Tag: update 20

What is wrong with Update 20?

U20 is the 2nd jubilee of some kind for LOTRO – a twentieth update. Yet the team has never announced it as being significant as such, other than saying we are getting to a very important part in the story. The first one, the more important one for LOTRO, is the tenth anniversary and we are impatiently waiting to see what it brings.

Before I set out on a journey to criticize SSG, I would like to say that I like the items they have added and I do hope they will last for longer than 2 months. I also did like the “regular” quests in the new region, but not the epic ones. I do like that some sort of reputation is great to have to get these items, unlike the gold rings in North Ithilien, but having 4 reputations, almost 500.000 to finish it all and reputation accelerators going up in price, that was a bad combination.

On the other hand I can’t say I am pleased that the offhand, which was dropping from T1 raid, isn’t an upgrade with an item different than the Ornate Inlay. Like it is the case with gold jewelry being upgraded to even “golder”.

For a refference you can check here the U20.0.1 changes.

But let’s start…

Epic quests and rewards

I usually do not like session plays. The one with Gollum was amazing. This amazement quickly dropped after the book was done in a matter of minutes if you chose to only do the epic first. I was expecting it to be a bit longer and a bit more epic. The cloak was a nice tought, since SSG expected that people won’t have the gold one for a long time and they wanted to give us a good placeholder for it, but it turned out to be a waste. And I’m sorry it did. For the epic reward I was hoping for something more unique, but then again we didn’t move far. Maybe in U21 we can get a unique ring and some decent cosmetics and housing items.

I also see nothing epic in talking to someone, killing 4 mobs, talking, killing 2 mobs, talking… Done, here’s your cloak and point. Much more epic is the tale of Eladan and Elrohir and it’s not the part of the epic quest line. I have now taken already three characters through the quests and every time I like it and I’m not bored of it. The other three won’t be either.

Stables

First thing I noticed is that the area has no stables. Now, I am not a lore buff, so I can not give you some Tolkien-ish reason why the horses couldn’t go into that region, but we did deal with that in Moria. And if our own horses could go there I do not see why the Stable Master ones would be so scared.

Vault, mailbox, vendor

Since this is a new region I am amazed by the lack of vault, mailbox or anything a region should have. Yes, you can’t actually send a letter to the doorsteps of Sauron, but it just feels like another way of prolonging the game time of players or making them go VIP. Vault would have been a must, though, since we have 6 different reputation items and several main task items used for Host of the West reputation increase. The summoning horn and milestone make the travel to the fellowship area a little bit easier, but the cooldown is a bit much.

Now that I mention fellowship instances, one fellowship instance can fill up your pending loot. Given that there is no vendor there, this makes you travel back and forth to deal with that if you don’t want to destroy everything you wouldn’t use.

3rd age Legendary Items and green items

Which brings me neatly to 3rd age LIs and green items which are of no use even for people questing. I do not think that anyone is actually using those for anything. So if SSG is not capable of making a “destroy all” button, then we could at least get less unneeded loot. Also, the Eorlingas level drops in a 105 area are getting annoying.

Lock-Pick

So, since the bags are already overcrowded we could possibly have the boxes in the solo and fellowship crafting instances remove 40 flowers (20 each) instead of us carrying the lock-picks we need, eventually forgetting them or having issues opening boxes or finishing quests due to not having enough room in our bags.

Nodes in crafting instances

I can understand that the nodes in the crafting instances are most likely shared with the landscape and for solo ones that seems OK. But for the fellowship ones this seems to be very bad, since there could be more than 1 prospector in an instance or more than one scholar and if there is no agreement on who gets what, it could actually cause some annoyance. Rather, give a certain amount of materials per one instance, combined with one box to select a type of journal we wish. This way we do not waste time on an instance with a timer and do not fight our fellowship members over it.

And since there are only two towers and two instances then maybe there is a way to combine ore with wood and scholar with cooking. The current state is beyond sad.

Drop rates and farming time

I am the first one to say that you do not need to have something the day it is introduces, which is the reason I was a proponent of the LI legacies increase. The fact that it is there does not mean you have to have it. But because we all know how much LOTRO loves grind some players have decided that they will take the opportunity to do everything they can to reduce it and I don’t blame them.

But please do not restart the servers every other day “dealing with lag” saying that some area wasn’t intended to drop reputation items. We all know that the mobs have always dropped reputation items. The players only had more incentive with 6 gold items coming from that grind to farm it in larger groups. I just do not know why it had to be a group of 24. Is the fellowship area too hard for 12 people?! Some people on Arkenstone were even asking for a 24-man raid for questing in Lang Rhuven for hours, thinking they are protecting themselves from the ban, in case the team decides to act on it.

Personally, I have canceled my VIP subscription because of the lag I have experienced for days, maybe even weeks, in North Ithilien. Taking even a minute or more to plant a seed or pick up one. But for some reason my deed accelerator or other tomes or even VIP subscription (or paying for it, as a matter of fact) does never lag. When this continued in U20 and SSG did not only not deal with it, but kept quiet about it, that was the last drop for me. For a lot of us even owning up to it and communicating would mean a lot, instead of ignoring everything on the forums, chat in game, etc.

Also, decreasing a spawn rate of certain mobs is fine by me. While finishing quests I have been ambushed by some of those, killing more than I needed. But there is no need to make it harder for people actually doing those quest to finish them because of the raids that were happening.

