I’m going to continue my Update 5 instance guide this week by heading into the Tower of Orthanc (ToO) raid. My raid group is currently only two bosses into T2, so I’ll be writing these guides from the perspective of T1. Feel free to discuss and ask questions about T2 in the comments though. If you want to check out my previous Update 5 instance guides, here’s the links:

• Fangorn’s Edge and Dargnakh Unleashed
• Pits of Isengard
• The Foundry

If your playing group is considering heading into ToO for the first time then I have one piece of advice – do it! Raiding seems to be intimidating for a lot of people, but T1 ToO is absolutely content that can be completed by a wide variety of groups with just a bit of preparation and coordination. You don’t need to be fully geared to do this content, you don’t need to be super hardcore raider, if you have a even a couple of hours a couple of nights then this content is well within your reach. And I can promise that if your current end game activities involve facerolling skirmish raids or mindlessly farming medallions/seals in smaller group instances or Draigoch, then you’ll find it much more enjoyable and rewarding to tackle this raid than playing around in those other spaces. The fights in ToO are genuinely varied and fun, will require people to use skills that they don’t have to in the other end game content (particularly lore-masters) and you’ll get a much greater sense of satisfaction from doing this content than facerolling through random skirmish raid #85 for another 6 seals and a teal shiny.

With that plug out of the way, I’ll head on into the guide.

Fire and Frost Tier 1

The structure of the ToO raid is that it’s a five boss instance with the first three bosses being in different wings that are accessible as soon as you enter and the final two wings (which are located within and on top of the Tower itself) open up after you defeat those first three wings. The raid is on a weekly lock (resets early Thursday morning USEST). If you’re heading into ToO for the first time, Fire and Frost (which is directly behind you as you enter the instance) is the first wing you should look to tackle. It’s the most manageable of the first three wings and is a good way to ease yourself into the raid. There are three trash pulls of fairly easy difficulty leading up to the boss, which is a two-boss fight slightly reminicient of the Ost Dunhoth disease wing.

ToO T1 isn’t generally that strict on class makeup but most wings will be easier if you have two main tanks and, for the trash, 3 classes capable of doing a perma-mez (LMs, burgs, yellow hunters). If you do have to use a hunter for cc on the trash, they should generally retrait for DPS for the boss fight. You will also obviously need two full healers (RKs or minis) and everything is easier if you have at least one and preferably 2 captains.

Trash

As mentioned, there are three trash pulls leading up to the boss. All of the mobs come pre-marked with symbols, as was the case in OD. This raid also introduces a new crowd-control mechanic called adaptation. Mobs with adaptaion will typically gain immunity to a particular type of cc for the rest of the fight once that type of cc has been applied to it once. The types of cc which are counted by adapted mobs are – daze, stun, fear, root and FM stun. The three trash pulls in F&F consist of the following mobs:

• Trash pull 1: 4 Ruffians, 2 trolls
• Trash pull 2: 5 Warriors, 3 ruffians
• Trash pull 3: 3 warriors, 3 ruffians, 2 trolls

Here’s an overview of these mobs, along with quick strategy for dealing with them:

• White-Hand ruffians (80k). Abilities: Leadership aura buffs nearby allies, can apply a disease to random fellowship members (after a /say callout) which causes an AOE stun on expiration (6s duration). Strategy: Generally these will be your CC targets – have your raid keep as many as you can permanently locked down while you kill everything else (other than trolls). They don’t hit that hard and do not necessarily need a main tank to target them, but they must be kept off healers of course. The disease that these mobs cast is the only thing likely to wipe a raid in this trash, make sure everyone is watching their debuff bars for diseases and potting appropriately (buffbars is recommended!). As a lore-master you can obviously cure some of these, but they typically come out two at a time so with the cooldown on PAAI you won’t be able to cure everything.
• White-Hand trolls (160k). Abilities: Adaptation buff, stacking healing corruptions. Strategy: Have your tank or tanks deal with these and kill them last. Don’t bother removing their corruptions until you are killing them. Either have one tank pick up both and kite them around (with your other tank picking up other mobs), or put one tank on each one and just offtank anything else.
• Twisted Warriors (35k). Abilities: Temporary morale bubbles will absorb most incoming damage, bloodlust makes kiting/cc-ing them very risky (+50% damage if they don’t hit something regularly). These are weak mobs and can generally be AOE-ed down at the start of a pull along with any ruffians that aren’t cc-ed. For pull 2 you should assign one tank to the group of warriors on each side of the room and for pull 3 you should ideally have one tank gathering up all three warriors and the other kiting the two trolls.

Boss Fight – Crisiant & Usgarren (Giants, 605,000 morale each)

Recommended virtues: The boss fight has a lot of AOE tactical damage, so I recomment Tolerance, Fidelity, Zeal for all classes. I I use Valour and Wisdom as my final two traits.

On T1 at least, this is a fight which involves you splitting the raid into two groups of 6 and tanking the bosses on opposite sides of the room. The general nature of this fight is that it is a control fight. Once you figure out the general strategy and positioning, there is no strong DPS element to this fight and all incoming healing is manageable. So tell your DPS classes to take it slow at first, let the tanks set up positioning and have everyone focus on their jobs and not panic. If you do that, you’ll find that it’s actually quite an easy fight.

The two giants, Crisiant & Usgarren, are aligned with frost and fire respectively. They will periodically summon grims and do 360 degree AOE attack corresponding with their element. The reason for splitting the group into two fellowships is that as you attack one of the giants you will gain a stacking debuff making you more vulnerable to attacks corresponding to the other giant’s element. At the start of the fight, have your fellowships each head to their side of the room and when the giant’s become active, have the tank position him near the corner of that side of the room with the tank’s back to the wall. The rest of the fellowship must stay outside of the giant’s 180 degree frontal arc at all times; if you get punted, re-establish this initial position as soon as possible to avoid any confusion.

