cordovan – LOTRO Players

Update 21.3. Almost.

Missed me?

As you possibly know, I usually cover the Bullroarer, but this time I wanted to try a different approach and see how that works out instead of writing critique after critique to some issues that might get changed and it seems like this was a good decision this time. For example, a nice feature was introduced to raid loot at first, but it wasn’t really sustainable. There were tradeable items that had a one-hour cooldown before they became tied to a character (or account, I don’t remember). But after the cooldown expired sadly we could not click those to add them to our wallet. I did not waste much time in later builds, so I’m not sure how everything was changed other than following the forum. It seems that the separate items have been replaced with boxes to be opened and select items. So, let’s go directly to the Update notes for the 21.3.

Content

Since the High Elf was introduced earlier in November, the main reason for this update is the new raid. Which, according to the new information, we are actually not getting yet. The issue has arisen with the Original challenger title, which isn’t available in the game right now for this raid. At first, the option was to introduce the raid but without the title. So, players could eventually beat the raid, but not get the title and would need to play for it again at a later date. So, after some thoughts from the players and probably a meeting at SSG, it has been decided that the raid won’t be introduced until the title issue has been fixed. Which is a very good decision by SSG.

Cordovan

As we took a look at the Abyss of Mordath over the weekend on Bullroarer and read your feedback, we uncovered a couple of issues that we do not want present when the raid opens to the public. We have decided to temporarily make the Abyss of Mordath raid inaccessible when Update 21.3 goes live on Monday, to give us time to correct these issues. This also allows players to compete for the Original Challenge title when the raid is first opened to the public. We will have more information about the raid’s opening soon. Additionally, the new raid Barter Vendors will not provide their services until the new raid opens to the public.

It remains to be seen how long this wait is going to take, but as per Cordovan, it should be measured in days and not longer.

Cordovan

I don’t want to commit until people get into the office on Monday and do the work on it, but the likely scenario is in the realm of days rather than anything longer.

A good thing is that they have actually changed some of the armour sets for some classes, but sadly a majority of them seem to not be addressed and remain to be not as useful as some previous ones.

There is a variety of other updates available, but I won’t be covering them all. Instead, I’ll just go into several more important ones for those who like to play the cap content. These issues are with the so-called instance cluster and the Ash of Gorgoroth system.

The issue with the instances is that SSG has supposedly fixed the drop rate on these instances so much that they had to introduce daily locks to them, similar to the featured instances. The locks are not transferable and are tied to boxes. So, a player could have a lock on the box for boss one, but not for boss two and three. Also, there are different locks for tier one and two. Similarly, this has been explained by Tybur.

Tybur

Chest locks are NOT inherited and are specific to a given chest. So for example, opening the Naerband boss 1 chest on tier 1 will give your character personal locks for that single chest. That daily cooldown will not transfer to any other character and will not affect the Naerband boss 1 chest on tier 2, or any other chest. Note that chest locks can be applied either when a boss is defeated and the chest spawns, or when the chest is opened, depending on the logic behind the specific chest. The ‘/raid locks’ command will give cooldown information for every currently locked chest on your character.

The chances of receiving an incomparable piece of gear instead of a rare piece of gear in tier 2 Naerband and tier 2 Seregost was increased.
Independently, the chance of receiving a piece of gear at all from any and all Naerband and Seregost chests (tier 1 and tier 2) was greatly increased.

It remains to be seen what ‘greatly’ really means, but it is certain that it will be an issue for people who used Court of Seregost to get scrolls of empowerment for their legendary items. These locks are further accentuating the issue that only now, with the raid coming out, has the instance Dungeons of Naerband been fixed. With the raid coming out and the issues the instance has had in the past, Dungeons of Naerband will probably remain unplayed or at least barely played. Court of Seregost also had some minor details added to remove confusion around resetting the fight with Lhaereth.

Further issues this update introduces is regarding the Ash system. The killing of Ash has started even sooner and it continues in this update as well. First the chance of getting items has been lowered, then removed from some mobs, now it remains only in resource instances. Now, months later, Cordovan has stated that the company has never intended for Ash to be the primary way to gear.

