Hello to all the read­ers out there!

In the blo­gos­phere, we have two impor­tant com­modi­ties: the first is infor­ma­tion, and the sec­ond, our nuanced opin­ions regard­ing the infor­ma­tion we’re given. See­ing as we should be get­ting some more infor­ma­tion shortly from other news sources, I thought it would be good if I con­sol­i­dated all the cur­rently known info regard­ing Siege of Mirk­wood in a post and then offer up some input regard­ing some of the infor­ma­tion given.

Obvi­ously, I couldn’t have done all this col­lat­ing myself, but I’ve found that the best con­sol­i­dat­ing post to date isn’t from a dev, but from one of the forum­go­ers on LotRO. To San­driell from the LotRO forums, I salute you.

Past the break, you’ll see a rather long post regard­ing what we know so far, and my thoughts on it as a mid-level player who shares in both the excite­ment and hes­i­ta­tion behind an expansion.

Basic Infor­ma­tion:

• Siege of Mirk­wood (hence­forth known as SoM) will cost US$ 19.99 and will be a dig­i­tal expansion.
• The story will con­tinue with Book 3 next year, which will be a stan­dard con­tent update, though it hasn’t been men­tioned yet if it’ll be a free one.
• Some of the improve­ments to the game com­ing with Mirk­wood will ben­e­fit every­one, but the key fea­tures will require the Mirk­wood upgrade.
• Level Cap to hit 65, along with new traits, virtues, skills, and class sets.
• Is sup­posed to have 100+ hours of new content.

Thoughts:

I per­son­ally would have pre­ferred a free update, but that’s the stingi­ness in me talk­ing. If you’re look­ing for some­thing to do on the cheap, and don’t mind it being at home play­ing video games, this seems like a pretty good choice. That said, I hope that they offer as much of the good stuff (like the skir­mish sys­tem) as they can out­side the Mirk­wood expan­sion, so that even while the level cap is still 60, there’d be some­thing else to occupy new play­ers like myself.

See­ing this from both the player’s side and the developer’s side, I can under­stand why they’d try to do a dig­i­tal expan­sion rather than a phys­i­cal one. It lessens the cost of pro­duc­tion some­what, allow­ing them to put more in the cof­fers to keep the game run­ning, all while offer­ing most of the ben­e­fits of a phys­i­cal release. Sure, there’s no cloth map that comes with the game now, but I’m sure the pre-order or Collector’s Edi­tion ver­sions of the game will come with some good­ies that ardent LotRO play­ers will love. As long as it’s not just horse armor, I don’t think peo­ple will go into a revolt.

On Skir­mishes, World-Join and How they Work:

• Skir­mishes are PvE, and should not be directly com­pet­ing with PvMP. [Source]
• Skir­mishes are not ses­sion play. [Source]
• Each player has 1 Sol­dier. A group of 12 doing an instance would have 12 Sol­diers total. So the player group would be lead­ing the equiv­a­lent of a sec­ond raid group in the 12 mans. Though each player would only have con­trol of their own sol­dier. And yes, you can still use any pets/banners you would nor­mally have in addi­tion to your sol­dier. [Source]
• Skir­mishes reward experience-points, com­pli­ment­ing the level up expe­ri­ence, and can be accessed as low as level 30. [Source]
• World-join is a bit of a mis­nomer. The name of that part of the over­all Skir­mish sys­tem is likely being changed to the more infor­ma­tive “Skirmish-join.” Remem­ber the way half the com­mu­nity calls Fel­low­ship Maneou­vers Con­junc­tions because that’s what it was in beta? This is one of those situations.

  Well, what IS Skirmish-join? There will be a dev diary on it (I’m work­ing on it now) but the short ver­sion is it will be how play­ers can enter the new Skir­mish spaces. It’s a UI that will allow play­ers to select the group size, level, and dif­fi­culty of a Skir­mish, and then be instantly trans­ported to the Skir­mish. Empha­sis on “Skir­mish”, the sys­tem does not, as of now, inter­act with Instances, PvMP, Bat­tle Instances or any­thing else. [Source]

• Sum­mary of pre­vi­ously writ­ten infor­ma­tion here from one of the big resources regard­ing skir­mishes, IGN’s LotRO Vault:

1. 12 Skir­mish instances will be avail­able, along with two tuto­r­ial instances, and are meant to be fin­ished in 30 – 40 minutes.
2. Skir­mish Instances will be scal­able based on num­ber of play­ers (1, 3, 6, or 12 play­ers) with the remain­der made up of player-made NPC soldiers.
3. Some skir­mishes will be scal­able by level, so given this, assume that the higher up you are in level, the more skir­mish instances will be avail­able to you.
4. Com­plet­ing the pri­mary and optional objec­tives of a skir­mish (up to nine optional, ran­dom­ized objec­tives) nets you skir­mish points, in addi­tion to the above-mentioned expe­ri­ence points. Said Skir­mish Points will allow for cus­tomiza­tion and advance­ment of the NPC sol­dier you’ve cre­ated to stand by you.
5. Related to the Skirmish-Join info above, you can get into a skir­mish from any­where in the world, and get returned to the exact same loca­tion upon com­ple­tion of a skirmish.

Thoughts:

With the news of skir­mishes as offer­ing expe­ri­ence points, I’m begin­ning to think that Skir­mishes might be a fun way to level up fur­ther so long as the expe­ri­ence point gain is bal­anced. So long as it’s a viable option, and not par­tic­u­larly over­pow­ered as to make quest­ing insignif­i­cant, then we should see a healthy num­ber of peo­ple quest­ing and under­go­ing skir­mishes to get past any burnt-out feel­ings they might have.

