LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
ToO raid progression update
Prior to update 7, it had become apparent that two of the T2 fights in the Tower of Orthanc raid were never going to be completed – Fire and Frost challenge and Saruman (with or without challenge). Despite an intense amount of effort that had been put put into these fights by some of the more hardcore raiding kins over the past 5 months, particularly some German kins, there had been no progress for months and basically everyone had given up on them both due to difficulty (or literal impossibility) and the lack of any sort of loot incentive. In response to this, the dev in charge announced some nerfs to these fights which were implemented in Update 7.
As expected, these changes quickly resulted in a breakthrough, with Legion der Freunde ([DE-RP]Belegaer) completing the Saruman challenge mode, which involves completing the hardest and longest fight in the game with no deaths, very shortly after Update 7 launched. Another German kin followed shortly, with a non-challenge kill, and two other kins have now completed the challenge mode and one other has completed the regular mode. Interestingly, all but one of these kinships are from EU servers. As always seems to happen with these things, this new progression has not been short of forum drama, with unsubstantiated accusations being levelled against some kins (not necessarily those involved in the actual kills) that they are exploiting some new macro bug which apparently enables a certain notoriously exploitable class to get insane (50,000+) DPS by bypassing the game’s internal cooldown clock. However, it seems that these current kills are legitimate (unlike some pre-Update 7 exploited kills) and so the current final raid boss in LOTRO has finally been taken down, more than 5 months after the fight was released.
Well, actually, Saruman should be the final boss, but it seems that the very first lock in the fight – Fire and Frost – is actually proving to be the hardest challenge to beat, which seems odd from a design point of view to say the least. While groups were initially expressing some optimism that the nerf to the fight would make it possible, no one has yet managed to beat it after a full raid cycle’s worth of attempts. It seems that something’s a little off in the mathematics of this fight, surely it wasn’t intentional that the first fight would have the hardest challenge in the raid!
A recent dev post from jwbarry announcing that there is a special title for any group that completes the entire raid, on challenge mode, in one sitting might give some incentive for groups to get this down. Time will tell if anyone manages to complete this deed before RoR, of if it becomes another raid achievement that is only completed after a level cap increase.
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#2 written by Yulan 1 year ago
The problem is that it’s hard to do T2 with strangers. There is a lot of strategy, trust and teamwork involved, and the truth is that when you find a working formulae (team + strategy) you will want to stick with that because of the time spent trying to complete these raids.
As a healer I usually join T2 Foundries announced in GLFF for the medallions, and it’s totally disappointing when your team isn’t capable of doing the very first boss. It’s hard to decide who to dismiss, and even harder to tell people you need to do so.
I can’t imagine myself doing that after hours of raiding. While I enjoy playing with anyone and teach them when necessary, my playtime is short and it’s frustrating when I find that I am not able to finish anything in a day because of the time spent in unsuccessful attempts.
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#3 written by PB 1 year ago
If you’re in a casual/non-raiding kin then at some stage, you have to make a choice why you’re playing the game. If you really enjoy the social side of things and are happy sitting at the level of progression you’re able to achieve in that type of kinship then that’s cool. But if you want to raid, at some stage you’re gonna have to join a raiding kin (or figure out how to turn yours into one, which usually doens’t end well). A lot of people get stuck at end game in good levelling kins that don’t raid and there’s a reason for that – raiding kins are very bad levelling kins and don’t even bother to recruit levelling chars because it’s just a bad fit.
The basic fact of the matter is that raiding kinships with full rosters cannot get non-kin members to join their raids. Why? Because can you imagine being the person in that kinship who was asked to sit out a raid night to let some non kin member join? It just doesn’t work. Raiding kinships keep things in-house because to do anything else creates drama within the kin. People in those raiding kins put in hours of work to help the group learn the fights and get to a point where someone else could just step in and take their place, they’re not going to repay that effort by making them sit out if they don’t want to.
My kin has been generally a couple of people short of a full roster for the last couple of months now, which I kind of like because it means we’re able to invite various outside kin contacts to our raids. But at the end of the day, I tell these people (many of whom are perfectly good players in non-raiding/casual kins) that I’d be happy for them to join our kin and raid with us on a regular basis but if they don’t, then they’ll only get occasional invites. You can’t expect raiding groups to make a committment to you if you won’t make a committment to them.
On the other hand, T1 ToO is regularly pugged on a number of servers (even mine!), with various degrees of success, which gives people from all sorts of kins a chance to experience the content. If there arent pugs on your server that do this then you can always start some yourself!
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PB, I appreciate these updates on Raid progression in the game, because I am not a part of a true Raiding kin. Everyone plays MMOs for different reasons, and mine revolve around toon progression for better gear but also the community interaction with my kinmates. We raid some, but for the most part its the overpowered kind, like finishing DN for deeds, even though we are level 75. My kin has finished RoF tier 1, all of the 3 mans in isen, Foundry tier 1, but due to some of my kin mates not having the best computers and not having enough 75s on at the same time, the tier 2 stuff is mostly beyond our reach. I’ve pugged RoF tier 2 on my own along with Fangorns Edge tier 2, but the true Raiding kins on my server keep to themselves and won’t share strategies or invite other kins to fill out their groups. Its all very propritery.