LOTRO Players News Episode 41: Pinebard

2 comments

1. 

   Kaleigh Starshine / April 9, 2014

   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.

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2. 

   Tsu / April 9, 2014

   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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