And if SSG wanted to prolongue the barter for the items there could have been mobs in different region giving different reputation on a kill – Skoironk armour rep, Tower of Teeth provisioner rep, Lang Rhuven weapons rep. Still dropping recipes, though. Then the barter items would need to be crafted and that would be done. Yes, there would still be a reason to go kill the mobs, but it would have been shorter lived.

Lag

A lot of dealing with lag in this update was actually dealing with reasons to farm, hence giving the people no reasons to group in such large numbers and hope the lag goes away. Which is not fixing it, only mending it a little. Please come out with a statement of some kind that isn’t one sentence long. People are prevented from playing, lag sometimes kills them, it can fail a challenge in the raid and we’re not getting anything from SSG. Not even some reward for staying with the game despite it.

We’re pretty much aware that little can be done about it, since there has been lag for years, but in the future, like someone on the forum has said, don’t treat beta like alpha testing and try to do more stress tests, giving some incentive to do that. On both occasion I was on BR there wasn’t enough people to even try out the fellowship instance, let alone something else.

Reputation from crafting instances

Crafting instances do not give any reputation with any faction. I see this as a bug, since we were always given some reputation on quests completion of the instances. Instead it gives a few tokens for the Host of the West, while the recipes we get are permanent, so we don’t actually spend those on anything. Only thing they are good for is if someone actually skipped a big part of North Ithilien and needs to make up for it.

Old useless flowers and Forager baskets

I have said in my article about the preparation for the new region that the old flowers will be good for upgrading the armour, since the progression is greater-supreme-whatever it’s called now and we can’t go from greater to the new one, without getting supreme. But other than that I see no use for these flowers that it would actually warrant their presence in such a number and through the whole map, not only around the camp of the Host.

There are 2 new Herbalist daily quests in the new region. Yet the Forager basket still only gives the old types of flowers and no new ones.

Travel icons, Deed region icons

I believe we now have 6 travel icons that are the same – Minas Tirith – Haerondir. Also, region icons in deed logs are the same. I guess it’s not the biggest issue we have, but it’s still something to work on and keep in mind. There has been time spent on mount icons, this shouldn’t be any harder.

Black Gate kill reach

While I have been testing the update on BR I have died once trying to make a screenshot of the Black Gate because I got too close. When the update hit live the distance of the kill zone has been increased. In a thread on the forum someone has complained about this it seemed to be funny to SSG staff, just like it was searching for the ent in Fangorn, only to find out he is nowhere to be found and you’re running in vain, or Bingo quests, or Evendim… Pattern? Not a fan of this kind of humor.

Skill visuals and rules for multi-boxing and macroing

If the game is in such state that a larger number of people will cause everything to freeze then please address the visuals of some skills and the rules concerning multi-box and macro. This is not only putting a strain on the server, it can prevent people from playing and finishing quests, it can be and is used for gold farming and getting an unfair advantage over other people by using more than one account for bigger chances of drops on landscape and instances that can be soloed.

I love some of my LM skills, lightning storm in particular. But at least Ring of Fire and Sic em need to be addressed to not cause the lag it does.

1 trait point

OK, I’m going too far now, but I’m pointing out something. Only one of my 6 characters who are raiding could actually use the one point. 2 have just spent it on something that wasn’t really needed and 3 have nothing to do with it. If you’re adding these keep in mind that if people are actually playing the content of this game and not staying on low levels forever we are already in our secondary tree and need 2 points for those.

Tailor and Cook crafting

My tailor is an explorer, which means he can pick up both wood and ore. While I was getting some new flowers last night and getting wood and ore in the process I have been also picking up the cooking crafting items. In the time I spent I have gotten from 130-200 crafting items through prospecting or woodworking and a total of 3 caps of evengleam. Also, in the same time, I have gotten 7 journals. How can a common crafting item be more uncommon than the journal?! The tailoring materials are nowhere to be found. I also haven’t seen one journal drop from the wood and it should be dropping for woodworker and tailor, as the old critical items were also coming from there.

Tailor essence

With the new recipe the tailor and only the tailor has been given an output to craft 7 masterful agility essences instead of the 7 barter tokens from a single use recipe.

 

106

We will not see any 106 mobs untill U21? Well, it certainly came fast.

Update 20 to be released on Tuesday, March 21st

Hear ye, hear ye!

In last weeks Twitch stream Cordovan did say that since they had a release candidate version of the build this weekend will probably not see the build. Also, the update was, for some difficulties they encountered, moved to not-Monday. Now the update is announced to release tomorrow, Tuesday, March 21st. You can read the downtime announcement here. The release notes you can find on this link don’t say what has been changed since the beta 2 build we wrote about. With Update 20 coming out and some other events we may be looking at U20, spring festival and anniversary all coming out in the period of next three weeks?

It would be great to know two things, though. How often will the Ornate Inlay drop, since we didn’t really get to raid on BR much. But maybe what I would like to know more is what could we expect from the new epic quest line. Since this is a pretty important part of the book, the epic rewards should be massive. Is there a unique item behind it? The only thing not yet updated from the gear is the Class Item. Do we get a few upgrade items like star-lit or remembrance crystals? Cosmetic or housing items?

Or do we just get Sauron’s middle finger with a side dish of lag?

LOTRO Update 20: The Wastes is 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.