LOTRO Players News Episode 41: Pinebard

This week we have a great discussion on the class system changes and talk about the news of the week.

Blooper video here.

Game News

LOTRO Screen Shot Competition Winners

Update 13 Bullroarer Release Notes(Part 4)

Store Sales
Free Sample Of The Week 4-4-14/4-10-14

+100% Crafting XP x1 Use Coupon Code CRFTXP 1/Account

25% Off

  • Monster Classes

  • Monster Traits

  • Monster Skills

  • 100% Infamy/Renown Gain

Live Player Dev Stream:

  • Session play is completely optional and does not impact Epic questing & story line. Can go back and play later if you skip.

  • Producers letter w/launch of U13 will describe the new class

  • New epic battle possible in U14

  • Did not rule out instances in the future (mentioned Mordor, Shelob’s lair) “our priority is to tell the story”

  • Hints at considering Osgiliath for future PvMP zone. Still considering

LOTRO Players News

April Fools’ Day Articles

Introducing: Warhobbits!

LOTRO to Revert to Subscription Only Model

An Unexpected Vidcast Claims Top Prize

Lilikate’s Creatures – Overhill

Community Events

LOTRO Video Highlights: The Call: A Hobbit Journey

LOTRO Players Adventures Episode 9

What We All Did – For Zyngor

Where’s Tinki? – Hobbiton

Brax’s pick of the week: NBI 2014 is Coming by Doone Woodtac at the XP Chronicles (xpchronicles.com)

Question of the Week

Question

Months after HD launch, how do you feel about the current class system?

How do you think it could be improved as a whole?(No class specific stuff)

Do you miss the old system at all?

Community Answers

Fredelas replied:

“I was always very fond of LOTRO’s previous a la carte system for selecting class traits. It allowed me to mix and match to get exactly what I wanted. That’s what I call flexibility.

I could write a tale of epic length to explain all the reasons I dislike the new class trait trees, but maybe I’ll just do bullet points this time in case you make someone read it out loud.

  • All of Turbine’s stated reasons for the new class trait trees could have been solved by modifying the previous system a little bit at a time.

  • Class trait points are earned in a dizzying variety of ways, some of which are completely undocumented (and unintuitive) in the game.

  • Turbine made these changes at the same time as a level cap increase, multiplying the balance issues that resulted. (Although to be fair, the massive increase in item potency is at least equally to blame.)

  • I’m penalized for trying to build a balanced or hybrid specialization by having to use twice as many points for trait ranks outside my selected primary tree.

  • The UI is bewildering. I can’t review the primary specialization bonuses without paying to retrait. The set bonuses are off to the left hand side, disconnected from the tree that earns them. There is no way to share my spec with other players, since it’s too much information to inspect.

  • Did I really need to relearn how to play my class at the same time as Epic Battles were added, where I barely play my class at all?

  • Most importantly, the hearts (and wallets) of all the Bard NPCs in Middle-earth are breaking now out of loneliness and despair.”

Brian replied:

“Over all, I’m liking the change to the class system. For the main reason that I can now take my time and configure 2-3 trait setups that I like. I don’t have to run back to a bard and rush a build setup if I’m about to group up.

Improvements: option to add quick slot button for the trait builds. Click on button and I’m set for tanking. Click another for healing. Just so I don’t have to open the trait panel.

Do I miss the old system? Sometimes. I miss being able to do more hybrid builds.”

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Feedback

Reviews

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Featured Comments

Makaia left a YouTube comment on episode 40 of LOTRO Players News:

“I have been a viewer of Andang’s videos for over six months now, and thus I would see the LOTRO players news videos and such on his channel, but never took the time to stop and listen/watch them. Now I am mentally beating myself up over that decision. About a month ago, I listened to part of one of the livestreams, and now, I’m utterly obsessed with LPN. I am not extremely active in the LOTRO community a forum post/check every few weeks is about what I do but I have found how helpful and informative LPN truly is. Favorite. Podcast. Ever. In some ways, I feel like I’m intruding upon a hilarious phone call, you all are so comfortable on air and talking to each other. Keep up the good work, and I look forward with much excitement to next week’s episode, and what the future holds for LOTRO players news!

And if this is going to be read on air, would Andang do the honors?”

Emails

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Final Thoughts

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Thanks for watching!

2 comments

  1. Kaleigh Starshine /

    Great show, everyone! 🙂

    Regarding the class/trait system question, I have noticed something interesting. It is seeming to me, more and more, that when many give their opinions about the good things brought about by the new system (being able to change lines on the fly, not having to visit the Bard, Loremaster pets being more viable, speeding up attack animations, and so on), they are mentioning things that are not really inherent to the new skill system itself, but rather independent changes that coincided with the arrival of the new system. All of those things could have been implemented with no actual change to the skill/trait system at all, really.

    But when the negatives are discussed (Lack of hybrid viability, being forced to put points into traits you do not really want to in order to go further down the tree, lack of customization, and so on), these are things inherent to the actual new system put into place.

