they’re taking some time to fix some of the issues with the festival and not just refreshing the broken portions. My biggest issue was with the snowball fight in that it just never seemed like there were people around to do it, maybe then need to add it to the Instance Finder I’m not sure why that event didn’t attract folks like the others, but maybe the debuff tweak will help out that event.

There are a few new things making it into the festival which is always welcome! Pinion didn’t provide too many details, but I like the idea of continually adding new social fun to the game in addition to all the other content they’re adding.

And finally, I have to say the new horse does look pretty darn cool!

developer diaries festival horse lord of the rings online LOTRO mount screenshots yule

Undocumented change to Moria class quests

1 month ago

by PB in LOTRO

There are reports on the forums that the moria class quests have been changed to no longer require you to complete the full fellowship quest at the end of it to get the trait attached to the quest line. Apparently all of the quests to kill the special mobs inside various moria instance remain, but the traits they used to reward have been added to the previous quest in the quest chain, so that you no longer to go into Forges, Skumfil etc. to get the relevant trait. The trait is rewarded retrospectively if you had already finished the second to last quest.

This change makes a good deal of sense from the point of view that these instances are no longer end game content and so it’s much harder to get a group for them nowdays, but it’s strange that this appears to be another fairly large change in game mechanics for which we have absolutely no official statement or patch notes about. Turbine sprung the “bound to account” change with Medallions of the North Men in update 3 and moria/loth/dul gudur medallions in RoI without any official announcement, it seems another fairly large change which will be relevant to a lot of players has managed to slip through the patch notes.

group instance Moria trait Update 5

Lore-mastery: Year’s end

1 month ago

by PB in Loremaster, LOTRO

Given the christmas season and upcoming holidays, this will be my last column for the year. I’ll aim to return to posting in approximately mid-January. I was going to use this post as an opportunity to link some of my past posts for people who might be new to the column, and also solicit some feedback. I hope you’ll also forgive me a little indulgence too, I thought I’d go back through my screenshots and give a bit of a slideshow of my lore-master over the past year or so.

Lore-mastery

I introduced this column just on four months ago in August and have written 29 (!) posts since then. The aim of the column since the start been to write about end-game play from a lore-master persepctive, both to give tips to existing lore-master players and to educate others about the class and various end-game issues.

Some of the posts have been about specific issues or gear or patches, while others have been of a more general nature, giving my opinions on something fundamental about the class or game mechanics. I thought I’d link some of the latter type for people who might be newer readers of the column:

What does a lore-master do part 1 and part 2. Two-part post looking at the 4 different trait setups you might use as a lore-master.
How to do damage as a lore-master. Basic message: stand in melee range and hit stuff!
Controlling a crowd. A basic overview of our CC and some more advanced tips.
Taking ‘support class’ too far. Sometimes lore-masters (and other support classes) need to stop doing all the fancy unique stuff that they could do and just get on with the business of killing the bad guys.
Legendary items guide. Overview of what legacies to look for and what items to make in the post-Isengard environment.
Soloing old group content part 1 and Part 2. These posts giving a bit of an outline as to what old group content lore-masters can solo at level 75 generated a bit of interest.

I definitely plan on continuing with the column next year, I’m enjoying writing it and am a little surprised that I still have heaps of column ideas remaining. The first few posts next year will hopefully be about the instances and raid in update 5 (although I have a nasty feeling the sw:tor-pocalypse might make getting together a decent raid group on my server a little bit tough unfortunately). I’ve also got a post on the will vs fate stat choice, a general overview of pets (I’m wanting to collect quite a bit data for this which is why I haven’t yet done it – the fact that the training dummies are broken and keep booting you out of combat hasn’t helped) and an updated tactical gear guide.

I would really like to get some feedback from any of you that reading this about the column! Don’t be afraid to comment, you don’t need to log in and it’s easy to do. In particular, I struggle a bit with the level of detail to go into and how much knowledge I can assume. While I’m obviously writing something a bit more in depth than a forum post, I’m not trying to write massive essays in my post (I’m aiming for about 1500-2000 words) so it’s a balancing act as to how much detail I can write up and how much background I can explain. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on the length of the column and whether it seems to be assuming too much or too little knowledge, though I realise this is going to be largely a matter of personal opinion. I’d also like to know whether people who aren’t lore-masters still find the columns interesting at all. Also, of course, if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see me go into then please let me know and I’d be happy to address it in a future post.

Levelling slideshow

As I mentioned in my first post, I’m new to LOTRO (and MMOs) with F2P so I’ve only been playing for a little over a year. I thought I’d take a look back over my old screenshots and put together a little slideshow of the lore-master levelling journey. If anyone’s interested in sending me any cool or interesting lore-master screenshots they have (psychobabblelotro at gmail.com) then please do, and I’ll look to include them in a future post.