The specific mechanics of the fight are as follows:

• Grims: The main mechanic in the fight is that each of the giants will periodically spawn grims associated with their element (there is a callout associated with this – “The frost courses through my veins” and “the fire burns within me”). I believe that this is on a timer, but it could be morale based I’m not 100% sure. To summon the grims, the giant does a “clap” attack – one grim will spawn for everyone in the giant’s 180 degree frontal arc when this attack goes off. If you want to avoid wiping, make sure that only the tank gets hit by the clap! When the grims are spawned, they should immediately be pulled off the boss by a melee character and dragged over to the healer/ranged group which should be standing ~20m behind the boss. Have everyone except the tank DPS the 30k grims down as quickly as possible. The trick is that the grims gain a special buff (a red question mark on a white background, it’s very obvious) at every 33% morale which makes them immune to damage until any form of cc (stun, root, mez) is applied. This is a great place for lore-masters to shine, as long as you save up your LoTRD cooldown for grims you will be able to remove all of these buffs with short or zero induction skills (blinding flash and LoTRD). The grims do some AOE damage and if allowed to stay around for long enough will do a fairly damaging distributed AOE attack.
• Corruptions: The giants each have a big AOE knockback special attack which is preceeded by a callout “My Power Builds!”. Luckily this can be avoided by removing the corruption that appears on the boss at that time. On T1 this is a two-tier corruption, so at least two corruption removal skills need to be used within about 5sec before the attack goes off. Have your tanks call this out if it happens during a grim phase.
• Shatter/Burn: The bosses will each periodically do an attack to a random character (“Freeze and shatter”, “You will all burn”), turning around if the target is behind them. Nothing you can do about it.
• Morale bubble: The giants will also announce, at about 20% morale, “The ancients shield me” and get a 150,000 morale bubble which lasts for 30s. On T1 this is nothing to worry about, either try to DPS though it (which will require very good DPS, 5,000dps in each fellowship) or just ignore it and resume hitting when it goes away.

And that’s it! If it sounds like a pretty simple fight, you’d be right. The only trick is letting the tanks get the positioning right, making sure you only get one grim spawn with each clap and then killing the grims quickly enough (using cc to remov the immunity buff as necessary). There’s not much of note to think about as a lore-master particularly. Given that you will only be able to debuff one of the bosses, you should have a careful think about your group makeup to decide which boss you will debuff with fire/frost lore. If your two fellowships are perfectly balanced then it doesn’t really matter, but if one of your groups has a weaker tank (perhaps a champ that doesn’t have such high mitigations as your guardian), or if one group doesn’t have a captain for off-heals or something, then put your fire/frost lore debuffs on the boss where you thihnk they’ll be most needed. Apart from that, just do your normal debuff rotation, spot heal/share power as needed and then DPS in the gaps. If you have decent tactical mitigation and morale you should feel free to stand in melee range of the boss for extra damage, but if you’re finding that you are in danger of dying then stay at >20m range to avoid the worst of his AOE attacks.

 

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2. Lore-mastery: Update 5 instances guide – Pits of Isengard I was tossing up whether to do a Riders of...
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PB Lore-mastery: Tower of Orthanc raid guide – Fire and Frost T1

The announcement of a new expansion is always exciting, as expansions bring a new level cap, new skills and new possibilities for character advancement and design changes. The lore-master has done pretty well out of our last two updates (in Isengard and the Nov 2010 update), gaining a bunch of useful new skills and some good trait refinement. So the announcement of Riders of Rohan has got me thinking about possibilities for new skills, traits and other changes to the class that could come with the expansion. While I think the class is fundamentally in a great place, and doesn’t need a major overhaul along the lines of Wardens or Champions (all our traitlines already have a well designed flavour and we are fairly effective in most of our roles), there’s certainly room for improvement and new interesting skills.

New skills

We are gaining another 10 levels with RoR, which should equate to another 5 skills if Isengard is anything to go by. I also appreciated the Isengard design of the new skills which didn’t just result in our skill bars being cluttered up with more new skills which either don’t get used or which obsolete old skills, so most of the new skills I propose here aren’t completely new skills.

• Level 76: Commune with nature (passive) – pet damge scales with your will and matches your weapon damage type. This is something that lore-masters really need imo. I was debating whether to suggest this as just a class tweak, but I think it’s a big enough increase in power to a fundamental part of the class to justify an entirely new skill. I would expect the scaling should be about 3% per 100 will, so if you had 1500 will at level 76, your pet would immediately get a 45% damage boost in addition to doing non-common damage. Given current levels of pet damage (around 50-100dps) this wouldn’t be overpowered, but it would be noticable, especially as we move towards 3000+ will by level 85.
• Level 78: Improved gust of wind – increased damage and 4s “freeze” (stun). This seems like a natural improvement for this skill. It already does cold based damage, it’s already primarily an AOE debuff, this just gives it an extra bit of utility.
• Level 80: Staff thrust - New melee skill. 15s cooldown, fast skill, low damage, interrupts. The biggest tool missing in the lore-master’s arsenal is an interrupt, this fills that hole. Lore-master’s technically already have a ranged interrupt (though it’s almost unusable), I think it’s appropriate that this be a melee interrupt given our hybrid melee combat nature.
• Level 82: Improved test of will - increases ICPR for next 30 seconds. On current cost/power/ICPR ratios lore-master DPS starts to get unsustainable after about 2min, especially if you’re debuffing at the same time. This gives lore-masters a way to manage their power in longer fights without having to gimp their damage output by using draw power. The rate of power increase shouldn’t be enough to replace draw power if you’re doing serious power sharing in a raid (although it would be useful to use the skill in a raid environment), but it should go a long way to making our DPS sustainable if the buff is kept up.
• Level 84: Improved ents go to war - Is a regular skill (no longer requires a legendary trait to slot). 2.5 second induction. This is probably my most radical suggestion. I think we would all like a new legendary trait, but Turbine is probably reluctant (for good reason) to open up a 4th legendary trait slot. This gives us the ability to have a new legendary trait without making the decision as to what existing legendary to drop quite so painful.

New traits

Traits are fun to play around with. Lore-masters are well used to mixing and matching and changing their traits around, because we have generally good legendary capstones going deep into our traitlines gives a lot of benefits. With RoR, I think turbine should give all classes a new class trait slot (probably at level 80), which would be the first trait slot added since Moria, giving us some much needed fundamental character advancement. Just making that change on its own would seriously unbalance the existing system of traitline bonuses and capstones, so I think all traitline bonuses should be moved up one (ie a 2-trait bonus becomes a 3-trait bonus, leaving no additional benefit for merely having 2 of a trait slotted) and the prerequesite for legendary capstones should be increased to 6 of the associated traits. This would preserve the existing balance while giving people more opportunity to use a few more traits, including these new ones:

• Master of nature’s fury: Blinding light - your light and lightning-based attacks have a +5% critical chance and +25% critical multiplier. Most of our existing DPS buffs are geared towards our fire skills, this would enhance a number of our non-fire tactical skills (lightning storm, light of the rising dawn, test of will and storm lore) in addition to improved staff strike, which does light damage.
• Keeper of Animals: Focussed attacks - the cooldown of your pets skills is reduced by 20% This has a huge variety of benefits, many of which are quite powerful. It certainly benefits some pets more than others; the bear and limrafn gain substantially more utility and the lynx and sabertooth a lot more damage. The raven and eagle would benefit less, but I don’t think that’s a fundamental objection to what would be a pretty interesting skill.
• Ancient Master: Critical debuffs - the magnitude and duration of your fire-lore, wind-lore, ancient craft, sign of power:see all ends and frost-lore debuffs is increased by 25% on critical hits. If you look in your combat log you’ll see that debuffs currently have the ability to critically hit. Unfortunately these crits do nothing and so fate/crit rating are fairly bad stats for a raiding lore-master. This is a way of making that stat count when you’re AM traitied, at least somewhat.
• Legendary: Raging waters - Grants the skill “Raging Waters”. 4min cooldown, 4 second induction, high damage 6-target cold-based AOE which slows affected mobs for 20sec (with a “broken leg” debuff). The skill is a nice thematic DPS cooldown, based on Gandalf/Elrond releasing a flood on the ringwraiths at the Ford of Bruinen. Lore-masters also don’t have much in the way of slow debuffs (only tar), so this is another slow debuff option. I would love it if this could do an AOE knockback, but that would probably break the game engine (eg. knocking mobs off cliffs causes all sorts of silly things to happen).

