If you’re a person dreading spoilers and want to be surprised and amazed, this is probably the point where you don’t click here and instead go read What to do when U20 hits live. And I am pretty sure that this story and reflection on what has happened by Eladan and Elrohir will amaze you as much as it did me. But I also seen something else in this.
If you remember the Pelennor epic line and all those battles and instances we have done to complete it… If you then continued raiding, you could have recognized pieces of it in the raid. Even though this is a reflection of the past, there is a chance that this will also announce some things that are coming.
So, the long awaited U20 is on BR and… Well, I’d say that some have expected more, but let’s see what is going on. The preliminary release notes you can read here.
The whole landscape questing part is very similar to some other regions. It looks very much like a West Gondor + Brown Lands combination, then a little bit of Rohan and Fangorn/Derdingle and it’s done. The West Gondor part is the 2017 Tarlangs Crown, now called Lang Rhuven. This seems to be the quest chain that has the fellowship crafting instance behind it, so it actually has more purpose than TC, but in my opinion no landscape should be that hard that you need a fellowship to beat it. I get a Brown Lands feeling from the Lang Rhuven part where they have made an entrance to the camp similar to BL. Rohan just because of the vast space and Fangorn for the crafting instances. I do like that we got the muster/return skill to the Camp of the Host, but I do not understand the lack of stables in the region.
(The last one is from Brown Lands)
Speaking of hard landscape… Apart from Tarlangs Crown, Roving Threats have also made their return. So, instead of a bit easier version of that which we had in War-Bands, we have fellowship RT’s.
You will have two areas you don’t want to approach too close for now. One is the black gate, which means instant death and the other one is Dol Acharn, which does 20% morale damage once you get near it. The area is inhabited by Wainrider Horsemen, Bowmen, etc.
Crafting instances aren’t actually giving you the classic crafting material, they have introduced Dagorlad materials. These are nodes that will give you items for crafting or journals that will raise your critical chance of getting the critical version of the output. The number of these nodes is nowhere near the classic crafting instances, so don’t cheer just yet. For now I have just done one for scholar and one for prospector – not sure if these change on a daily basis or are they adding more nodes into these two, so that they can cover all.
The items you get from crafting instances, or rather, the items you farm the crafting instances for, are good, but it will be a farm. And even more so, since these we will be able to upgrade these using items from the raid. So, using 80 metal scraps and 20 armour pieces (new barter item, not actual armour, for some classes it’s weapon, for some provisions) you would be able to get a Master armourers crest of Gondor swiftness that will give you 355 agility and 623 morale. These are items you get from landscape, possibly quests and crafting instances. You can then further upgrade this item by using the item you have and an Ornate Inlay and get a jewelry piece that has 391 main stat and 690 morale. The barter items are very much like Central Gondor ones that were used both for barter and reputation gain or like Far Anorien. For a set of gold jewelry – necklace, earring and pocket, you will need all 3 items – salt and provisions for earrings, which are not unique, so you can have two, broken blade and weapons for necklace, metal scrap and armour for pocket.
I remain hopeful that the Inlay doesn’t have a drop chance of a Pelennor essence or the Officer’s bracelet, since the increase it gives is not much, but it is a great way of catering to both, more casual player base and raiders. Makes me wonder why something like this wasn’t introduced in the first place when flora jewelry came out.
The golden version of the offhand will cost you 80 metal scrap, 20 armour pieces (or any other combination of these) and 3 tarnished sigils of gondor. The sigils most likely drop in the fellowship version of the crafting instance. And the armour upgrade will cost you a supreme armour piece, 60 metal scraps, 15 armour. This will give you an armour piece with 104 main stat and 517 morale, which would be an increase in 10 main stat and 50 morale on one piece. If you remember, we have wrote that we would expect these to become gold here.
Jewelry has the same stats on all the pieces – earring, necklace and pocket – the remaining ones that aren’t gold (not counting the hilt). So there is a pocket, it just seems that for now the graphic for it isn’t ready so it looks like a bracelet or something, with the stats I mentioned it would be better for a dps role, but tank classes may still want to use hilt of Earnil, since it will give you 745 morale.
Ofcourse, there is new flora. I’m still unclear about what it should do, but in this build it doesn’t look like much. The new area has eight flowers, 6 of which are new. Mournweed, Eye-of-Night and Evengleam will give you Gold extracts; and Bonemallow, Dusknettle and Wraithscowl will give you Violet extracts. There are two old flowers around – Horsetail and Larkspur, giving their usual output.
As far as questing goes, you will come across some classic quests, one you will need to be accompanied by a dog who will uncover traps and hidden orcs for you. One disappointing chain was going back to the towers right after you have already been there and turned quests in. It felt a bit like the old types of questing – finish a quest, turn in, go back to the same spot, finish a quest, turn in, go back to the same spot… But it wasn’t too bad as it was the only one of this kind. And as far as deeds go… It has some similarities with North Ithilien. I haven’t come across any treasure caches, but there are some artifacts etc. that need to be found. The virtues still seem to be capped at 19, which is very annoying. We’re constantly getting more and more ways to increase these, but no way to use what we have. I hope something similar to Big Battle points will also happen to virtues and that SSG will remove their cap in time.
Since Epic book isn’t out in this build and I have come across some rangers in the marshes and some Marsh-Lights that aggro if you pass too close, I imagine that one part of it could be rescuing those from drowning or something.
If somebody knows what this item is or what it does, I would really like to know in the comments.
The items are great, it just remains to see how much grind it will take to get those. Legacy increase is also great. It may make certain things easier, but the new landscape isn’t your usual walk-through, so it will actually come in handy. And the additional tabs for chat window is also going to be great. Upgrading jewelry, offhands and armour for those of us with more than one character just might take us untill Mordor.
And in the closing… In the notes you could read that the Reputation accelerators are going up in price. If you’re like me and have a lot of marks, you have nothing to worry about, they are still not too pricy. But you should know that the new area actually unlocks more reputation tiers for Host of the West faction, which are even useful, in a sense that they have something behind that reputation level, compared to Minas Tirith, which didn’t. So, stock up in time, the Waste-land is coming.
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.
Source: BBC
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 allI’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.
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.
There was a post on the official forums where a player was bemoaning on the current state of the game.
A few pages into the thread, it was brought up why are we not in Mordor yet? Produktion Malphunktion chimed in with this statement :
Exactly. The MMO landscape has changed drastically over the past 6 years.
All I can say right now is we are very aware of this and well, we will see what we will bring to the table in 2015.
To Mordor!
Mount Doom. The plan is already there and has been for years. It’s awesome. But yes, we very obviously do not follow Sam and Frodo since in the books they don’t have any population where we can hide players. Sure I guess we could do ‘the forward guard for Frodo’ or the ‘cleanup crew’ but that is kind of lame, and very forced.
But there is a war a few hundred miles to the east of Frodo that fits what is needed for an MMO-towns, conflicts, good guys, bad guys, places to explore. This gives breath and space for YOU to be the hero for a while, not the baggage handler for Merry and Pippin. It is fun to run alongside Legolas, but it is not fun to watch Legolas do all the work…if you get what I mean.
Would a Frodo and Sam game be cool someday…sure, but not as an MMO. That would just turn into Frodo and his Amazing Friends!
We will continue to visit Frodo and the real hero- Sam–like we do in 14.2.
So to sum it up, there is a plan for Mordor. We ARE going there, but not with Sam & Mr. Frodo.
