Upcoming Changes to the Dastardly “Hounding Fear”

Tony posted this on January 22nd, 2010. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2607

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.

Legacy Tier Upgrades to Be Fixed Soon

Tony posted this on January 19th, 2010. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as News, Patch, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2580

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.

If you’re not famil­iar with this issue, Fer­di­nand the Great has posted a brief sum­mary on LOTRO Vault:

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.

Upcoming Radiance Barter Changes: The Real Fix?

Tony posted this on August 15th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as Mines of Moria, News, Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2014

Amlug has a blog post that I think many have been want­ing for quite a while now. It’s all about Turbine’s planned changes for how Radi­ance gear is bartered. I highly rec­om­mend read­ing the full post at its source and leav­ing some com­ments. The entire post is of inter­est, though, so I have 95% of it below as well:

Yes, we have lis­tened to your con­cerns about the Book 8 changes and the pre­vi­ous instances not being changed.  We have talked long and hard about what are the best ways to fix this sys­tem so it is works for as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble and we also ulti­mately want it to feel…wait for it…rewarding!

So we have come up with a new plan.  Meet Medal­lions — The new shiny barter token to use for bar­ter­ing for your radi­ance pieces and some extra Leg­endary Item aug­men­ta­tions!  Medal­lions will be replac­ing most of the tokens that you’ve seen since Moria.  There will be unique Medal­lions for each clus­ter of instances that we release.  Cur­rently there will be two for the live con­tent you guys are play­ing: the Medal­lion of Moria and the Medal­lion of Lothlo­rien.  The Medal­lions will drop off of every boss mon­ster in level 58+ instances.  This means that killing boss one in Forges of Khazad-Dum will drop Medal­lions for every­one in the party.  (Note: Make sure you all loot the chest!)  I’m not going to get into how many, etc. here because we are still bal­anc­ing the sys­tem.  Play­ers can use Medal­lions to trade for same things they were trad­ing for — namely the Chal­lenge sets, the other dun­geon sets, and relics and Leg­endary Item XP.

Cur­rently the Medal­lions of Moria will drop in: Grand Stairs, Forges, Six­teenth Hall, Fil Ghashan, Skum­fil, and Dark Delv­ings.  The Medal­lions of Lothlo­rien will drop in Water­works, Halls of Craft­ing, and Hall of Mir­rors.  Future instances will drop a new Medallion.

The goal here is to not force you all to grind through instances in only the way we want.  Also, play­ers will still gain ground towards gain­ing their sets even if they aren’t achiev­ing the Chal­lenges.  How­ever, doing the Chal­lenges will gain you more Medal­lions!  In addi­tion to this, we are going to be adding in some items to Chal­lenges at a very low per­cent­age drop.  This means you’ll have a chance of get­ting some­thing spe­cial. Finally, we are fix­ing it so there are new Chal­lenge quests that work while you are inside the instances only and are on a daily retry timer.  Orion has men­tioned this tech and you can read his blog for more infor­ma­tion.  Oh and if that is not enough, we have some new Leg­endary Item good­ies that you can trade for that we think you will like a lot.  (But you’ll have to wait to find out what exactly!)

“But what about my old tokens?  What do I do with them?”

No wor­ries.  There will be new npcs at the Twenty-first Hall and Caras Gal­ad­hon near the class train­ers that will exchange those old crusty tokens for new shiny medal­lions!  These Barter Exchange Traders will also hold all the Leg­endary Item good­ies.  They are your new favorite buddies.

I’m sure there is much more to talk about and we’ll be dis­cussing the new instances we are work­ing on shortly, but for now, I hope this comes as good news.

–Amlug

p.s. Radi­ance and Hope have been sep­a­rated back out again.  Radi­ance will no longer give bonuses to play­ers on land­scape, it will only be used to com­bat Gloom.

Happy? Unhappy? Indif­fer­ent? Unsure until it’s in effect? No mat­ter what your opin­ion, I think we can all agree that it’s great to see Tur­bine address­ing player con­cerns so directly. I am per­son­ally happy that they’ve taken the time to think about this rather than rush­ing some­thing out to appease some of the more vocal forum members.

I have to say, I pre­fer this blog approach some of the team mem­bers are tak­ing as of late. They can get all of their ideas out before oth­ers can inter­ject or mis­con­strue. There’s also more time to edit and be sure of what they’re say­ing before they post it. I think this goes over bet­ter in the long run, honestly.

Bounty Hunting your way to Item XP

Isy posted this on August 13th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as Guides, Patch.
Tagged as , , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2002

itemxp

So here in Europe, Book 8: Patch 1 was released today, and as can be expected, within sec­onds of log­ging in, the trade chan­nel was being spammed with the newly craftable ‘reforged’ 2nd Aged items, while the advice chan­nel was full of fran­tic mes­sages from play­ers des­per­ately seek­ing those all impor­tant new craft­ing recipes! (Note: For those who still need to know, the Lothlo­rien Vine­yards is where you will find a Lothlo­rien Craft Guild rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Guild recipes, while single-use recipes are traded by an Elf at the docks nearby). All of this craft­ing drama inevitably ended with the Auc­tion House flooded with all the new crafta­bles (with a hefty price-tag attached), and a dras­tic price-increase for mithril flakes.

After the excite­ment of craft­ing my own 2nd age for the first time and help­ing a small group out with a Carn Dum cas­tle boss, I was advised by a kin­nie to head towards Esteldin. With a Level 60, there is not nor­mally any need to head towards the North Downs (despite spend­ing so much time there dur­ing the middle-portions of the lev­el­ling expe­ri­ence), but a return visit is now highly rec­om­mended: hid­den behind a pil­lar near the stable-master in Esteldin is a quest-giver, who pro­vides access to five bounty-quests, (which I can only assume is new with the Book 8 patch but wasn’t men­tioned in the patch notes!?). Each of these quests is designed for a Level 60 in a small fel­low­ship, is repeat­able every 5 hours, and, for each quest com­pleted, rewards you with extremely valu­able Item Expe­ri­ence (IXP) runes with IXP val­ues far exceed­ing those nor­mally found in Moria.

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Patch News: 2nd Age Legendary Crafting

Isy posted this on August 11th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch.
Tagged as , , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1984


Photo courtesy of http://shop.danceandfancy.co.uk/

Firstly, a quick intro­duc­tion! My name is Isy (another of Tony’s new MMeOw writ­ers!), and in-game, I am part of the rel­a­tively quiet EU server of Gilrain. I have been play­ing for over a year, and while in the past I have deemed myself to be a ‘casual’ player, I would prob­a­bly now be bet­ter described as a “casual/hardcore” hybrid, hav­ing recently joined a more raid-active kin, own­ing a Level 60, full-radiance Cap­tain, and a Level 60 Rune-keeper. Like many in the player-base who have reached the so-called “end-game” con­tent (and are get­ting just a wee bit miffed with repeat­edly run­ning instances to pos­si­bly win some radi­ance armour, just to access a raid in the hope of get­ting lucky on even bet­ter radi­ance armour), I like to know what is around the cor­ner. Call it spoil­ers, call it curios­ity… for me, track­ing down infor­ma­tion or spec­u­lat­ing over rumours whets my appetite for LotRO’s future and gives me some­thing to look for­ward to.

As such, I wanted to share some infor­ma­tion that should inter­est high-level char­ac­ters who enjoy craft­ing — espe­cially those of you who can’t stand the radi­ance gat­ing! Intro­duc­ing: 2nd Age Leg­endary crafting!

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