Mirkwood’s Legendary Item System Changes

Tony posted this on October 7th, 2009. It has 5 Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2250

The lat­est devel­oper diary is up and it’s all about changes to the Leg­endary Item sys­tem. I’m lik­ing what I’m hear­ing so far as the changes appear to increase the value and strength of these items, while also mak­ing the whole process of lev­el­ing them a bit less grindy. Look­ing across the LOTRO blo­gos­phere, it seems to be going over pretty well with oth­ers too (Jaxom, Mer­ric).

I really rec­om­mend read­ing the entire arti­cle (there’s some nice details for Cham­pi­ons in there, for exam­ple), but here’s some inter­est­ing bits:

  • “The expe­ri­ence needed to move from level 30 to the max­i­mum level of 60 (all Leg­endary Items regard­less of Age have a max level of 60 now), is depen­dent on the Age of the Leg­endary Item. Every level from 30 to 60 is now a flat amount of expe­ri­ence; Third Age LI require 20,000 expe­ri­ence per level, Sec­ond Age take 40,000 and First Age require 80,000.”
  • “With Siege of Mirk­wood, each class’s set of lega­cies has been updated. The weak­est lega­cies have been removed and will no longer be added to new leg­endary items, while other weaker lega­cies have been improved. Addi­tion­ally, each class has gained a hand­ful of new legacies.”
  • “Every leg­endary item now has a fourth relic slot. This slot will only hold a new type of relics that are not part of the relic com­bin­ing sys­tem but are instead cre­ated by Crafters. Each craft can make relics that give a bonus to a par­tic­u­lar stat, morale or power. In addi­tion, all crafters can make Greater Crafted relics once they reach Supreme Mas­ter rank. These Greater Crafted relics can only be used by the Crafter that made them and give a small bonus to Melee, Ranged, Tac­ti­cal or Heal­ing skills.”
  • “A new Tier of relics has been added to the relic com­bin­ing sys­tem after Tier 8. These new relics give the same style of bonuses as the other relics.”
  • “We will be intro­duc­ing a new set of her­itage runes which can be used on all leg­endary items with Siege of Mirk­wood.”

There will also be some new scroll types to apply to your Leg­en­daries, which I think is pretty exciting:

  • Scrolls of Empow­er­ment: “These scrolls allow the player to upgrade the Tier of any Legacy of their choice on one of their Leg­endary Items. There are no lim­its to the use of these scrolls other than avail­abil­ity and hav­ing a Legacy avail­able to be upgraded.”
  • Legacy Exchange Scrolls: “These scrolls allow the exchange of one exist­ing legacy for the Legacy on the scroll. So far the Wise have only been able to deci­pher scrolls that grant Lega­cies that increase basic Sta­tis­tics, Might, Vital­ity etc.”
  • Scrolls of Delv­ing: “These scrolls increase a Leg­endary Item’s max­i­mum advance­ment level by 10 up to level 70. No item expe­ri­ence is granted. The extra ten lev­els have to be earned. Only one of these scrolls can be used on any one Leg­endary Item. A legacy upgrade reforge is granted at level 70. Leg­endary Items from level 60 to Level 70 are treated as hav­ing reached max­i­mum level for decon­struc­tion purposes.”
  • Scrolls of Renewal: “These scrolls reset the leg­endary points spent on the item to zero allow­ing the player to re-spend the points in any manner.”

These scrolls can be found as loot or may be awarded dur­ing decon­struc­tion. The scroll that could allow a Leg­endary to reach Level 70 is inter­est­ing, mostly because it gives you one final chance to reforge it.

Any thoughts or hopes for the future?

Get out the vote!

Hobbit and Redhead posted this on October 1st, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.

Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2235

Go vote on Siege of Mirk­wood!

(Cross-posted else­where.)

Skirmishes, Storage and Mounts, Oh My!

Tony posted this on September 29th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2202

Saluting on a Horse -- Yeah, that's right.

Salut­ing on a Horse — Yeah, that’s right.

Along with the date, Tur­bine has also posted up a few more devel­oper diaries con­cern­ing Siege of Mirk­wood. They’re really worth check­ing out.

Skir­mishes

Zom­bie Colum­bus has a two-page diary that cov­ers the new Skir­mish sys­tem. It will be fol­lowed by even more Skirmish-related diaries in the weeks to come. Be sure to read the whole arti­cle (it’s not too long and I found the sec­ond page to be espe­cially inter­est­ing), but here’s a bit on their vision for the system:

To cut right to the chase: Skir­mishes are short, acces­si­ble, ran­dom­ized, scal­able, story instances with incre­men­tal rewards. Why Skir­mishes became this can best be explained by dis­cussing what the designer’s goals for the sys­tem are. Every­thing we added to Skir­mishes was done with a high level “vision” in mind. By shar­ing this vision with you, I hope that you will see why we made the choices we did, and how we ended up where we are now. Our goals were to:

  • Cre­ate finely crafted instance con­tent that can be played by dif­fer­ent group sizes and levels.
  • Keep play-time short, allow­ing Skir­mishes to fit into other activ­ity cycles. Inter­nally we’ve called them– “Pop-corn” expe­ri­ences. If one is short and good, why not try another?
  • Add ran­dom­ized ele­ments into Skir­mishes to keep replays interesting.
  • Encour­age a rota­tional play of Skir­mishes, to keep them fresh and pre­vent them from over­shad­ow­ing exist­ing playstyles. Skir­mishes should com­ple­ment the game, not alter it!
  • Set up an incre­men­tal reward struc­ture, like the instance barter systems.
  • Allow play­ers to feel that any amount of play time was a step closer to a desired reward.
  • Give play­ers a feel­ing of par­tic­i­pat­ing in epic strug­gles, and of being lead­ers of small armies.