The new legednary trait should be earned by doing an epic level 85 solo quest that takes you all over middle earth and culminates in a new skirmish encounter. All classes would do this quest, it’s just that they would obviously get different trait rewards at the end.

New class items

We’ve received a dev hint that our long promised class item is coming soon – perhaps in Update 6 – but whether we get them soon or with RoR it would be nice to use them as an opportunity to resurrect some of more exciting raid amour set bonuses, in part because they’re good bonuses but also to stop us having to keep equipping very old armour to get these unique and powerful bonuses.

• Parchment of Nature’s fury: +10% fire damage. Flat out DPS boost (it works out to approximately 2.5% in a normal hybrid melee/tactical DPS rotation given diminishing returns). This just brings back the moria 6-piece bonus.
  Parchment of Animals: Your beacon of hope gains a 30s HoT (would not stack with OD set bonus). The OD 3-piece bonus is so ridiculously powerful (a 33-50% increase in beacon of hope is equivalent to literally thousands of will) that I can see us still wearing it at level 85 if we don’t get a way to replicate the bonus.
  Parchment of the Ancient Master: Your blinding flash has a +5sec duration (cannot be further increased). Again, this is such a powerful and unique bonus that in situations where you need to double mez or deal with cc mechanics like Adaptation, it might still be optimal to wear the level 60 DN set at level 85 if we don’t get another way to replicate this bonus. Already they’ve felt the need to duplicate this bonus on a level 75 armour set, it would be a shame if they had to do that again at level 85.

General tweaks

There are also a few things about the class which could use a bit of tweaking:

• Inner flame changed to work like this – channel duration is 6sec, if channeled for the full 6sec it gives all recipients a HoT for the next 10s equivalent to the inner flame heal. As much as I want to like it – especailly because if channeled for the full duration with improved inner flame equipped it’s equivalent to an additional beacon of hope on your whole group – in practice the current 16sec channel is completely unusable. This still means you need to sacrifice 6sec of doing nothing to get the full heal, but it might make the skill usable.
• Call to the valar resets cooldown on improved frost lore and staff sweep. These newly introduced skills aren’t reset by our skill resetter.
• Ancient craft from multiple lore-masters stacks. I can’t see any real issue with this change seeing as reveal weakness (which is more powerful) from multiple burglars already stacks. This still won’t make it totally optimal to bring a second lore-master to a group or raid, but it would certainly help the situation.
• Bog-guardian pet gains Angry Bees skill as a passive/automatic skill, and this is replaced with a toggle skill for ranged/melee stance. One of my biggest annoyances with the bog guardian is that it does so much more damage and flanks in melee, but it’s a real pain to position a lot of the time. Angry Bees is already up 100% of the time if you autocast it, so it’s a logical choice of skill to replace.
• Eagle ICPR scaling. This currently hasn’t scaled since SoA – 60 ICPR was respectable at level 50, but it’s laugable at 75 let alone 85. Bump it up to at least 100 ICPR, if not 200.

Various lore-master legacies could also use a substantial cleanup and consolidation:

• Staff major legacies – Remove: Light of the rising dawn crit multiplier and damage removed. Add: Staff thrust cooldown (max of -5sec) and Draw Power cooldown (max -15sec).

• Staff minor legacies – Consolidate: Lightning skills crit rating and lightning storm damage into a single “lightning skills crit rating and damage” legacy. Add: “Light of the rising dawn damage and critical multiplier”. Change: Gust of Wind damage to “Cold skills damage” and increased in magnitude by 25%.
• Book major legacies – Consolidate: Burning embers and Wizard’s Fire pulses into “Fire skill damage over time pulses”. Add: “Inner flame cooldown” (max -20sec).
• Book minor legacies – Remove: test of will devastate damage. Add: Increased damage absorption and reflection on air lore (max +50%).

I realise that all of the above is very unlikely to happen, but it’s fun to speculate and think about ways in which the class could be improved in interesting ways. There’s lots of options, lets hope the devs get creative!

 

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PB Lore-mastery: Riders of Rohan class changes wishlist

I’ve been a bit quiet and occupied lately, but I did have a chance not too long ago to chat with Shipwreck on the Beneath Your Feet Podcast.  He has a different spin on things as each episode focuses on another area of the game discussing the lore, backstory, and overall setting.  When he approached me about recording, I figured I’d hop on and talk about everyone’s favorite Middle-Earth resort location – Angmar!  While I know many don’t like the area, for me it still holds lots of fond memories and is definitely someplace you should at least visit – even if you decide to skip it while leveling and just go back at a higher level.

Take a listen as Shipwreck and I try our best to boost the Aughaire travel agency’s business

 

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DocHoliday Guest Appearance on Beneath Your Feet Podcast

The notes for today’s 5.2 update are live for those looking for something to do while the servers are down, take a look on the Lorebook.

There’s really not too much in there other then the changes to the lockboxes, which are pretty significant.  There’s also quite a bit of changes to Tier 7 of crafting, including the removal of many of the reputation requirements!  You should also notice some big changes for those of you with Scholars.

Outside of that, not too much exciting in today’s update, hopefully this will be a rather smooth one

 

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DocHoliday LOTRO Update 5.2 Patch Notes

Raiding exploits is a topic that’s been getting a bit of attention on the official forums recently. There has even been some moderator and developer response to some of this discussion, which is somewhat unusual and (in the latter case) encouraging. The discussion has been sparked by the fact that there are are a number of very serious bugs in the current end game raids, including bugs which allow you to:

• “Tank” Draigoch without taking any damage whatsoever
• Bypass the adaptation crowd-control mechanic in the Tower of Orthanc (ToO)
• End the Sauraman fight in phase 3 (of a 5 phase fight)
• Get credit for completing some of the T2 ToO challenges without meeting the challenge condition

Just to get something out of the way right up front – this article will not be discussing what these bugs are and if anyone explicitly or implicitly outlines what they are in comments then those comments will not be posted. Also, while I personally know what’s involved in the first of these I don’t exactly know what’s involved in the other three (though I have a good idea with the second), so don’t bother trying to ask me how they work or anything because not only won’t I tell you but I can’t.