One thing I’d like to see though is a way to pick your team­mates in skir­mish­ing. I think it’d be fun to go through a skir­mish with my kin­ship, for exam­ple, so that my kin­mates and I can know each other’s playstyle bet­ter in a raid-like scenario.

Added thoughts: Since the sys­tem seems to imply that you’re returned back to your place of skir­mish depar­ture after a skir­mish, an option that allows a per­son to keep on skir­mish­ing with­out hav­ing to return to the place he came from might be use­ful so that we can have fewer load­ing screens and, thus, save a few min­utes of our lives.

On Enhanced Com­bat Responsiveness:

“Autoat­tacks will not delay fir­ing a skill. What this does mean is that ani­ma­tion have a chance to pre­empt autoat­tack anims in such a way as to pro­duce a pop in the anim tran­si­tion that isn’t there right now.” [Source]

Thoughts:

If this means faster fights and the abil­ity to use gam­bits on my war­den en masse, I’m all for it. Let’s just hope it doesn’t break any­thing or turn the estab­lished com­bat mechanic of LotRO into a whole dif­fer­ent beast.

On Leg­endary Items:

• Leg­endary items will now be maxed at level 60 — no word yet on if this includes exist­ing leg­en­daries or only new ones.
• Leg­endary items will gain a 4^th runic slot, new lega­cies and new titles.
• You’ll be able to craft and cus­tomize 3^rd and 2^nd Age Leg­endary items. We can already craft them, so its the “cus­tomize” part that is of inter­est — no word on what it means yet, but there is a Dev Diary about this com­ing soon.

Thoughts:

Not a lot to say, since I haven’t reached that level yet, but being able to cus­tomize a legendary’s look would be nice.

On Dol Guldur:

• The pri­mary raid will be Dol Gul­dur, which will be a multi-boss instance, wherein you’ll get to fight a Fell Beast, and ulti­mately, the Lieu­tenant of Dol Gul­dur, who is second-in-command among the Nazgul. [Source]
• The new raid will also con­tain a clus­ter of smaller instances with both 3-man and 6-man spaces, accord­ing to the SoM website.
• Turbine’s Jef­frey Steefel said that you “will need a tonne of radi­ance to get through here.” [Video Source] [Our Report] UPDATE: As noted by the Stroll To Mor­dor blog, Ten­Ton­Ham­mer seems to have moved the video to their pre­mium mem­ber­ship page, so you’ll have to take our word for it for now.

Thoughts:

Now we come to a big issue that everyone’s hav­ing with the game: Radi­ance. I went into LotRO to pur­sue the story, so I’m a bit annoyed with the idea of requir­ing “a tonne of radi­ance” to make my way through an instance I’ll be doing in the future. If they have an eas­ier way to acquire the radi­ance though at that level, I wouldn’t mind so much (that token bar­ter­ing sys­tem they’re plan­ning would come in handy for SoM, I’m assuming).

About Horses and Goats:

• Mounts will become skills rather than items.
• The mount change allows for new things, such as pass­ing into instances and new zones while mounted; inter­act­ing with the var­i­ous NPCs from the com­fort of the mount, being able to use emotes on your mount. [Source]
• You can have mul­ti­ple horses. Each is a seper­ate skill, but there is no limit I am aware of on the num­ber you can have. There will be a Dev Diary on the new sys­tem, so that should give you a ton of info when it’s pub­lished. [Source]

Thoughts:

Use­ful money sinks are nice, and it’s good to have that extra bag space. Now if they’d only make musi­cal instru­ment play­ing a skill so I don’t have to keep on sell­ing off my lute when I’m full up on loot. Yes, that rhymed.

On Book 9:

• Epic Book 9 and much of its Epi­logue take place in Mirk­wood, so you’ll need ‘Siege of Mirk­wood’ for it. [Source]
• Speak­ing as a sto­ry­teller, I’d hope that you’d want to com­plete Book 8 in order to set the stage for Book 9! But as a game designer I rec­og­nize that Book 9 needs to be another on-ramp to the Epic, so you won’t need to do Book 8 first. [Source]
• There’s a lot of meat to Epic Book 9: instances, skir­mishes, monster-hunting, and a few sur­prises. [Source]

Thoughts:

If that “sur­prise” men­tioned above includes a con­vo­luted riddle-answering, treasure-hunting game, I will cry. I prob­a­bly won’t skip Book 8, but they have to make it more acces­si­ble if they expect mere mor­tals like myself to get to the story properly.

On Stor­age:

• Also on the list of changes is the addi­tion of shared stor­age space for accounts. Cur­rently, shared stor­age space appears to be lim­ited to 50 items, though this was likely to increase over time in a sim­i­lar man­ner to pur­chas­ing fur­ther stor­age space for your character’s Vault. [Source]
• …just like vaults, what’s put in at one vault NPC can be taken out at another. As long as the char­ac­ters are all on the same account. [Source]

Thoughts:

I’m imag­in­ing there will be a sep­a­rate tab to delin­eate between reg­u­lar vault items and shared vault items. This is def­i­nitely a step in the right direc­tion for user-friendliness, and should save me a ton of grief with send­ing mail to and from char­ac­ters on my account.

Lastly, we have the Beta Rewards Program:

San­driell men­tions in the last note on his post that it might be advan­ta­geous for us to sign up for Turbine’s Beta Rewards Pro­gram. You should prob­a­bly get a move on and do that now, if you’re really stoked for the expansion.

All in all, this post is pretty hefty, and I appre­ci­ate you read­ing it. It out­lines some of the big plans Tur­bine has for its game, and I’m impressed at what they’re plan­ning, espe­cially in terms of user-friendliness and com­bat­ing MMO burn-out. Let’s just hope their plans come to fruition with­out any issues, so we can all enjoy excit­ing new adven­tures together.

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