Reply With QuoteAnybody hit the endgame yet? I'd be curious to hear how it's holding up.
They just patched up LOTRO to Book 11, which adds a bunch of nifty stuff. Some minor but appreciated DX10 effects, class changes (big ups for Minstrel), new end-level stuff, crafting fixes, yadda yadda.
Here's the patch notes: http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Release_Notes_Book_11
Anyone still playing? I just started noodling around in it again with my oh-so-uber level 34 Hunter. :P
Anybody hit the endgame yet? I'd be curious to hear how it's holding up.
Whose fear now breaks on damage and when that happens the mob calls for help. Sounds pretty nerfy to me.Originally Posted by Jason Cross
Sure, that part is sort of nerfy - and it affects all fear (Hunter's howl type skill and stuff too). It's pretty basic MMO stuff: "don't attack the crowd-controlled mobs" and all that. But this stuff is all neato:
# War-speech A new stance that concentrates on damage, but reduces healing power.
# Call to the Elder King Usable only while in War-speech Deals damage in an AOE and makes enemies more susceptible to Light damage.
# Call of the Second Age Usable only while in War-speech Deals damage to enemies near the Minstrel and gives a movespeed buff to your fellowship.
# Chant of the Oathbreaker A chant that summons an Oathbreakers blade to harry a foe, dealing damage over time and reducing resistance to Cry and Song attacks. War-speech empowers this skill.
# Tale of Battle An aura that grants Vitality and Wound resistance. Can only have 1 Tale active.
# Tale of Warding An aura that grants Hope and Armor. Can only have 1 Tale active.
# Call to Greatness Grants a class specific buff to a fellowship member.
# Call to the Fellowship Gives a bonus to your fellowship's next fellowship manoeuver.
# Gift of the Hammerhand - You have mastered Lay of the Hammerhand well enough to bestow a lesser benefit upon an ally
# Chord of Salvation An instant cast heal, costs a lot of power though.
# Irresistible Melody Out of combat only. Plays a tune so irresistible that nearby free people will break into a dance.
# Stack size has been doubled for Lute Strings!
I wanted to like this one for longer than I did. Ultimately it was mostly the combat system. It feels like playing WoW underwater. That alone made it hard to enjoy the great graphics (the DX10 stuff is really nice), the breadth of the experience (I was one of those MIDI-keyboard using musician Minstrels), and the great expansion of the world we already all knew so well. I'm glad they're going even broader, with housing, more monster play stuff, more crafting elements, etc.
But I don't know how much this'll help beyond retaining who they already have. And that's fine of course, but it just means that like other non-OMG-numbers!1/1 games before, a lot of the creativity gets passed over when future teams assess what's worth emulating or copying.
My level 41 minstrel may be worth checking out again, now that they claim they're more solo friendly. Unfortunately, the extended break I've had from the game has given me enough perspective to realise how much of a futile time sink it is. And my level 49 hunter experience has allowed me to find that the end quests at Carn Dum are impossible without an extremely well organised fellowship, which I can never find.
C'mon Peter, all games are "futile time sinks." :) I'm not being reimbursed financially for sinking hours into playing Team Fortress 2. All that matters is if you have fun while you're playing. And in LOTRO, I do. I don't know if that will be true once I hit the end game or not. But for now I'm having fun killing, exploring, crafting, and all that stuff.
I kinda lost interest after a while. From a roleplayer perspective there's a great deal I appreciated about the design of LoTRO: the respect for the setting, the way they arranged public channels (which ended up having the effect of eliminating spam in spatial/say channel), the beautiful settings, the PvMP design, etc.
But ultimately it felt alot like WoW. Run along the well-worn ant-paths and solve the scripted quests. Collect loot and experience. Rinse, repeat.
I think SWG kinda spoiled me for neat toys and a (more potential than realized) sandbox experience. Getting a horse and blowing a horn really doesn't quite compare to building huge player cities or taking a starship out for a spin. Not to say SWG is any kind of pinnacle or that I could recommend it as an alternative to alot of folks but it was at least wild flailing in a general direction I'd like to see better polished and executed in the future.