This article seeks to cover the basics of exploiting the game – what it is, why you shouldn’t do it and the occasionally grey line between “exploit” and “smart play”.

What is an exploit?

The definitily of exploit is pretty clearly outlined in the LOTRO Code of Conduct (which is binding on you if you play the game):

17. You will not exploit, distribute or publicly communicate any Game error, miscue or bug which gives an unintended advantage within the Game world.

So if you take advantage of a bug or error in the game to gain an unintended advantage, such as finishing a fight much more easily or quickly than you otherwise could have, or to get loot multiple times within a lock period, then you are breaking the game’s code of conduct and are at risk of getting banned. From what I understand, while Codemasters used to be reasonably tight in having GMs police exploiting, Turbine has in general been fairly relaxed in enforcing this with only one high profle incident apparently resulting in a significant number of bannings (where a bunch of people got banned for exploiting faulty locks on the turtle when it was first released to get multiple first age LIs right after it was launched). However, just because exploiting has (apparently) been fairly lightly policed by Turbine in the past doesn’t mean that they don’t have the power to ban people for taking advantage of bugs, nor does it make it any less a breach of the game’s code of conduct.

The concept of exploits is pretty well established in MMOs. For example, many of the top WoW guilds were banned for exploiting a lock bug to get extra loot in the most recent WoW raid and the guild which got the world first kill of the Lich King in that game was stripped of their title and banned for taking advantage of a bug in that fight. The fact of the matter is that MMOs are complicated pieces of software so bugs will creep in and, unlike single player games, MMO companies feel that due to the social and subscription nature of their game, people exploiting bugs to finish content that they otherwise couldn’t have finished, or to gain loot quicker than intended is unacceptable.

The excuses

Whenever the topic of exploits come up, people who are exploiting them come up with vaious excuses. None of these really hold water imo, but I’ll go through them.

It’s Turbine’s fault for releasing buggy software

I absolutely agree that Turbine needs to do better with its QA and bug fixing (particularly the speed of bug fixing). The number of bugs and broken stuff in the RoI instances is disgraceful and the fact that there are so many wide ranging possible exploits is an indictment on their quality control, testing procedures and development resources. But at the end of the day, we play the game as we get it. Sometimes that game has bugs in it. Taking advantage of those bugs is exploting, period. Just because Turbine is rushing unfinished and buggy content out doesn’t make it any less of an exploit, and it doesn’t make it right.

Everyone’s doing it

This barely warrants a response, cause it’s the worst excuse in the book. But clearly it isn’t a valid response, nor is the suggestion that just because people aren’t getting banned for it means it’s not an exploit. Unfortunately sometimes behaviour such as exploiting the Sambrog challenge (after they tried to fix it) becomes so common that it’s hard to find a group that isn’t exploiting it, but that still doesn’t make it right and you should do what you can to get your group to do it the proper way.

It’s not an exploit, it’s just smart play

This is the only excuse which has some merit to it. Turbine may have designed a particular fight thinking that it would be done in a certain way. But the community is clever and crafty and comes up with an unexpected and unintended way of doing the fight which makes it much easier to complete. Doing the fight in the “unintended” way is not exploiting it, it’s just smart gameplay. An example would be the original Watcher fight where groups quickly realised that range tanking made the fight much easier by drastically reducing incoming damage and effectively neutralising the AOE mechanic. That this was an unintended outcome by Turbine is pretty clearly shown by the fact that they subsequently introduced a non-removable range damage corruption mechanism which nullified this strategy, but that doesn’t mean that range tanking the watcher was an exploit.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if a particular strategy is taking advantage of “bad code” for an unintended advantage (and is thus an exploit) or just a smart way of doing a particular fight. To this day I’m not sure if the strategy of standing in the safe spot near the pillar in the lightning boss in Sammath Gul is exploiting the fight. There’s some indication that Turbine wanted people to run around and try to learn the patterns and dodge them, because the first safe spot that people learned (where the group can just stand still and DPS at range) had an invisible barrier placed on it in one of the post-F2P patches. But even after that patch there was a new safe spot. So I don’t know whether figuring out the pattern and standing in the spot that didn’t get hit was exploiting or just smart gameplay. There can at times be a genuine grey area here.

Another situation can arise where a fight literally can’t be completed without “taking advantage” of a bug. For instance the ToO acid wing before the recent patch was bugged such that the acid in the boss fight didn’t do any damage (you just got a bunch of “absorbs” pop up above your head by standing in it). No one would suggest that completing the boss fight at that time was “exploiting”, because you’re not doing anything active to gain the benefit of the bug, it’s just that the fight is easier than was intended.

But sometimes it’s pretty clear that you’re taking advantage of an actual game bug. One indication might be that the mob you’re attacking is getting hurt but you’ve done something which means that it is doing no damage to you (outside of a kiting situation; kiting is clearly not exploiting). That’s the case with Draigoch at the moment using a certain strategy. And the fact that this strategy is an exploit has been pretty conclusively shown by the fact that Turbine has deleted videos off its forums explaining how to do the fight this way.

Another indication might be that what you’re doing is obviously a bug, eg because a skill works in a different way when you use it out of combat compared to when you use it in combat (if a skill was intended to have a certain effect then it would work both in and out of combat). This is the case with the second bug on the list I posted at the start. And there’s been an official statement by the raid’s Dev that this is a bug:

On the subject of adaptation:

Are the character skills being used currently working as intended, yes.

Is adaptation currently working as intended in how it responds to them, no.

Will we be tweaking the implementation of adaptation, yes. In update 6 adaptation will not clear until the pull the monster is attached to leaves combat.

He goes on to say that he personally doesn’t consider it an exploit – and I can see his point, for groups finding out about this the first time (which is entirely possible). But if you know about this bug – and it’s clearly a bug as outlined above – and you continue to use the strategy then that very clearly falls within the definition of exploit in the code of conduct.

And as for the third and fourth of the exploits outlined at the start, I don’t know the details of these but they’re unarguably exploits. You shouldn’t be able to finish a 5 phase fight in 3 phases, or get credit for something you didn’t do or meet a challenge condition that you actually failed.

At the end of the day, whether you and your group exploits fights is up to your attitude to the game and morality. Given how scarce Turbine’s active policing of game exploits seems to be, you’ll quite possibly get away with it if you do (don’t blame me if you get banned though!) but you should at least admit that what you’re doing is against the game’s code of conduct and a dirty way to win a fight.