Cordovan

We have tried to be clear that Ash of Gorgoroth is meant to be a non-primary way to get gear, with the primary method being running the content. We are working to better align with that principle in Update 21.3 through guaranteed or near-guaranteed drops depending on difficulty in the Update 21 instances.

Sadly, this statement does not hold when you consider how bad the quest gear is and that they have removed landscape drops of better gear. The only thing that remains to get gear is instances and rare boxes, some of which are behind 115 camps that pull too many mobs for leveling players and some areas are very hard to do with too much Shadow.

This is only made worse by putting the cap amount to Ashes of Gorgoroth to 10.000 Ash, similar to Commendations in the PvMP area. This way ensuring that players can not get the newest gear as soon as it hits the live servers. But most of all, ensuring that players need to spend time or preferably money to get the Gorgoroth lootboxes and keys so they can get Ash and best-in-slot items. Players who already have over 10.000 Ash will not be able to disenchant new items, so they will need extra slots in bags, vault and shared storage, this way spending more with SSG. Some countries have already started addressing this lottery system with their laws and it remains to be seen how SSG and entities behind it will react to this.

Review of 2017

At the start of 2017, we have been very happy to see SSG part ways from Turbine and WB, thinking that things may turn for the better now. The new old team had a big task in front of them. Or even several. Celebrate the 10-year anniversary, release a long-awaited expansion, walk into Mordor, destroy the ring and create another raid.

I also started writing for LOTRO Players this year and I have been very positive in one of my first articles when I wrote… But Lord of the Rings Online has fought against the odds and either won or drew a tie in its battles. What is keeping LOTRO alive? Is it the quality of content, design or lore? I would assume that the deep story Tolkien has provided and the developing team has even filled in at times is actually this games biggest treasure. We play and come back sometimes after years of breaks from the game just to relive some moments from the books and movies, to explore the new content, be a part of the world we so much love and possibly beat some of the newest challenges. And since we do enjoy these challenges too, we can not ignore the work that goes into content creation.

Sadly, the hopes of the players and the reality don’t always get along. Depending on the players and the type of content they are enjoying, you could get different opinions on the state of the game and around everything else too. My opinion on some of those things is sadly almost famous, but like some of the other players, it has never been my goal to talk down on the game or the people working on it, but there has been some disappointment how some things were dealt with because I was amazed by some of the bad business decisions. So much so that I have actually bookmarked the first words of apology in years I have seen on the forum.

Cordovan

Scourges of Gorgoroth will now appear in different locations every day. Their previous behavior of being in one location was a bug, and was fixed last week when we updated our events schedule. There was a miscommunication that led us to not properly notify you after the change was made, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Personally, I would forgive a lot if only I had more communication during the Wastes in U20, which was repeated during the announcement of Mordor expansion release date and price. Cordovan is likely doing the best CM job so far, but the company not addressing some important issues even to say something like the quoted text above was just too much for me. I am grouping this under the business model. Communication, marketing, customer support and value etc. Speaking of which, Mordor didn’t really get enough Marketing before the release and when finally the trailer was released players actually asked for it to be removed from YouTube.

The visuals of the game have gotten much better and there have been some screenshots of the same place with 10 years difference and the improvement is really great. If you can afford to play on ultra high graphics, you will certainly enjoy the view. This is also the year when a 64-bit client was announced, so it is to be hoped that the lag and other issues will be alleviated soon and we will have fewer complaints in that area. The world building is great. Apart from some falling through the actual world, it will always be great to personally revisit some places from the books and movies and be a part of the world developers created for us using and interpreting Tolkien’s words.

There have been some plans for the future of LOTRO past 2017 and Severlin mentions them in the producer’s letter.

Well, the worlds are now open and I’m off to test the drop rate if possible.

A different day, a different solution

To remind you, if a reminder is even needed, I have had an article about how SSG wanted to address the issue they have created by not putting the correct Ash value on the elf-enchanter. Some people were happy to see the discounted gear, thinking it’s the correct price because there were so many ways to get more pieces of gear. The teal barter items had a +14 Light of Earendil stat, while the crafted purple items had a +16 and it was only natural to think that is the reason it was cheaper and because of the eventual gear from the instances.