I like the idea of Skir­mishes. In some ways, it’s like hav­ing a Leg­endary NPC in addi­tion to a Leg­endary Weapon. I’m always big on ran­dom­iza­tion in MMORPGs and I hope that Tur­bine con­sid­ers using it in more addi­tions in the future.

Stor­age

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard about the addi­tion of Shared Stor­age, but Tur­bine is offer­ing more details (and some images) of the sys­tem in action. I like the over­all con­ve­nience of it, espe­cially because the it hooks into the exist­ing Vault sys­tem. You can trans­fer items to and fro as you please. It can even han­dle bound items, although as you may expect, only the char­ac­ter who that item is bound to will be able to see it.

Shared Storage in Action

Shared Stor­age in Action

Mounts

This change is a big deal, in my opin­ion, as it really opens up a lot of future poten­tial for mount use. The Devel­oper Diary on these changes is the most inter­est­ing to me, espe­cially because it gets a bit heav­ier into how and why Tur­bine makes design and usabil­ity decisions.

For those inter­ested in the end-results, the new sys­tem most directly offers the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

Siege of Mirkwood on December 1st with Pre-Order Offers

Tony posted this on September 29th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2199

Siege of Mirk­wood has an offi­cial date: Decem­ber 1st, 2009. To com­ple­ment this, Tur­bine is offer­ing sev­eral pre-order options for players:

  • The LOTRO Life­time Mem­ber­ship is now avail­able for $199.
  • Any cur­rent or for­mer player who renews or upgrades their sub­scrip­tion to any multi-month plan by Octo­ber 31st gets the Siege of Mirk­wood dig­i­tal expan­sion for FREE!
  • All play­ers can pre-order the new LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack which con­tains 2 char­ac­ter slots and one shared stor­age slot that allows play­ers to share items with all of their char­ac­ters on the same server for $19.99 and get the Harbinger’s Cloak which pro­vides 8% speed boost and the Dusky Nim­ble­foot Goat mount for FREE!
  • Start­ing today, exist­ing Life­time Mem­bers who pre-order the LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack get the Siege of Mirk­wood dig­i­tal expan­sion plus two in-game items (Harbinger’s Cloak which pro­vides an 8% speed boost and a new mount) for FREE!

If I had more money I’d finally sign up for the Life­time Mem­ber­ship at this price. It’s just eas­ier to break up that fee than pay it all at once. Curses!

On the flip­side, I’ll appar­ently be get­ting Siege of Mirk­wood for free. Can’t complain!

I’m a bit con­fused by this Adventurer’s Pack, though. It does answer the call for more char­ac­ter slots (and the fee is rea­son­able, espe­cially when I con­sider how many deals Tur­bine seems to like to give), but I’m thrown off by the shared stor­age slot. I was under the impres­sion this was going to be part of the expan­sion itself. Does this mean that those with this pack and Siege of Mirk­wood will have two shared stor­age slots? Or does it mean you need to pur­chase the Adventurer’s Pack to access it at all?

In any event, I’m excited about the expansion!

Update: A Casual Stroll to Mor­dor has a great post clear­ing up all of the con­fu­sion, along with links to offi­cial comments.

Lothlorien gets some love: new quests with expansion

Isy posted this on September 15th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
Categorized as Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2159

lothlorien

Since PAX there has been rel­a­tively lit­tle new news regard­ing the upcom­ing ‘Siege of Mirk­wood’ expan­sion. How­ever, today I came across a lit­tle nugget of new infor­ma­tion while trawl­ing through the LOTRO​.com forums. The juice comes from the res­i­dent LotRO lore–mon­key Berephon and his MyLotRO blog — which can be found here.

The blog explains how in his down­time (from fix­ing typos and check­ing the lore used in the new Mirk­wood quests), he was given the oppor­tu­nity to do an Orion style update on a small cor­ner of Mid­dle Earth. Berephon goes on to explain his choice of Fanuid­hol — the orc-infested war-zone north of Lothlo­rien, where there are cur­rently just a few quests. His over­haul will include 14 new tasks which include sev­eral repeat­able quests to gain Lothlo­rien rep­u­ta­tion, IXP, cash and sil­ver branches. A com­ment in the dis­cus­sion, which fol­lows the blog entry indi­cates that highly-prized Lothlo­rien gold leaves may also be included as a quest reward, should the rewards guru per­mit it!

Berephon’s choice to add to the cur­rently lim­ited num­ber of Fanuidhol’s quests is well jus­ti­fied. Based upon my own trav­els in the Golden Wood, any quests that add vari­ety to the reputation-grinding quests in Lothlo­rien is most wel­come, and I look for­ward to see­ing the results.

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