Yesterday the NDA went down for the Helm’s Deep expansion. Now players are free to share their thoughts and also content. Andang, Ethelros and Pineleaf decided they would start out by showing the Epic Battle system.
They created a video for each of the five battles coming with Helm’s Deep.
Helm’s Dike
The Deeping Wall
The Deeping-coomb
The Glittering Caves
The Hornburg
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excellent videos – thanks very much 🙂 I’ve only been able to try out a couple (need more points!!) so this was very useful, cheers 🙂
May I join you both in Epic Battles once they go live? 🙂
Honestly, after watching the first movie, I understand much more why I am having so many issues with these.
The distance between a class loaded with AoE’s that can hit unlimited targets and had such a wide swing-range of damage with them versus a class limited to single-target attacks with no crowd control abilities available is enormous in this context. They most certainly are going to have to give Scouts special features to make these viable, I would think, like making all of their attacks AoE or something.
Do you think it is possible to just do Engineer and Officer and be able to earn Platinum medals, without engaging the foe directly much?
I will watch the rest later. Thanks for these! 🙂
I think it will be very hard to get platinum solo. You will need help to do well. Also being at cap will help with the current balance. As a solo champion in red line, I don’t do too well, but I still get lots of rewards at the end and it is still fun. These battles are not really about winning or loosing, it is about doing the best you can in the situation you are in.
So far I have not been able to complete any of these, or at least earn any points to put in the trees to help get me started. At least a part of that is not knowing where to go, and confusion over exactly what we are supposed to do, like with that sidequest in the first battle where you need to actually click on the archers to have them shoot. I had no idea!
But what I am really getting at is balancing issues within the system based on the classes, I think. When I saw you striking 10 foes at once, I was saying to myself, “It would literally take me 10 times as long to do the same amount of damage. But, actually 20 times, since Scouts lose half of their damage when not attacking from behind the foe, which will be difficult with the chaos of the battle.”
I think that most of the ‘homogenization’ issue is due to the Overlords having made our foes so weak, especially with their attacks, that they feel forced to throw hordes at us now, in order to make up the difference in a way. And that is fine, if you are playing a class that can deal with that.
But we Scouts have no ranged abilities, no AoE at all, and not even self-healing, unless we trait in our least damaging line. If they make these battles doable for Scouts, would that not make them trivial for Champions and others who can deal with hordes of foes more efficiently?
I think that has always been a challenge of classes like this. There are some of the hardest to play in LOTRO because they can’t deal with large numbers. It is a weakness of the class, but it is accurate as far as lore goes. Bilbo and Frodo couldn’t take out large hoards for a reason. That being said, they could work around it. I am not sure if there is a way to work around it here aside from playing with another player.
That being said, on some battles, I never actually fight an enemy. I am too busy taking down ladders or firing catapults or managing soldiers. Sadly you have to finish the first battle to get to the other battles that have the diversity in gameplay and allow situations for your class to shine.
So, I go back to my first question…
May I play with you all sometime? 🙂
Oh, and a question about Officering. Watching you give the Commanders commands, sometimes you just chose one, and sometimes just clicked them all quickly. Is there a limit to how many orders you can give, and if you give more than one, do they all work simultaneously? Is there a reason not to just give them Haste, Healing, Armor, and Damage all at once, whenever you can?
Thanks so much! I really did learn quite a bit from these videos!
Of course you can play with us sometime! As for the officer stuff, You can only use each buff every couple minutes. You want to save them for your partners side if possible but at times if you notice soldiers getting low, you might want to give them all the help you can.
The lack of AoE is an issue, especially in Epic Battles. But I have been able to get to rank 3 (Engineer) finally. Engineers do get some traps that cause AoE damage; that helps some. Mostly I focus on using the siege weapons, and not on direct combat.
I’m happy to help out anytime if you want someone to duo these with.
Thanks for these – as someone who didn’t participate in Beta, it is great to get a look at what these Big Battles are all about. From the footage I watched – it looked like it would be really fun, and I like that you can do them in the group size that works for you.
Thanks!