Loremaster and Minstrel notes both say "Filled out level 40-50 skills". That's really bad for a MMO that's been out this long.
Well, I guess it's better than doing nothing about them. :)
This is the point, for me. The 'time sink' part is doing stuff that I don't find fun, or fun anymore, that I have to do to continue in the game. TF2 is pretty much all fun for me, but MMO's wrap the fun stuff up in layers that takes so much un-fun time to get to.
That may be the greatest backhanded compliment ever.but it was at least wild flailing in a general direction I'd like to see
You guys shut up. I miss LOTRO and talk like this -- not to mention updates to my main character's class! -- make me miss it even more. Unfortunately, given my work load, there's no way in hell I'll be back in Middle Earth before mid- to late December. :(
-Tom
So anyway Tom, any idea why Delia comes up as a level 50 minstrel on my friends screen? I didn't think that you maxed her out.
Also, Finley is still patiently sitting on a rock, waiting for Tomwise to come back to the Shire.
Whoa, Delia's been busy while I've been away!
I think she was still at 44 (?) last time I played. But it's entirely possible someone hacked into my account and leveled her for me.
-Tom
I had a lot of fun up until around level 40. Then I hit a wall where anything I wanted to do would take more hours in a row than I wanted to devote to it. I managed to squeeze out a few more levels, but I started playing monster PvP exclusively, which kept me going for a little longer. I cancelled about a month ago. The prime motivator was moving, but the magic had died a while ago. I think that basically I blew through the content faster than they were getting it out there, given that I didn't want all of my time spent in 6 hour chunks.
This patch adds god's very voice on earth, the cowbell, to the music system.
Well I did hit the endgame...
I did all the quests and chapters up to halfway through 10, where I had serious issues getting groups for the Evendium portion.
Went on about 4 raids to Helegord....It was pretty underwhelming compared to WoW raiding. Most of the time was pull raid-wipe, pull raid-wipe, pull kills mobs, move up, raid wipe, run back, raid wipe.
No real strategy in taking on mobs, just kinda get through it by dumb luck.
PVP is a hoot though, but there are serious imbalances going on there (Good guys get outnumbered by Bad Guys all the time).
Pretty much on haitus until new zones come around. Will picked it up again when the expansion is released.
Tom I know what you're saying. I've given up tens of hours of gaming to work to buy and furnish a house over the summer and it's tax season all over again, no gaming until April for me.
I hope that my karma will be good enough to be reincarnated as the ambition free mildly retarded son of a rich man who spends his whole life gaming.
Given how much it sucked to level a healer when WoW started, I REALLY enjoyed my Minstrel (a Dwarf called Rocksteady) in the lowbie levels.
LOTRO never grabbed me, though.
Dear Turbine, if I get an update error after downloading 800Mb or so of your patch; please don't make me have to start from the beginning again. Fuck.
One very neat thing Turbine added in this patch is a new Fellowship Quest Log Indicator. Basically, once you are in a Fellowship, little silhouettes appear next to your quest entries (one per fellowship member who also has each quest) and hovering your cursor over them shows their name. So it's easy to know who has what, what needs to be shared, ...
I'm also now the owner of a house with a very nice view in the Shire, with additional storage and a bank vault right behind my garden.
Wendelius
I had a similar experience except I "squeezed" all the way to 47 before becoming a full time creep. At that point I just grew tired of angmar and didn't want to kill anymore spiders and she-devil things. My frustrations with getting good groups together for books 5 and 6 and the crafting rare item monster camping was enough to make me cancel.
I still do peek at the lotro site from time to time and did read all the book 11 notes though. I could definitely see myself coming back for a major expansion.
My gang seems pretty skeptical about LoTRO's housing. Evidently there's not free placement of items and the actual variety of items to place isn't all that big, compared to say SWG (do I bring SWG up enough?). Items in LoTRO are mostly 2D renderings in inventory as opposed to SWG where everything is a 3D item that can be dropped. Add to that furniture or component items that can be manufacturered and given new names entirely, placed to create entirely new set elements (say, a couple dozen freefloating skirts renamed "Curtain" and arranged over a stage).