The first idea was to strip the people from their newly received gear and have them left without any gear, which cause a massive uproar on the forums. I have been following the community for a while and it has been a long time since I have seen the people there so in sync with who has made a mistake and what needed to be done. I haven’t seen a greater display of a community effort that great and I applaud them for that. As much as some people do not like the tone of some of my articles, I’d like to think that it played at least one small part of it.

The current solution that SSG has come to is that they would offer two solutions. Either turn in the gear and receive the ash that you spent and shadowed essences, the number to be determined by the number of slots of the armour piece you turn in. Or keep the gear, but it will be downscaled to the old level 330. I hope this means that the stats stay the same, but we lose the extra +4 LoE. This would be tolerable and what I would prefer because I’d hate to see SSG try to downscale or upscale anything since it doesn’t really work that good in LOTRO. Downscaled BB’s and upscaled PvMP is a proof of that.

Cordovan

When Update 21 Patch 2 was released to the live worlds on October 10th, the cost for Incomparable items from the High-Enchanter Barter Vendor was incorrectly set when compared to the rest of the gear on offer. Once we recognized the issue, we temporarily disabled the vendor. We are working on a hotfix to correct this issue.

For players who already purchased Item Level 330 Incomparable gear, we have several options available. When the hotfix is released, already-purchased level 330 Incomparable items will be able to be disenchanted with the Flame of Ancalamir to return the full Ash of Gorgoroth cost, plus a number of Shadowed Essence Boxes equal to the number of Essence Slots on the gear. Already-purchased Item Level 330 Incomparable Gear will also have its stats adjusted to be approximately equivalent to the level 330 rare gear available through the High-Enchanter, and the Essence Slots will remain. This allows players to utilize the gear if they choose. Following the hotfix, Incomparable gear will have its correct vendor cost.

Cordovan

The essences will be retained in the gear, unless you disenchant it, in which case you’ll want to use an Essence Reclamation Scroll prior to disenchanting it.

Since they want to downscale the gear, but keep the essences in it, I hope this works. Because we couldn’t slot the new essences in old gear and this might create some issues if another oversight would happen.

Another issue this creates is that people have paid Ash for an upgrade and now are getting downgraded. In a sense. If done correctly we may actually end up with higher level gear and more stats than we had, since some gear we had before was lower than 330, but higher than 326, but we would get less light too. And to get the Ash back one would need to turn in the item. Would this warrant for players to ask for a certain amount of Ash now too? I’m not sure. What do you think?

Of course, this being the mistake of SSG many think that they are not supposed to be downgraded and still expect to keep the gear as it is now. This is what I would prefer too, because it makes no sense to me to have the instances roll out and now go and do Ash farms. Drops aren’t good enough to spend too much time in t1 instances preparing for t2c, hoping for crafted items that may or may not crit. I guess what could be considered positive from all of this is that we may get the Ash of Gorgoroth to be account bound. Eventually.

Cordovan

Additionally, we are looking into making the Ash of Gorgoroth account-bound, although that’s not specifically a part of this announcement (but is pretty big news).

Once again, I can’t praise the community enough for what they have achieved. With the community being against this solution it was a smart move of SSG to not push the first solution they offered and now we can only wait and see how they implement their new plan and when. Hopefully soon, since with the ash vendor being blocked people can’t get the Flame of Ancalmir and follow the quest chain if they are only now entering Mordor.

Don’t miss a minute of this year’s Harnkegger Games!

Many of the dwarves of Laurelin seem to be in a frightful hurry these days. Thorin’s Hall is alight with activity in preparation for the games of the year that start tomorrow.

What games you say? The Harnkegger Games of course! LOTRO’s very own Olympics with a twist is back for its sixth year. Compete and earn yourself massive amounts of gold (nearly 2500 gold to be won!), plenty of sturdy steel keys and a hoard of LOTRO Points (a whopping 13.000 of them this year!) Oh and let’s not forget, eternal bragging rights, well, at least until next year of course.