    As far as the old system feeling stagnant and all, there was no reason at all that more slots for traits and more traits could not have been developed, as Brax said. In fact, many have been developed and are part of the new system. There was nothing magical about the number 7 (for traits) or 3 (for Legendary traits) that required them being kept as is.

    As far as balance goes, I simply cannot stress enough that it was not we, the characters, who were overpowered before, but it was instead our foes and the measures taken against them that made us so. The LI System was introduced with Moria. I remember being scared to death of venturing in Moria, in the Shadowed Refuge and other places, where getting the attention of one extra orc or goblin could spell your doom! It was exciting to venture on the landscape then, even if it was underground 🙂

    And, since skills and traits and all had become virtually stagnant after that point, there simply was no way for us to become overpowered save through our items, which only really got out of hand with Helm’s Deep.

    Instead, our being overpowered was due to our foes being weakened. Their protections were reduced so we could cut through them like butter. They were given wet noodles to hit us with, so they posed little threat. And their aggresion range was reduced to the point where we could freely frolick through fields of foes with little danger in raising the ire of any at all. Even now, the foes in and around Helm’s Deep have hardly any more morale than foes we fought previously, in Eastern Rohan and even back to Isengard.

    And therein lies the best answer for rebalancing things, in my opinion. Rather than making vast, sweeping changes to our characters, a better approach to rebalancing would be to balance our foes relative to the danger we are facing (through areas of landscape like Limlight Gorge and reinstituting tiers of difficulty rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach of Epic Battles).

    Why are vast, sweeping changes to our characters not the way to go? Ripples in the water! Here is one small example:

    There are 15 slots for us to wear jewelry and armor. Teal armor at Level 95 gives one of two options for your main stat and Vitality bonus: Either 217 or 186 to each of them.

    Let us say that we swap out every single one of those items to give us the highest Vitality bonus rather than our main stat. That would be 31 extra Vitality over 15 items, so… 465 Vitality overall.

    With the coming changes to mitigations, that 465 Vitality will give us: 1395 Morale (At most about 10% extra morale at that level) and… virtually nothing else.

    So, a small list of the ripples made by this measure:

    – All but invalidating half of the possible choices for itemization save for possibly tanking classes (Even now there is a thread in the Bullroarer forum about how people will be farming the old Isengard instances for items that give mitigation rather than wear the new ones)

    – Irritating those who have bought stat tomes for the stats affected by this change.

    – Weakening a great number of skills that give bonuses to these stats(Captains’ Motivating Speech, Minstrels’ Tales and so on…)

    – Adding fuel to the fire of the solo/group, casual/raider feud, as each group argues about how the other is being catered to.

    – And many more I am sure will only be recognized down the road.

    It just seems to me that, if you want to achieve a balance, you need to limit variables as much as possible. What should be done I think is this:

    – Turbine needs to determine what they want the balance to be for landscape content. While so many of us believe things are far too easy there now, there are some who do not believe that and even feel it is too tough still. Using their data-mining, Turbine needs to determine what is the proper place for it to be and balance the foes to that rather than making wide, sweeping changes to our characters.

    – Then, balance other content accordingly: Tier 1 Instances, Tier 2, Tier 2 Challenges, Tier 1 through Tier 3 Skirmishes and so on.

    Simply put, there needs to be inclusive measures taken rather than merely neutral or exclusionary ones in order to best bring about balance. As an aside, the new class/skill/trait system was a most decidedly exclusionary measure, forcing the opinion of ‘skill bloat’ on those that enjoyed using all of their skills, taking away hybrid choices away from the player, and in so many other ways.

  2. Yesterday, LOTRO PLAYERS had a Tsunami defence shield activated…I could not log in to give feedback to another great show…

    keeping it simple…

    Re: Trees

    I have never understood why such a simplified skill tree was implemented. What it provides with one hand, very basic skill progression it rips away with the other, exorbitant cost of hybridisation!

    RAW NOTES on Trees: tree update..I think it has some room for quick fixing…indeed more shared branches are needed. For some skills in another tree they should become accessible…penalty-less…
    has to be some balance…and make the trees complicated…one branch will spread off to other trees…

    Path bonuses
    200% pure
    100% 75% hybrid
    100:50:25 broad hybrid
    75:50:50 jack of all trades
    Like to think as training/style, logic being if concentrating on one style it would have a negative effect to have too much of another style…Weird hybrids…miss em.
    Switching mid battle…we can do this?

    Agree with Drac RK was more fun before…why is this? Drac…u listening oh, off counting again! (u should really have him do the episode count! And his laugh is pretty close too…thats 2 ha ha ha!)

    And finally unneeded NPCS left in game:

    Bards & Trainers…get rid of them? Poor unused NPC’s…also the gear sellers RP only! Or Bard will sing you a song of you latest LOTRO achievements…or a ballad with the voice of PINELEAF…

    enough madness…Great show 🙂

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