 

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PB On raiding and exploits

We’ve seen this event teased a few times, but it sounds like this might be the event they’ve hinted at in a couple of the 2012 preview conversations.  Today Turbine posted a behind the scenes look at the Buried Treasure event giving some insight into how it works and some of the potential rewards.

Personally, I don’t understand why it has taken so long for this event to make its way to live (still no actual dates given) as it seems like they’ve been able to do entire festivals while this one has been in “beta.”  As for the event itself, it sounds cool and fun and I’ll be curious to see what all is available from those barter items.  I do like these non-progression tied events as they give you something else to do in times when you just want to hang out and relax.  And for some reason, I find the concept of a trained cave-claw to be very fascinating and just picturing the dialog options between characters and the trainers has me anxious to try this event.

My only real concern with this even will be the availability of the “Treasure Hunter Picks” that come from repeatable quests, dig-sites, and of course, the LOTRO Store.  Hopefully there will be enough ways in-game to get some picks such that you’re not forced to use the store, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a once daily limit on the repeatable quest for the pick.

But by far, I’m sure everyone is anxiously awaiting their opportunity to get a coin dropping horse!  Make sure to check out the diary and the image gallery to see what’s coming.

 

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DocHoliday LOTRO Buried Treasure Teaser

First of all I’m going to start this article off with a quote: “Hmmmmmmmm.” Now, that’s not a particularly interesting quote on its own but the fact that it was said by the Turbine dev Graalx2 in response to a complaint about the lore-master’s ranged slot item (which was promised in November 2010) does make it fairly interesting. I’ve got no idea what it’s going to be, but I’m certainly looking forward to it and hope that it makes it into Update 6!

Anyway, I’m concluding my series of Update 5 instance guides this week with an overview of The Foundry, a 6-person instance centered around Sauraman’s Ring Forge. I’ll look at doing some guides on various Tower of Orthanc wings in the coming weeks, too. As with the previous guides, these are written mainly from a lore-master’s perspective but also give a general overview of the tactics of the instance. For reference, here’s links to the previous guides:

• Fangorn’s Edge and Dargnakh Unleashed
• Pits of Isengard

The Foundry

Diseases/wounds? The fire-callers do a moderate damage fire wound, but it’s nothing too scary.
Stuns? All three boss fights have stuns.
CC required? Nope. There’s some places where it’s theoretically useful but it’s not worth the loss of personal DPS.
Trait setup: 4 Red, +2 whatever. Overall, the level of damage in this instance is pretty low so you don’t necessarily need to trait 2-blue, especially if you already have offhealing. Feel free to take whatever you want – improved sop:c, a 6th red, even dunedain learning if you’re OCD about stun prot and like to get lazy like me .
Recommended pet: Raven on the first boss due to lots of random tactical damage, raven or bear on the others, whichever will add the most DPS to your group.

Strategy:

I would consider the Foundry to be probably the easiest 6-person instance that Turbine has released since Moria; it’s far, far easier to beat the Foundry T2 challenge than Sammath Gul, Sari Surma or Lost Temple. While there are quite a few tricky mechanics here and there, the overall level of incoming damage means that a lot of them can be ignored and there’s nothing even remotely as tough as the Lost Temple disease mechanics or the controlled DPS races in the Gortheron and Osan fights. Continuing the trend of the In Your Absence cluster, there’s also no need for lore-master cc here – I recommend just traiting for DPS, especially given how great sticky gourd is for mowing through the trash mobs.

Trash

Overall, the trash in this instance isn’t very difficult and you should basically be able to faceroll through it. Because of all the AOE, lore-masters love the trash in this instance (1500-2000 DPS is easily achievable on most of the 20-30s pulls), there’s just so many mobs to just unload on. Be nice on your tank, but not too nice – blowing stuff up is fun . Stuff will die very, very quickly if you also have a champ along for the ride. Some of the pulls have a “purple eye drops purple puddle” mechanic which you’ll be familiar with if you did NCF/Ivar in OD, but quite frankly I find you can just ignore it in the trash pulls because stuff dies so quickly and it does so little damage. Feel free to move away from your group if you get the eye though.

I love the smell of burning trash in the mor... no wait, anytime.

Leading up to the first boss are some stationary and some pathing groups of orcs. It’s no biggie if you pull both together usually, but probably try to keep them separate. There are two goblin “snitches” who will run away to wake up an ~85k troll as soon as they are aggroed, it’s a good idea to root/stun/burn these as soon as they’re going to be woken up. I have noticed a strange bug a couple of times with them where they sometimes disappear immediately after getting rooted (had this happen with both a hunter and lore-master root), if that happens they’ll be returning with the troll shortly afterwards so be alert.

On the way to the second boss there’s a couple of trolls, some fire arrow orcs and lots and lots of AOE goodness. There’s more packs of orcs on the way to the third boss and these groups introduce the fire-callers, which put a moderately damaging fire wound on people and seem to do a bit of damage – kill them first, AOE away. The final room before the last boss has some fun stompy pilons (similar to the last boss in The Waterworks), just don’t get crushed underneath them.

Boss 1 – Dhâr (Orc)

The fight against Dhar is easily the hardest fight in the instance, and requires your group to at least learn some mechanics and positioning. The square room is divided up into a 3×3 grid of smaller squares, with grates separating each square. At the end of each row of squares is a set of 3 levers, each set has a ~14k add standing at it. The main mechanic in this fight is that Dhar will gain a damage-absorbing shield at about 90% morale. This shield can only be removed, temporarily, by dropping overhead trash on top of him. The trash can be dropped by pulling levers and falls into one of the six squares. The leftmost lever in each row of squares drops trash onto the square closest to it.

So the goal is to line the boss up on a square when he gets his shield, pull the coresponding lever to drop trash on him and then quickly DPS him down while he’s temporarily vulnerable. The group should have a designated lever puller and this person and the tank should coordinate which square is going to have a trash drop (or just have the tank pull it somewhere and the lever puller respond to that). Note that if the actual drop misses Dhar, he can be dragged through the trash shortly after it falls and that will still work. When the trash does fall, it causes a short duration stun so it’s not a bad idea to keep stun immunity up on your tank.

The trick with the levers, is that once one is pulled it can’t be pulled again. And you remember those adds I mentioned? They will randomly stand there and pull levers. So killing them is the first priority. They don’t need to be tanked specifically, just kill them quickly (lore-master stuns and roots are good to keep them from killing squishies). They do respawn if killed, so it’s theoretically possible to just keep one mezzed for the whole fight, but it’s not worth it for a lore-master to trait a mez just for this, so only go the cc option if you have a burglar in the group who doesn’t mind going in mischief stance.

