Thinking out loud or How moral is this morale

The new essence grind is certainly a topic and a part of this game that gets everyone’s blood running and not in a good way. There’s usually some harsh verbs involved when speaking of those.

Since the flowers hit the game I’ve been thinking, to myself mostly, what do these updates give us? Armour upgrade was barely noticeable, 9 main stat, some armour (which means some mits) and some morale. On jewelry we got 12 stat and 34 morale. Gold jewelry pieces have thankfully been much better upgrades.

Source: LOTRO Wiki

But the essences… We can agree that the new essences weren’t really necessary to complete the content and that for the content we now have we are becoming overpowered. Granted. But that has happened in every update and when we beat everything and got everything we wanted we were basically ready for the new challenging content. But I simply can not see how the current essences are that much better than previous t8’s, especially morale essences. We have had a supreme morale essence with 972 morale and 42 fate, then there was a superlative, which was somewhat better. Now, between that supreme and current best morale essence, we have 4 different essences in the middle (superlative and 3 Ithilien essences) and still the Pelennor essence of morale with 1148 morale and 49 fate is only better by 176 morale and 7 fate. REALLY?

Hopefully the t9 essences we will see in the future will be of somewhat greater improvement. Also, it is to be hoped that the SSG and the developers will listen to some of the players, including me, about the upgrading of the current Ithilien ones. This can not be the only way to do it, since it would tie the new essences to the old ways of getting them and old content. So, maybe essence crafting or bartering could become something along the lines of upgrading the old Etenmoors armour with less Commendations if we have the old armour and a bit more for getting them without.

Currently, all the investment of time and money is going to waste by the essences being bound and prohibiting sale once we don’t need or want them. If the grind is to be done, then hopefully we will have a reason to do so. Now for the most part only the min-max’ers are doing this.