Like every year The Harnkegger Games Committee on Laurelin (consisting of members from Durin’s Folk, The Blue Mountains Regiment, and The Shire Angling Club) get together and host a full week of crazy, exciting and hilarious games, this year running from Monday 11th till Sunday 17th of September.

Known for its various gaming contests, general merriment and consumption of rather large amounts of ale, this festival of Dwarvish origin offers 15 full-scale events, open to anyone with a Laurelin character out of the starter zone, a friendly smile, a good dose of sportsmanship and an eager spirit.

Not only do the Laurelinians and LOTRO themselves provide a massive hoard of prizes for the winners, but you also get to fight for the honor of your race! Will you ensure the dwarves earn their third consecutive Harnkegger Nations title this year? Or will you valiantly fight for the honor of Men or Hobbits, taking revenge for narrowly missing the title these last two years? Who knows… maybe the Elves might even win more than a couple of points this year and challenge the others for the title?

Don’t miss a minute of this year’s exciting Harnkegger Games via LOTRO’s very own twitch channel, where community manager Cordovan and the LOTRO streaming team will be covering every game day LIVE.

The opening concert, provided by the beardelicious dwarf band “The Rolling Kegs” , kicks off this year’s Harnkegger on Monday September 11th at 2pm servertime (US Eastern) in front of the doors of Thorin’s Halls on Laurelin.

Like what you’ve read? Feel like competing in some of the events of this year’s Harnkegger Games? Then check out harnkeggergames.simplesite.com or follow on twitter @HarnkeggerGames

Mordor 21.1: Best available gear

Gearing up in Mordor is a little bit difficult when you’re doing it for the first time, because the gear comes from several different sources and you can’t even access them all right away to eventually plan it. So in the hopes that this clears some things up for you, I’ll just introduce (if we can call it an introduction at this point in the game) a few pieces of gear and their sources.

Questing

Questing will usually give you some gear to get by while questing and leveling, but the rewards aren’t really worth much, other than the Light of Earendil that prevents the shadow debuff.

Where questing does give you the best items is near the end of the regions Talath Urui and Agarnaith. These will give you 2 pieces each – chest and legs. For some reason, and this is likely not a bug, light armour classes get the same armour twice, while medium and heavy have dps and tanking versions.

Ash

While questing you may come across some rewards you do not like or need – you can turn those to Ash. You will be getting drops from enemies and these may not be for your class even – you can turn those to Ash. This is a decent system which allows you to clean your bags on the go by using the Flame of Ancalmir, but it has some downsides. These would be that the Ash is not that easy to get unless you’re in the Ash farms and buying a lot of keys to open lootboxes. The green, purple and teal items will give you 5, 10 or 20 ash respectively, but the same items from lootboxes will give double the ash, so 10, 20 or 40 Ash.

From Ash you can get earrings, bracelets and boots.

You will need 2525 for a “regular” build without the Ash gold rings, which makes it 5050 for two builds. With the two gold rings the number goes up to 8025 or 16050 if you want to go for four of those rings, but you can also make them work in both builds by slotting some essence that will be universal to both or, as I suggested, keep the Allegiance build for tanking and healing.

Allegiance

Best items from the Allegiance system will depend on the fact what class you have and how you play it. But let’s say that you are not getting ready for dps, then the Allegiance will provide you with best rings on chapter 4 (rank 15 Allegiance) and best cloak on chapter 7 (rank 30 Allegiance).

Which would mean that if you are gearing for one role, let’s say tanking or healing, then you would need to get one Allegiance to rank 30 and another to rank 15. If you are making 2 builds for your character, then you will be bringing two Allegiances to ranks 30 and another two (3 and 4) to rank 15, so you would have two cloaks and four rings. And I do suggest to go with Allegiance rings and hope the gold ones drop from a box one day, rather than spending almost 3000 Ash for something that is clearly inferior from the lootbox rings. There is no content right now that says that you NEED those now anyway.

The best gloves are also from Allegiance. Unlike the rings and cloak, these are not a quest reward, these are a barter item from an NPC for the tokens you claim while leveling up an Allegiance. This would be your Allegiance Quartermaster. The gloves will cost you 75 Tokens of Service or 150 for both versions.