A bunch of us were really excited about Conan's potential for player cities too until we saw just how limited that would be and the word, if I recall correctly, fully rendered player housing itself isn't even in yet. Conan still has us curious for other reasons but the heart and soul of this old gang was really the early SWG days and RP around player cities and communities and the rush of seeing what we could put together ourselves.
Anyhow, here's where my character and his PA (guild) hangs out in SWG. It was a barren bunker (three level player housing with multiple rooms and elevators). Each item was placed and arranged by me. Some are player crafted items with custom names I had made (like bookcases renamed 'Outer Rim Cultures' or 'Sorosuub Technical Manuals' for example or a flat armor slab component part renamed "RESTRICTED AREA - CREW ONLY" to serve as a warning sign). It's hard for me to get excited about something that's less than what I've already got.
SWG had the best implementation of housing in my opinion. However, that's for two reasons, one you noted: almost everything in SWG was built as a 3D model. The other reason was the way the world itself would bend to player colonizaton, between land deformation (better later than at launch) and adaptive mob spawn spots.
At the same time, I think SWG went a bit too overboard. There should have been more strict zoning enforcement in where players could place, or a method by which placing housing/structures would be risky the further you got from the cities. I'm a big fan of housing hit points and a structured method by which one could defend their house if the planet rose up to fight their placement in certain areas. Having minigames surrounding housing placement would help make their placement in hazardous areas both rewarding and self-consistent. Right now, like UO pre-T2A before it, we got urban blight and the grousing about it.
I think EQ2 did a great compromise: full placement of some items in your instantiated house but the house/apartment itself was preplaced. Even the biggest houses were already part of the cities. Plus at first you could only be a bazaar-like vendor from that house. So having your commerce centered on your house meant it made sense to spend development time fleshing out the experience. This (like SWG) also creates a great sidegame for crafters (which the ability to change your visuals without affecting your stats does in EQ2 now too).
EQ2 has a lot of great ideas. It's unfortunate it wasn't more successful, as like CoX, it doesn't brook a lot of emulation for people who follow success with money.
So I haven't played since their original trial right before the actual release...
What changed, in overall/big terms, since then? Did they improve the UI? Are these the first class improvements? Is crafting still a pain in the ass?
If anyone knows...
Crafting hasn't changed too much. It's basically an emulation of the WoW/EQ2 system of in-world resource gathering with sub-combines and skillups.
There've been a number of class improvements since launch. What class are/were you interested in?
The UI is largely the same. Walk, run, jump, sluggish combat system, DAoC-style autopilot horses, that sorta thing. The GUI has gone through some changes, but afaik it's still not open ala WoW.
They've overhauled every class but burglar and guardian, I think. They've been doing them every month or two. The overhauls seem to consist of adding skills from 40-50, and tweaking existing stuff. The ones I've looked at seem pretty nice. Of course, the class I played most, burglar, hasn't been done yet, so I don't know how much it actually helped.
They have filled out crafting a little in terms of what you can make, but I think it is still a pain. The one thing they did improve is that there is just one generic item used for one-time-recipes, so you don't have to kill a particular named monster, you just have to kill any of the entire set of named monsters. Or something like that.
They've been good about sticking to a regular schedule of improvements to the game. Minor improvements on a monthly basis, major improvements (like this one) on a bimonthly basis.
This patch also improves (second improvement) the scalability of the UI. and your windows do end up all out of place when you switch between full screen and windowed.
This month is minstrel and loremaster month. I think Hunter was in a previous patch. Not sure what other classes have been revisited.
There are more things to craft (including furniture) and, as Andrew mentioned, you are not relying on a single bloody named monster for the one-time-recipes.
There has been quite a bit of added content since the trial (Evendim, raids, the Balrog place this month, ...) and housing.
LOTRO was already very polished at launch (although it certainly didn't charm everyone) and they have done nothing but polish it even more and add to it since then.
Wendelius
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