This morning, LiuTsieng posted a brief explanation on how the gauntlet system for Barad Guldur is supposed to work. After the bug fix for the gate issue in this area, some things have been adjusted.
We don’t do a great job of communicating the way the gauntlet works, so here’s what’s happening in that pic:
— You have 40 minutes from the time you kill the last two armored guards at the end of the gauntlet to kill Durchest without having to reclear the gauntlet.
— 39 minutes after you’ve killed those guards, you’ll get a warning message. Something to the effect of, “You hear the sound of reinforcements in the halls, they are coming..“
— A minute after that warning message, you’ll receive a message stating something to effect of, “Reinforcements have arrived, this is your last chance.“
— At this point you’ve had 40 minutes of free attempts on Durchest. Any current attempts will need to be finished up, after which the gauntlet will reset.
If you’ve been trying to prevent a respawn of the gauntlet, you’ll see the situation in that picture. Simply walk to the entrance (you don’t need to leave the instance, just walk to the door). You should see the front gate raise, an instance billboard indicating that you will have to reclear the gauntlet, and then the gate should lower.
This is why most groups aren’t seeing this. If you kill Durchest before the gauntlet timer is up you shouldn’t notice a thing. If you consistently attempt Durchest with everyone dying and then reviving at the entrance, you shouldn’t notice this. If for some reason you do though, walk to the entrance, let the gate raise, then lower, then reclear.
Hopefully if you’ve been having some issues, this will clarify things a bit.
Hounding Fear is one of those mob skills that has always been a center of debate. In the past I would say it was overused, but Turbine has made an effort to change that over various updates. Today I came across this post on the forums from LOTROSystems with some clarification on how Hounding Fear currently works and what is planned for the future:
Hounding Fear.
This has been the subject of many threads, complaints, frustrations, and arguments. We’ve responded in the past to some of these threads trying to explain things a bit (feel free to hunt them down if you wish). We also made a significant adjustment to Hounding Fear with Moria: reducing the chance of it landing on you when fighting mobs lower level than you. Currently, you actually have a 0% chance of getting hit by Hounding Fear when being attacked by mobs that are gray to you.
The reason we’re responding to this (newest) thread is because the game has changed a bit: Skirmishes, specifically soldiers. We want soldiers to be able to protect players the best they can, and we also want players to be able to protect their soldiers the best they can. Hounding Fear hampers that a bit. If you’re able to heal your soldier and trying to run over to him but get slowed by Hounding Fear, you might not get in range in time to save him. Therefore…
The effect “Hounding Fear” is being removed from Skirmishes AND from Landscape.
Now, you might be saying: “Protecting your Soldier? That is your reason for removing it when there’s so many better ones that have existed this whole time!?” What it comes to is that this was the final straw. We’ve debated back and forth for a long time now about the merits and flaws of Hounding Fear: what we were trying to achieve with it, how we were successful and unsuccessful with our goals, what the consequences will be if we remove it.
We hope this change will be for the better in the short term and the long term. We feel this is the right choice to make (though, to be fair, we always make the choices we make thinking they’re the right ones). Should it have been made sooner? Maybe. Will it backfire horribly because of some unforeseen consequence? Hopefully not.
Thank you for all of your feedback. We do pay attention to your concerns and try and act upon them when we are able to (assuming we agree with you, of course ).
So things appear to be changing for the better for all you Skirmishes out there.
Graalx2 posted on the official forums today, confirming that legacy tiers will be fixed soon:
We have found the issue with all of the legacies costs not decreasing as the legacy tiers up. It will be fixed in the next major patch (not tomorrow’s). There was a problem with rounding off that caused the numbers not to change as they should. This will correct all legacy costs for all classes.
Unaware of what the issues were? A number of legacies (at least eight of them confirmed for Wardens!) did not reduce in cost at certain upgrade levels. (In particular, T4>T5 and T5>T6 were being miscalculated.) That means that, given a rate of something like 500SM/hr (taking into account dailies), you were looking at about four hours of wasted gameplay upon purchase of a Scroll of Entitlement, because your legacy tier upgrade would net you zero points. Oops.
I’ve not dealt with that issue yet, but it’ll be something to watch out for … sure sounds like a pain in the butt.
Volume 2 Book 9: Siege of Mirkwood, Patch 1 is up on Bullroarer for testing. For some reason it feels as though there’s been a longer gap between the release and Patch 1 than usual, but maybe things are just dragging for me. You can read the full notes on the official forums: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=312145
As usual there are issues floating around that aren’t addressed by this patch, but we’ll have to hope they’re addressed in the future. I know there are several camps of people who are unhappy with some of the current legacy options. Managing that well seems like a nightmare, I don’t envy the people working on it.
Additionally, there’s a change to shared storage that is worth explicitly noting:
Quest items are no longer allowed in shared storage. Quest items that were stranded in Shared Storage are destroyed the first time you login a player on the account. Players who have the related quest underway will need to cancel and re-acquire the quest to receive a new quest item.
I was under the impression quest items couldn’t be placed in shared storage, but if you happened to do this, be sure to restart your quests. It’s an annoyance, but hopefully not a major one for most people. I am under the impression that if you remove them before the patch you should be safe, so give that a shot!
Siege of Mirkwood didn’t have a pre–patch download, unlike previous books and expansions. Even so, if you happen to have the Turbine Download Manager, the files you need for the update will download now. If you want to get a head start, this method could be a good alternative.
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