Crafting

Crafting is now back and for now is a source of several best in slot items. You will be able to craft the best helmet, pocket, necklace and essences. Sadly, by design, bug or just forgetting about it, we have no new crafted relics and the current ones in comparison look so miniscule that you could even unequip them and not feel any difference. Hopefully we’ll get some of those soon too.

The recipes for these are bartered by the tokens that you get from questing, but the recipes are not bound to character and you can send them to any of your crafters.

Some of the items, like captain standards and Lore-Master brooches, are level 323 on regular crafting and as a critical success also, so I’m guessing this is a bug and should be fixed some time in the future, so the Doomfold captain standard should then be the go to item at least for tanking. But this is pale in comparison with scholar and cook not being able to make any essences.

The necklace will cost you 90 silver signets of the Thandrim. Pocket will cost you 30. Helmet will cost you another 90 signets. So, this brings us to 210 signets for gear. The essences are one shot recipes with no chance for better ones and depending on your build you will need different number of essences. Without the gold rings it’s 14 essences. One essence recipe will cost you 15 signets, which is another 210 and we get to 420. You still need to get the new relics. For some classes the relics that reduce speed will still be the best most likely, but let’s say you’re changing all – one relic costs 50 signets – 150 signets per LI makes it 300 in total for a single build. Total signets needed for one build 720. This number is very easily obtainable just by finishing all the quests and continuing doing the dailies, etc. And I’d say it’s a great start to barter for the return to Udun foothold at the start and with that skill we get to 730 signets. 1450 in total with a full second build.

Landscape

Landscape has a chance to drop off-hand weapons and shoulders. It can drop some other things, but those are covered. Usually, the level of the shoulders and off-hands is 309, it can drop a level 310, which is a little bit more rare and a very rare 315. Some of these off-hands are good, but for some you may want to run some of the scaled instances and get what you need. You can get some other shoulder pieces in Mordor, but these are purple versions with one slot less for the essence.

Also take good note what drops stay in your pending loot. Landscape has a rare chance of dropping the best essence – Shadowed essence.

Gorgoroth Steel-Bound Lootbox

I didn’t mention the gold rings before with Ash, because this is where they are best in slot. The same actually goes for shoulders. The lootbox has a chance to drop items which are much higher in level than the ones we have available. The gold rings obtainable with Ash are level 326. For some time I have tought that the highest level from the lootbox was 329, then I have been told that there was also a 330 and recently on the forum someone posted an item level 331. Given how SSG handles informing the players about the content they put out, we can only assume that it can go even higher. But the lootbox also has a chance to drop other items of a higher level than what is available to you.

The SSG executive producer has also said on the forum that lootboxes aren’t intended to have the items with best stats exclusively.

There will never be a design that has loot from lootboxes that is statistically better than what you can gain someplace or somehow in game. Finding that loot in game might be hard, but it will be possible. Our overall design philosophy is that loot boxes are not required to reach the best gearing. If players do find some piece of gear that is best in slot and can only be gained through loot boxes then 1.) it is a bug or 2.) it is an oversight and will be fixed or 3.) there was some release timing issue and the loot will be available someplace in game soon.

In this case the intent is that those rings can be purchased from the Ash vendor for an appropriately large amount of Ash.

Sev~

The discrepancy in item levels has been noticed right away and reported and there have been hotfixes, patches and updates, but this still happens.

This makes this system, especially after buying the Mordor expansion for no small amount of money, the biggest pay to win in this game. Gorgoroth boxes are dropping like crazy, yet the keys are very limited. And we only recently find out from Cordovan that the “bugged” dailies that didn’t have the key are working as intended and that we should only have 3 keys per week, with no chance for a landscape drop.

This is working as intended. Not every daily offers a Black Steel Key. They are also limited to three Keys per week.

So, if we want to prepare for instances and min-max the gear, we are not only pushed to buy the keys, but also inventory (which is on sale right now) and the vault space and maybe shared storage to keep the huge amount of boxes that are dropping.