There are three other mechanics of note in this fight:

• The squares will randomly and periodically fill up with highly damaging lava. Don’t stand in the fire.
• The boss will periodically call out a random person’s name. An AOE fire-spot will appear under that person’s feet. Don’t stand in the fire.
• Steam will spurt out from the walls along the grates in between the squares, doing about 2-3k damage. It’s theoretically possible to spot a small steam burst before the vent, but in practice that’s pretty much impossible so you can either just heal through this or not stand on the grates; this will expose you to a risk of getting hit by lava though so the healer’s gonna be healing something either way.

All of these mechanics mean it’s good for your group to stay as spread out as possible.

As I said, this is the toughest fight in the instance, and minstrel healers in particular will start running out of power so do share it with them. Encourage everyone to blow their cooldowns though, because once it’s over, there’s not much else they’ll need them fore.

Boss 2 – Gurbák (Troll)

The thing to watch out for with Gurbak is the walls of the room. They’re insta-death. And he’s a troll so you just know there’s going to be punting. So surprise, surprise, the trick is to tank him in the center of the room. Crazy, I know. If the tank can keep the troll in the middle of the room, with everyone grouped up behind him, then you win this fight. That’s all there is to it. Given the supreme importance of positioning, make sure to tell your hunters (always the hunters) that it’s not a DPS race so give the tank plenty of time to build up a threat lead.

I have no idea what that purple thing is either.

Gurbak will periodically punt the tank and also occasionally turn around to punt a random group member. For this reason the tank might need to turn him around so the troll doesn’t get too close to the walls, just have the rest of the group switch around to stay behind him if this happens. He has a big induction AOE attack too which should be easy for just about any class other than lore-masters to interrupt. I hate not having an interrupt (and no, blinding flash is not a usable interrupt without fast loader traite). Anyway, apart from that, keep stun immunity up on the tank and fire away.

Boss 3 – Penrith (Angmarin), Ghashanuz (Orc) and The Ring Forge of Orthanc (it’s a forge)

This is perhaps the most disappointing fight in the instance because it really has the setup to be an awesome fun fight, but because the level of damage coming at the group is so low (with one exception) it ends up just being a fairly boring grind fest. There’s no real pressure on a group here if they have a workable strategy, it’s just a question of DPSing 600k total morale down while walking clockwise around the room.

The second boss in LOTRO within the "object" genus.

The setup is pretty simple – 2 bosses, one forge. The bosses need to be separated from each other or else they do additional damage, so have two people tank them (they don’t do much damage, you can tank it with a non-tank traited champ or captain very easily). All three mobs will periodically green out and do their thing, so you’ll need to be switching targets from time to time. Challenge condition (which all groups should be doing if they’re on T2) is simply to kill the forge before either of the bosses. When the forge is dead, the bosses get enraged and do significantly more damage. This isn’t a very difficult challenge condition, all you need to do is make sure to get Penrith and Ghashanuz down to ~15k before killing the forge, and then finish them off quickly.

The additional mechanics are as follows:

• The big one to watch out for is the fire which gets spawned from time tom time at the far right of the room (1 o’clock if you take the entrance as 6 o’clock) and then spreads clockwise around the room. This MUST be avoided. For this reason, you should start off in the bottom part of the room and then when the fire spawns, the whole group runs around clockwise to 12 o’clock until the fire has cleared from the first place where it spawns and then move back to where you started and wait for the next one. The only thing that is likely to kill you in this fight is this fire. It doesn’t move very fast, but be on your toes.
• As with the trash, purple eyes appear over random people’s head and they drop 5 purple puddles over about 20s. It’s probably a good idea to drop these around the edge of the room. Don’t spend the whole 20s running though, only run after you drop a puddle.
• The orc boss does occasional stuns on its tank and the forge enters a phase where it will do short duration stuns on everyone in the room for about 30sec. I recommend keeping up stun immunity on the orc tank, yourself and the healer. Reactively use SI on anyone who looks like they’re in danger of getting stun-trapped in the fire or a purple puddle.

And that’s pretty much it. As I said, it has the potential to be an interesting fight, and the whole place is nicely atmospheric, but it ends up being pretty long and tedious I find. Ah well.

Anyway, I hope those guides helped. Feel free to ask any questions or give any additional hints in the comments!

 

Related posts:

1. Lore-mastery: Update 5 instances guide – Pits of Isengard I was tossing up whether to do a Riders of...
2. Lore-mastery: Guide to U5 instances – Fangorn’s Edge and Dargnakh Unleashed Well, it’s been a bit of a delayed start to...
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PB Lore-mastery: Guide to U5 instances – The Foundry

After all the anticipation of the patch notes coming down JUST before a server hiccup at Turbine brought down the website, the actual patch notes for Bullroarer are quite tame.

I think the biggest thing in there (other then sound to the /toast emote) is the change to the Lockboxes:

• Better items and more often from the boxes
• The mount
• Relic Removal scrolls – pseudo bone for those upset this is only in the store
• Various other legendary item swag
• Lock box only weapons – very interesting here, who knows what these will be
• 10% rate to drop a key
• Improved chance to contain more then one item
• No longer include items from the lowest tiers

Oh, and all kidding aside there’s also the “fix” for the Creep mitigations.  Hopefully they got it right this time and they’re back to where they’re supposed to be.

There’s also some new stuff to the store (I know, you’re all anxiously awaiting these updates) to include some cosmetic armor and some of the higher tier relics found in-game.  I like that what’s in-game is also in the store, but how about updating the game to include the same or at least similar stuff to what’s in the store?

 

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DocHoliday LOTRO Update 5.2 Coming to Bullroarer

I was tossing up whether to do a Riders of Rohan wishlist post this week or continue with the update 5 instance guides, but I figure that the longer I take on these guides the less relevant they become so into the Pits of Isengard it is…

Pits of Isengard

Diseases/wounds? First boss has a DoT wound that’s worth removing
Stuns? No
CC required? No
Can a lore-master heal? I’m going to say no. Yes, it’s theoretically possible (there’s someone on the forum who’s done it), but for all practical intents and purposes the first boss is not a fight that a LM can heal without an exceptional group.
Trait setup: 5 Red, 2 blue. This is an instance which requires (at T2) a full tank and a full healer, so your DPS really matters here especially given the fairly tight dps requirements on the first boss.
Recommended pet: Bear or raven. In general, I think bear is more useful on Zaburz and Fushbraf, and raven on Ironam.

Strategy: On T2 this is a three boss instance with the most extensive trash pulls of any of the Isengard 3-person instances. This is also the hardest (and imo most fun) of the three, with some fun boss fights, tricky trash pulls to work out and a chance for us to really shine in our DPS role.

