Beware of the spoilers
So, as you can see we at LOTRO Players have been running the BR and testing the game to bring you what is new and SSG what is broken. So far, so good. We’re keeping up. Some of the bugs and kinks have been noted in the following video. For your convenience you can use the time links in the description.
Other than the ones in the video there are some other issues. Usually you’re not able to aggro two different kinds or species even if they are standing next to each other. So an animal kind should only aggro if you attack its kind. But Dire-Horn aggroed even though I attacked a man. Which in the new area can be an issue, since the mobs actually hit quite hard at times and maybe you don’t want to pull too many for various reasons, be it gear, not full health bar, etc. Some quests do not tell you if you got the item or not. I’ve been killing leaders for a while untill I found this out. And Mithrandir isn’t moving at all. So it was quite annoying to ride even from the second area of Mordor – Dor Amarth – back to the front of the gate just to continue the quest or turn it in. It would be nice to get ported to him once the quest is done, at least, because while doing this I spent quite a few Mithril Coins. Once the Black Book starts it is interesting. When I found myself in Annuminas I tought it was some kind of a bug. Which is what happens in the early stages of beta. Sometimes you do not know if something is a bug or just hasn’t been built in yet or something else is happening.
The trait points have also been changed. You will now get only 3 trait points, instead of 5 – 108, 111 and 114. The reputation goes to celebrated. At level 110 and having finished all the available quests in the 2 first regions, I have 210 Silver Signets of the Thandrim. You use this for non-slotted armour recipes and essence recipes, both single use. You also use them for your muster/return skills, cosmetic items and relics. So I wouldn’t mind getting a bit more of these while questing and there will probably be some repeatable quests to get more. You will die now if you try to swim through lava, but it also has a decent reach when you are standing close to it. Which means no lava fishing for fried fish, but it also sometimes makes it a bit difficult to collect quest items needed.
And given the description you can see when handing in the quest and on the item itself, I think this item should be a bit stronger and a bit less green.
High Elf
In this build we have also received the High Elf race and we were able to test some animations. The High Elf still isn’t done and they still look very similar to men, the race movie intro is the same as for regular elves. Personally, I wasn’t impressed when my High Elf captain started with a club with a few nails in it, while he was level 110. Running is still a bit awkward, it looks like tip-toeing and kicking back. It also has something of a balerina-like jump up, but when you are jumping from a higher position then he lands in some parkour style, which I do love. Bellow you can see the High Elf intro.
Some of the High Elf racial traits are decent, but I do think they need still some work. A wider dps buff, possibly a better out of combat rez – 30 minutes is far too long for a cooldown, unless it’s in combat. But so far I am not that impressed with the High Elf that I would invest money to buy the class and time to regrind all the virtues, trait points, etc. Race alone does not give game changing bonuses and I don’t see value in cosmetic changes like looks and animations other than for devoted role players. I have most of the classes, a captain too. So High Elf without some fancy class means nothing to me and to players who have most of these classes, some even all. But if there was an option to pay for an Elf to High Elf transformation, I would probably do it in a heart beat. 5% power bonus?! Whoopty-do. I’d take a High Elf racial bonus over the Elf one any time.
Barad Dur facelift
In Beta 1 you couldn’t continue the quests in Lughash. Once Beta 2 came out, that was the first thing to check out and it worked. One of those quests takes you to Barad Dur to free the king. Seems like dwarves still didn’t fix this bridge, hopefully they get to that. Even if they don’t, just hold to your mount a bit harder and it will be fine. But what surprised me the most, and in a good way, was what happened inside. Barad Dur has actually grown. It felt like I got into the TARDIS – It’s bigger on the inside.
You get a larger map, more quests, more enemies and different ones too. And just a note, once you pick up the quest from the dwarven king he will ask you to search for something in the relic chamber. That is the chamber with the two Cargul. You need to enter it and it will say that the item is not there. I missed it in the first run through. What I also love in Barad Dur is that once you free the prisoners they do not respawn a few seconds after, making it look like you did nothing. This seems to be permanent.
What I don’t like
The players have been asking for a while now that we get the Destroy all loot button, but we didn’t get it. And still we are getting the Eorlingas recipes, random purple LI drops, green items we don’t even want to vendor… I hope this gets fixed and we get rid of this junk loot. The best hope tokens are still made with the Westemnet recipes… So the players have been asking to even get the same token, but for new materials.
I also have some concearns about the gear and rating we are going to have. We have the best planed gear to test. But as per Vastin, this is not the gear that will be available in the U21 update, it will be a part of a dot update. Which one, we don’t know. And even with that best gear, which doesn’t even have a set bonus, which is another complaint, we do not cap many of our stats. Which I find is unacceptable because we can not re-introduce older ways of gearing and playing while the mechanics of the runs stay the same. Bosses get their morale buffed, damage buffed, avoidance buffed, they deal AoE/frontal/distributed damage and we now need to choose where we want to put our essences. If this happens I do not know how it will impact the raiding and PvMP community, but I don’t expect it to be nice.
The overall statting balance has been changed with the intent of making it quite difficult to cap everything you might want to cap – you’re going to have to make choices regarding what’s really important to your build – DPS vs. mitigations vs. vitality and so forth.
Pre-mordor it was very easy to cap your primary mitigations with most classes, and then you’d classically start stacking morale or DPS mods. In Mordor you can expect there to be more tension between these decisions as it will decidedly NOT be trivial to simply cap your mitigations – only main tanks would be expected to even really try for that.
Speaking of the best gear issue here… It would be nice to know if the gear stats are close to where they intend them to be and if they didn’t intend it to have bonuses. Then we have an issue here with putting a cap on the level you can use some lower sets on. No level 75 sets and no level 115 sets. I have seen some Dome of the Stars loot has scaled, but I still didn’t see a box drop and how the armour from it looks like. But even if it scaled properly… SSG makes old content sets unavailable, only to make us run old content to get the scaled sets. This content is at least two years old.
I usually don’t intend to make my articles a rant, but if having these rant-like elements does help a bit and pushes the readers and especially the developers to reconsider some things and possibly provoke a different approach, then I’m happy I made it.
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