Untill recently I was using the PvMP plug-in only to not miss a lootbox in the pending loot, now I just don’t care if it gets deleted and timed out.

Personally, I do not think that we wanted to pay for the expansion so we would have the privilege to be milked for keys with a massive RNG – some get it on the first box or don’t get it on 100th. Do we have to do it? Of course not, but the fact that it is “optional” does not diminish the recent business decisions, lack of information about the game or misinformation. 3 keys intended per week with this amount of boxes? Who are we kidding? Is one key per day going to make or break someones bank?

Tactical classes

We still do not have any information if the tactical classes are working as intended. The dps has dropped significantly and the heals have too. The only buff we have had is from leveled legacies. We have spent star-lits only to then notice that nothing has moved at all in terms of dps or healing rating. Which brings me to the conclusion that it can’t be intended. How does someone spend something to upgrade only to stay in place? I don’t mind a slight nerf to RK dps or mini heals, but with the damage mobs are putting out or group taking and not being able to cap certain needed stats, this should have been done better than just letting us use star-lits, but not advancing. There could have been some cap to reach and not pass, but not moving at all is too much and broken. This is not only bad for grouping, but has also made questing in Mordor considerably harder than on physical classes.

Conclusion to the gearing

Obviously, you do not need to build your characters for t2 right away, but I did. I do not like to have too many swaps or change the gear all the time for t1, for landscape, for this or that. So, all I’m running with at all times is t2 gear. Below are my builds for warden and minstrel. Soon I’ll be able to add captain too. Please disregard the yellow letters and percentage, as the plug-in is outdated and doesn’t show the correct caps. But as a reference I’m providing you with my numbers on the builds. These can and will be further tweaked, but for now this would be it.

Interview(s) with SSG and other news

The long awaited Producer’s Letter came out on the 27th of January, so some time ago, and we spoke a little about it here too. If by some very unlikely chance you did not read it, you can do that here. To be fair, after such tension about this letter we have had on the forums and everything that is happening this year (10th anniversary, Mordor, High Elves, new crafting instances, new concept – as far as we know – of the crafting instances, etc.) all of us expected at least a bit more.

So, we also tried to get an interview… Unfortunately we drew the short end of the stick in this one. Even though I would say the message was sent very much in time, which would be the first day of the BR 19.3 build, we have seen many interviews, streams and forum posts since then, every one revealing something new and some of those were the questions of our own. We have shared those interviews with you on our FaceBook page too. The SSG team was very busy, so we are basically repeating ourselves and the “news” may have lost its purpose. Not going to blame SSG, the High Elves and some other news have raised many questions and everyone was fighting for answers. Together with the transition and work on Mordor it was bound to tie the team down. In this article I would like to bring you the interview with Jerry “Cordovan” Snook and the team, laced with the information we had the opportunity to see by now.

First of all I’d like to congratulate SSG on some of the changes they have made. I was very sceptical about the premium housing and I must admit I wasn’t a big one to do the decorations in the old neighbourhood, but the new ones… Now this part of the game has become much more interesting and enjoyable for me. The area is a bit large compared to the old one, but both the interior and the exterior are great, love the indoor yard and a 1 minute travel skill. Speaking of which, I am still not certain if a 1 hour travel skill to the Premium Kinship house is intended or a bug.

LP: There is a mention of a High Elf. Is the High Elf only another race or is it also a playable class with different mechanics or even only origin? Would it be too early to elaborate on the race bonus difference from the “regular” elf?

Cordovan: High Elf will be a race, not a class. We do expect the classes available to the High Elf to be at least somewhat different from the regular Elf, though.

Ciccolini (MMO Central): The High Elf will have different racials. The High Elf… right now, the argument about different classes, I say they should be able to do anything. All the lore people look at me and say ‘not burglars’. But a High Elf captain is something they might be able to step up to because of their ancestry. That’s something that we’re looking at and we hope will pass through our lore review and I think that one of the things that we want to do is, we would like to be able to present an Elf that is animated and looks different. But the problem with changing the animations, the running/fighting animations, is that you don’t want to do that too much on existing Elves because it pulls the rug out from under the existing players. But the High Elf is an opportunity to maybe have a different set of animations that represents how they move, the flow of the ability for them to move with grace and fluidity, so we hope that they just feel different because how they run and how they fight will be different than the other types of Elves. As well as the class options, maybe some of the racial abilities, we want them to be balanced with the other races, but some of the racial abilities might be more… I don’t want to say fantastic, but might involve the Light rather than some of the other things you might have seen.