First boss – Zaburz

The opening area involves you navigating around mobs while pulling four levers. You have to kill some of the trash, and there’s a fun little prisoner mechanic where if you kill the guards the prisoners will follow and “help” you (randomly aggro a bunch of mobs you didn’t want to wake up) and then you make your way to the other side of the room to the first boss. The first thing you need to work out with this boss is positioning, which is relatively simple. He’s standing on a railroad track which leads down the middle of the room. Run to the wall at the far end of that track and have the entire group stay there for the whole fight, with your backs to the wall. The boss can yank you and if you’re not standing there you’re at risk of falling down some insta-death pits.

The boss, an orc named Zaburz, is your standard tank and spank with adds, but there’s quite a lot of adds (3 each wave, 10k morale each) and they come regularly enough that you need to be on your A-game to kill them all in time, especially if your tank isn’t contributing much damage. I’m pretty sure these adds are time based not morale-based too, but that’s not toally clear. Luckily lore-master burst AOE DPS is perfectly suited for these waves – keep tar down regularly and then try to setup a good ents/sticky-gourd/cracked earth/lightning storm combo (whichever you have off cooldown) when the adds are grouped up. This is likely to give your tank fits keeping up with the aggro, but you really have to hit them as hard and as quickly as possible so just warn them before the fight and also keep your bear taunt ready if you’re in trouble. Also, it’s definitely possible to root 2 or even all 3 of them at range to let you whittle them down before they come in close, but this of course will give you a big threat lead over your tank so make sure you can kill anything you engage at range before it gets in close. Be prepared to use your WoTC heal and even racial panic button if you pull a bunch of adds, because you will die very quickly. There’s also some wound removal and spot healing to worry about in this fight, so you’ll certainly be kept busy.

After this boss, you have the choice of going left, to the poison wing and the troll boss Ironarm, or right into the fire wing and the fire boss Fushbraf. It’s up to you which way you go; the fire boss is substantially easier but it has much harder trash (the hardest trash of any 3-person instance in the game imo), so there overall isn’t much difficulty difference between the two wings.

Poison wing – Ironarm

The trash in the poison wing isn’t much to worry about, but it does teach you one of the boss mechanics which is that if the trolls are allowed to stand in the poison puddles then they will spawn exploding limrafns. Tell your tank to watch out for this . The T2 challenge condition also involves you tiering up the wing’s poison debuff to 4, which happens by killing the right kind of mob – just keep pulling and killing stuff until you hit tier 4 (this is the same in the fire wing).

The boss fight is more of an endurance fight than anything, it’s relatively easy provided the tank keeps the boss moving around out of the puddles. It’s almost inevitable that some limrafns will get spawned though, so I highly, highly recommend that you stay at range in this fight. Yes, it will cripple your DPS (taking into account the necessary movement too to keep LOS, I do about 400 which is pathetic), but it’s a vastly safer way of doing the fight because the limrafn explosions will very quickly take you out. If one does spawn, try to hit a root on it ASAP because it will probably run straight towards your healer and then kill it as quickly as possible (appx 700 morale, so one skill should do it). As long as everyone stays alive, this is a relatively easy but long fight.

Fire wing – Fushbraf

As I said before, the trash in the fire wing is hard, brutally so the first time you go in. But it is certainly possible to figure it out and I really quite like it in the end. The biggest problem is that you’re fighting around a lot of insta-death lava and the fire orcs like to do massive yanks and throw you into that lava. So positioning is obviously important. For the first pull, run across two bridges so you end up to the left of the mobs in a relatively safe spot. Pull from a distance and stay as much as you can with your backs to the wall in the alcove (ie run back when you get pulled). Have the whole group bunch up, because if everyone keeps the orcs in melee range then they won’t yank you (the yank does like 1500 damage too, it’s really not fun). The problem then is that the orcs put up a fire ring which does quite heavy AOE damage. So let the mobs come in close, and hit them with as much DPS as you possibly can while your tank frantically tries to keep threat and your healer desperately keeps the group alive – that’s pretty much what you want in a fight isn’t it? The pull just before the door to the boss room can be pretty brutal. Root the group in place to start and have everyone run up to the door as quickly as possible. Tell your healer to blow all the cooldowns that they can becuase they’ll probably need it. Once you’ve tiered the fire debuff up to 4 then head on into the boss room.

The final boss, Fushbraf, is stupidly easy. If you’re doing this with a full healer and tank, his mechanic (which is a 4-pronged fire earthquake thingy) can be completely ignored. All you need to do is stand in the middle of the room and do damage. Which is actually quite fun – the rest of this instance is pretty challenging, it’s nice to just be able to sit there and hit a target dummy for a few minutes! And speaking of target dummies, this boss is the best place in the game at the moment to benchmark your DPS. Unless they’ve fixed it recently, the training dummies in Galtrev are completely broken and useless for measuring DPS becuase they boot you out of combat every few seconds, wiping all DoTs. Given that an enormous proportion of LM damage is from DoTs that’s a big problem. This couple of hundred k morale troll though gives you a perfect measuring stick. It will take you about 3mins to kill him, and it’s a pure single target fight, so it’s a very good way to measure your DPS. Personally, I’m able to get just over 900dps as measure by CombatAnalysis, which translates to a bit over 1000dps because CA doesn’t measure the sticky gourd DoT (which hits for ~400 damage every 4 seconds). I’m not fully geared out, I’m sure it’s possible to squeeze another couple of hundred out of the class, but I think that’s a good general benchmark for lore-master sustained single target DPS using a second age L75 staff (tactical mastery was about 27k, with around 5.5k crit rating). Note that this was in a group with a guardian tank and RK healer, so I had no external buffs or mob debuffs of any kind (I hit over 1100 with a captain another time!).

Also, you can once again see the importance of melee to lore-master sustained DPS in the screenshot below. Autoattacks were my second biggest source of damage, accounting for almost 30% of total damage! Throw in staff strike and staff sweep on top of that and melee attacks accounted for over half of the damage I did in that fight. As I’ve said before, if you want to do damage as a lore-master be sure to stand in melee range.

Hope that’s of some help to people, I’ll move onto the pits next week and then the Tower of Orthanc raid some time after that.