Cordovan (Forum): We do not have plans to add a new class with the High Elf.

LP: If High Elf is a new race with old playable classes people are already speculating what classes those would be. Any comment on that?

Cordovan (Forum): I realized I should clarify my earlier statement to say that we are not debuting a new class with the High-elf, although the list of classes High-elf can be is expected to be at least somewhat different from the current elf.

LP: Could it be possible to eventually pay for a race change? Would the mechanics of the game allow for such a service?

Cordovan: At this time we do not have plans to make a paid racial respec/change available. The mechanics of the game do not currently allow for it, so it would take a large amount of engineering and development time to make this a possibility.

Snook (MMO Central): I was talking to some of the LotRO team this morning about that particular question. The big challenge we have with, say, racial respeccing that we don’t have in Dungeons and Dragons Online is our races are limited in class options in Lord of the Rings Online. So that respeccing process has a layer of engineering work that’s required that makes it difficult to see us doing that for the High Elf here. Ultimately in terms of the name issue, we do have renaming options available, so someone could you know rename their regular Elf and then make a High Elf character for that. But for being able to respec from one race to another, it’s just not on our short-term agenda here.
Ciccolini (MMO Central): I don’t think that we’d be able to implement that in time for Mordor. Even if we started pursuing it today, that would be a tremendous amount of work and the LotRO tech for races is, it just doesn’t… it’s not set up to allow that. I mean, technically anything is possible in these games, but I don’t foresee us being able to do that for Mordor, and after that is, you know, is that what we want to be spending our precious engineering resource times on? Maybe? But it wouldn’t be, it won’t be for awhile, so I wouldn’t expect to have that for Mordor or shortly thereafter.

LP Palantir*: So, there is a possibility that High Elf will mostly be a cosmetic change, with different animations, racial skills and traits and wider class selection. Hopefully, these racials will be a reason enough, other than RolePlaying, to re-do a class you may already have just so it could be a High Elf. It is certainly hard to speculate on something that is as vague as a race, since it brings very little to the game for now – looks, racial traits and skills that make very little difference most of the time, if at all. It would be nice to see the races re-done that they do not need to earn reputation with themselves, especially in case of High Elves.

LP: What would you say to the people who would say that you’re adding a new race, but not fixing some of the existing ones? Then again, I’d guess making one is easier than finding the problems with the existing ones.

Cordovan: We will continue to work on quality of life improvements and bug fixes, both for races and for other areas of the game. If you have a particular issue with a bug involving a race, please let me know so I can dig into it further.

LP: Pledging the sword to Men, Dwarves, Elves or Hobbits… I find Hobbits there is a bit too much, since, if we look at the lore, only a handful of Hobbits has actually embarked on such an adventure and in general isn’t a “fighting race”. Is this planed to be something similar to Hytbold, giving you a race specific daily or another kind of bonuses for the choice? Will it impact the game in a way that the decision you make will determine the landscape or the outcome? Can a Man only pledge the sword to Men or to the others too?

Cordovan: Pledging your sword will be a part of the story line, and we do expect people to be able to pledge to multiple groups. While it might not make the most sense lore-wise, we understand that many players want to pledge to multiple groups, so we plan to support that.

Libby (MMO Central): These features will have storylines associated with them. I think that’s maybe as far as we probably want to say now.
Ciccolini (MMO Central): I can talk a little bit about the design behind that, if you don’t want to talk about specifics on revealing the secrets. So, originally, we were like ‘okay, you can only choose one’, because that makes sense. But as we went back and forth, we realized that even though we like to encourage alts and like to have players play through the storyline, there are hardcore LotRO players that are just gonna want to be able to play through this, all four of them, on their main character. They just will, because they want their main character to experience everything. But, there’s the issue of, well, if you’ve already pledged yourself to the Elves, the Dwarves might be grumpy about it and vice versa. So, what we’ll probably do is, what we’re planning on is, it’s meant for alts, but if your main character wants to do all four, you can, but for every additional one, it gets harder.