 

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2. Lore-mastery: Guide to U5 instances – Fangorn’s Edge and Dargnakh Unleashed Well, it’s been a bit of a delayed start to...
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PB Lore-mastery: Update 5 instances guide – Pits of Isengard

Orion has the second part of his Warden updates posted and this walks through the Shield and Spear line gambits.  If you missed Post #1, head over here   As a follow-up to that post, Orion also responds to some of the comments on the forums as well:

• Clarification on buff Tiering
• Essentially higher tier buffs have shorter duration, but bigger magnitudes.  But, if lower tier is active that duration is used instead.
• BPE bonuses for builders are partials
• Sadly War-cry is just a normal HoT, not an AoE HoT
• Fist gambits will also be ranged, but AoE gambits will still be close proximity
• Way of the Warden isn’t a stance, but a stance buff – see below

Here’s the gist of Post #2 from Orion:

Gambit	Always	Determination	Assailment	Recklessness
Defensive Strike	Low Weapon + Potency	Increased Block Rating	Threat Reduction	Increase Physical Mastery
Impressive Flourish	Low damage + low DoT	Low HoT + crit defense + armor	+1% Ranged Damage	Minor Light DoT
Persevere	Low Weapon	HoT + Block & Partial Block	Minor Lifetap	Minor DoT
Maddening Strike	Main-hand Damage	Small Threat Transfer + crit defense + armor	+2% Ranged Damage (stacks to 3%)	Low Light DoT
Safeguard	Low Common Damage	HoT + Block & Partial Block	Threat Reduction + Lifetap	DoT
Shield Up	??	+BPE for 30s	Fellowship Agro Dump	Reflective Damage Shield +% slow
Deflection	Decreased Threat
Celebration of Skill	Main-hand Damage	HoT + Block & Partial Block	+3% Ranged Damage (stacks to 4%)	DoT
Dance of War	Increased Evade	Moderate Threat Transfer + crit defense + armor	Threat Reduction	Lifetap
Shield Tactics	+Tactical Mitigation + Stun Immunity			On Crit, Daze for 3 seconds
Shield Mastery	??	+BPE for 60s	Large Fellowship Agro Dump	Reflective Damage Shield +% slow
Restoration	Main-hand damage + HoT
Conviction	AoE Heal	AoE Threat Transfer, AOE HoT	Nearly Negates Fellowship Threat for 10 seconds	10s +Physical Mastery Buff

I really like what’s going on with the shield line, especially with all the buffs and threat mechanics going on.  I also like the continued way he’s incorporating stacking of tiers as you go along.  It is really looking like the Assailment stance will be quite handy for group mechanics and will allow the Warden to do some fun Agro tricks

Continuing on with the Spear line, remember these turn into Ranged attacks if you’re in the Assailment stance.

It appears as though the DbD morale requirement might be gone, if so that would be HUGE for Wardens, although I’m expecting the power return to be significantly lower.  Overall this line doesn’t seem too different with just some nice additions.  Of course, being able to do this stuff from range will be quite interesting, that’s for sure!

Finally, Orion does touch on two of our Legendary skills and probably the two most controversial ones:

• Defiant Challenge
• 5s Forced Attack
• 40% Mitigation Buff for 15s
• Reflective Damage Shield for 30s
• 3 minute 30 second cooldown
• Way of the Warden
• Enhances stances with bonuses for 180 seconds
• 600 seconds (10 minute) cooldown.

 

No related posts.

DocHoliday Warden Update 6 Dev Post #2

Orion’s starting to open up a bit more as he gives us some pretty hard details about what’s coming for the Warden class with Update 6.  While these are posted on his my.LOTRO blog, they’re still subject to change based on feedback.  Also, keep in mind this post is titled “Blog #1” so there will be more coming.

First up, he describes how Battle Preparations will work which sounds pretty slick.  Essentially, using the skill will turn builders and masteries no longer require a target and as such can be used outside of combat.  This will allow you to build and store a gambit pre-fight for up to 30 seconds.  I’m a little curious to see if there will be a cool-down for this skill.

He then tackles the stances, which I think are the meat of the change for the class:

• Determination becomes THE tanking stance
• Bonuses to both regeneration rates, crit chance reduction, as well as increased BPE
• Gambits are all tweaked to focus on tanking
• Assailment becomes the ranged DPS stance.
• Reduces BPE, increased iCPR, increases ranged damage
• Spear Gambits become ranged attacks!
• Gambits tweaked to focus on ranged damage
• Recklessness remains the melee DPS stance
• Increases melee damage and iCPR, reduces BPE, lowers attack duration
• Gambits tweaks to focus on melee damage

Orion then walks through how the builders will change based on the stance you’re in.  The ideas of the builders are still the same but there are different tweaks and bonuses available as you switch stances.

Overall some really interesting stuff here but the main ideas remain the same.  Determination/no stance pretty much stays the same while the others stay similar but reflect their appropriate role.  I also really like all the buffs in there!

In this first post, he just focuses on the Fist line gambits:

When you actually break this all out, it really isn’t as intimidating as I had feared.  The gambits are more or less staying with what they currently do, but can apply a secondary stance dependent buff:

• Determination –> Threat or Evade
• Assailment –> party damage buffs
• Recklessness –> more DoTs or lifetaps

The nice part for me about the Assailment line is it looks like it might also fulfill a side-roll of fellowship damage booster.  Depending on the range of the buffs, I could see this as being potentially VERY helpful in group settings and allowing Wardens to find group roles other then just tanking.

So far, I’m loving the concepts Orion has laid out and I can’t wait to see the other two gambit lines as well as what’s in store for our traits!

 

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DocHoliday Orion Outlines Update 6 Warden Changes

Right on the heels of the Riders of Rohan Expansion announcement, Massively released an article with comments from Kate Paiz and Adam Mersky talking about the upcoming year.

The article starts off with a bit of a look back at 2011 and I think it is fair to say the whole EU transition took up way more time and resources then Turbine expected.  Is this to blame for the “down” year for content?  Who knows, but certainly it loomed large for them.

2012 is another milestone year for Turbine as it will mark the 5th anniversary of the game (Holy cow has it been that long?).  There will be another event and even though they’ve acknowledged that last year’s wasn’t well received it doesn’t sound like there will be major changes for this year, just some tweaks to it.

Teased in the interview is talk of the next region coming with Update 6, The Big River named for the River Anduin.  This should be another fun area to go explore as there isn’t a whole lot written about it but we know there’s quite a bit going on there.  Also coming with Update 6 are changes for the Instance Finder:

• Ability to run specific Instances
• Instance Finder will replace World Join
• Reflecting Pool will roll into the Instance Finder
• not to mention the much anticipated Warden changes

A few things teased that will be coming “soon” are:

• skirmish soldiers out in the landscape as companions
• new festival for the summer
• smaller more frequent game updates!

The couple teasers for Rohan are:

• We’re only covering the Eastern part, which explains why no Helm’s Deep
• Don’t fret, land-mass wise this will be twice as big as Moria!
• Mounted combat will be confined to that zone (I’m on a roll with predictions so far)

This is exactly the kind of Producers letter I was hoping for towards the end of last year, so I’m glad they finally pushed it out the door.  Things are looking up for LOTRO that’s for sure, can’t wait to get moving on some of this stuff!

 

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