LP: I had personally expected to see some way of getting some of the rest of the golden jewelry in U19.3. You mentioned only 2 crafting instances in the stream. Usually there’s 3. Was that a mistake or will they be a bit more universal and since we have seen gold jewelry from flowers and raid, is crafting the next way of getting some of the jewelry done, since people have been asking for some update to it?

Cordovan: In Update 20 we will have two new resource dungeons, so the number is accurate. We’ll have more information about how they will be used in the future, but it is more story-specific rather than general in nature.

Cordovan (Forum): We are expecting to debut some new crafting recipes in Update 20 related to Reputation. Crafting level will not be going up, but we will be using some new ingredients.

LP Palantir: First I was guessing that SSG wouldn’t keep the rest of the jewelry for a full number update. For me it is somewhat illogical. But since the “new” crafting is coming in U20, we could say that with all our gear changed and upgraded one way or another the only things that we didn’t yet upgrade are: earrings, necklace, pocket, offhand. I would guess and hope that some kind of upgrade is going to be introduced for these items either through recipes or barter items similar to T2C raid armour. Speaking of which, I am aware that it is wishful thinking, but it would be nice to see the cloak upgraded too.

LP: LFF and Trade channel are becoming global. Does this mean that after the training of the GMs some of these channels will be moderated more?

Cordovan: Our in-game GM team will continue to monitor public channels for inappropriate content.

LP: Sometimes there are some “silent” changes happening that aren’t in any of the notes. Are these changes intentional or does something like that happen by adding code? For instance, the ground after boss 5 and before 6 in Throne has changed recently. Also recently, in Epic Battle Defence of Minas Tirith the first wave start has been pushed to start somewhat later. A while ago in Glittering Caves the spider queen was moved a bit back to not aggro with the smaller spiders in front of her. There are probably more examples. None of these were mentioned anywhere. Obviously, no dramatical changes, just curious if they are intentional.

Cordovan: Usually changes don’t make it into the notes because they weren’t specifically called out by the dev doing the work, so “some minor adjustments to Epic Battle Defence…” might be in the changelist, but not get called out specifically in the notes. Sometimes it’s a halo of a different change. Sometimes the changelist note was marked improperly (say, put into a past or future update in the notation of the changelist.)

LP: Was there any tought about the new essences? It is pretty hard to get them and that is fine, but once we want to change them they are either left for an eventual alt or just vendor them. Is there a possibility to add an option of refining the Tempered essences back to the wisps that you use to trade for them or is it your standpoint that you shouldn’t be able to sell those?

Cordovan: I don’t think we have any plans to adjust the new essences.

LP Palantir: I am unaware how one would measure the success of the new essences, I would guess through people buying solvents and crafting them, or rather the increase in sales of solvents, since the “old” T8 is still very good. If the new essences can not be a return investment many players will wait for the next one, with better and higher improvements – T9 maybe. About how small of an improvement the Ithilien Tempered essences offer, especially morale, we have wrote here. Since the Tempered essences can not be sold I have come across players who would rather have a wild essence, so they could sell the wisp, than the tempered one. Hopefully SSG will either unbind the essences or introduce a way to refine the Tempered ones back to wisps which can be sold.

In other news…

Steam Payment is again available (Forum) and the Update notes for U 19.3 can be found here. And you will also be getting a new mount as a gift if you are any kind of VIP or if you subscribe to become a VIP. More information here.

Cordovan (Forum): It seems that there is a “race condition” happening, which is a term for what order things happen as you log in. Depending on what loads first for you, people are either getting the horse automatically added to their skills, or they are getting an inventory item. Either way, though, people are getting it. What is happening is it is trying to apply it to your skill, but if that takes too long, it is instead delivering an item.

*LP Palantir is a lore apropriate crystal ball, it shows our estimates and guessing what may come.