Long time, no post.  I know.

I wanted to drop you guys a line about what I have been working on.  For the past week, I have been implementing a newly designed barter drop system for instances.

“What?  Wait… a new one?” - you ask

Yes, we have listened to your concerns about the Book 8 changes and the previous instances not being changed.  We have talked long and hard about what are the best ways to fix this system so it is works for as many people as possible and we also ultimately want it to feel…wait for it…rewarding!

So we have come up with a new plan.  Meet Medallions - The new shiny barter token to use for bartering for your radiance pieces and some extra Legendary Item augmentations!  Medallions will be replacing most of the tokens that you’ve seen since Moria.  There will be unique Medallions for each cluster of instances that we release.  Currently there will be two for the live content you guys are playing: the Medallion of Moria and the Medallion of Lothlorien.  The Medallions will drop off of every boss monster in level 58+ instances.  This means that killing boss one in Forges of Khazad-Dum will drop Medallions for everyone in the party.  (Note: Make sure you all loot the chest!)  I’m not going to get into how many, etc. here because we are still balancing the system.  Players can use Medallions to trade for same things they were trading for — namely the Challenge sets, the other dungeon sets, and relics and Legendary Item XP.

Currently the Medallions of Moria will drop in: Grand Stairs, Forges, Sixteenth Hall, Fil Ghashan, Skumfil, and Dark Delvings.  The Medallions of Lothlorien will drop in Waterworks, Halls of Crafting, and Hall of Mirrors.  Future instances will drop a new Medallion.

The goal here is to not force you all to grind through instances in only the way we want.  Also, players will still gain ground towards gaining their sets even if they aren’t achieving the Challenges.  However, doing the Challenges will gain you more Medallions!  In addition to this, we are going to be adding in some items to Challenges at a very low percentage drop.  This means you’ll have a chance of getting something special. Finally, we are fixing it so there are new Challenge quests that work while you are inside the instances only and are on a daily retry timer.  Orion has mentioned this tech and you can read his blog for more information.  Oh and if that is not enough, we have some new Legendary Item goodies that you can trade for that we think you will like a lot.  (But you’ll have to wait to find out what exactly!)

“But what about my old tokens?  What do I do with them?”

No worries.  There will be new npcs at the Twenty-first Hall and Caras Galadhon near the class trainers that will exchange those old crusty tokens for new shiny medallions!  These Barter Exchange Traders will also hold all the Legendary Item goodies.  They are your new favorite buddies.

I’m sure there is much more to talk about and we’ll be discussing the new instances we are working on shortly, but for now, I hope this comes as good news.

-Amlug

p.s. Radiance and Hope have been separated back out again.  Radiance will no longer give bonuses to players on landscape, it will only be used to combat Gloom.

Hey guys and gals!

Just wanted to drop a quick note and let you know that we’ve scoured clean most of the worst instance bugs from Book 8 new instances.  I know this is frustrating to see on day one.  We don’t like it either so we have fixed it.  As you may have seen on the main forums page, we are planning on releasing those fixes as fast as we can.  Bear with us and the fixes will be here before ya know it!!

We have a lot of changes coming in Book 8 with the release of Dar Narbugud, our newest multi-boss raid.  I wanted to talk about some of these changes and what they mean for you!

Instance and Raid Changes Coming in Book 8:

• New instances and raids:
  • The Mirror Halls of Lumul-nar - a three-man instance located in Zirak-zigil (contains a hard mode)
  • The Water Wheels: Nala-Dum - another three-man level 60 instance located in the Flooded Deeps (contains a hard mode)
  • Halls of Crafting - a six-man instance located next to the entrances of the Forges of Khazad-Dum and Fil Ghashan (contains a hard mode)
  • Dar Narbugud - a twelve-person raid that contains 6 bosses with First Age Legendary Item token drops and the new Tier 2 class set
  • A ton of new quests for the instances and raids - opportunities to gain Galadhrim reputation, Rare Drops, and Legendary Item XP.
• Changes to existing raids:
  • The Vile Maw is now a little bit easier than the 2.0 current version.  Think of it as new version 1.5 with a slower transition from stage 2 to 3, slower pile-ups of corruptions, etc.
  • The Vile Maw and Turtle Raids can now be run 2 times a week
  • Vile Maw gloom went down to 140 from 150.  This will allow people to fight in 30 gloom when using the full radiance set
  • Hope buffs from Helegrod and The Rift have become a Radiance Buff that lasts 3 hours even if you disconnect or log out of the game. These buffs have been also been adjusted from +3 Hope to +10 Radiance.
• Changes to Item drops for instances and raids:
  • All First Age Legendary Items are now dropping only in raids via a token system.  We’ll get into the hows and whys of this system but suffice it to say, you now can pick your First Age once you get enough tokens instead of hoping the random number gods are in your favor
  • All 3 Moria raids will be dropping First Age tokens at varying rates — it is up to you to figure out where the best place to get tokens is!
  • A new barter system for the hard modes of the 3 new non-raid instances.  Every player will be able to loot 1 barter token from the chests if they achieved hard mode and will be able to collect and trade these tokens in for a +15 radiance piece of a 3-piece set or Legendary Item XP tokens
  • All of the previous instances are dropping more Second Age items per instance!
  • Tier 2 class set is now a 5-set bonus max rather than a 6-set bonus max so that players can now mix and match that sixth piece to their heart’s content.

We are really excited with this new cluster of instances and we hope it will give you guys a bunch of options now in obtaining more phat lewts!  The new instances should be some of the most challenging and most fun we have done to date.

First Age Legendary Items:

Pitchforks down, please!  As I said before, we have turned the First Age drop system into a barter system.  I realize some people have concerns with the number of tokens that are dropping in Book 8, and that at first glance it seems like players are getting less Legendary Items than they used to, but this actually isn’t the case.

Prior to Book 8, when you killed the Watcher you would get 1 Legendary Item and a 50% chance at a second.  The problem was that each one of those loot rolls (on the back end) would pull from a GIANT pool of First Ages for all the classes.  If you were a Captain for example, you had an 11% chance of getting a First Age for your class and then you had a 1/13 chance of getting the First Age halberd that you actually wanted (or the banner, or the hammer, or the…). This means that the percent chance of you getting the banner you wanted was 0.8%! This gets even worse for Champions!  Currently in Book 7, the Watcher resets once per week. This means if you were the last person in your Raid to get a First Age and you were a Captain, you would have to run the Watcher an average of over 100 runs to get what you wanted.

Now, with the new system, we are dropping between 4-6 First Age tokens per Watcher run and the Watcher is now available twice a week.  This means that if you are that same captain and all your other members in the Raid have First Ages, you now need to run the Watcher 1 to 2 times for that same exact level 60 weapon.  The difference is pretty substantial if you think of it in mathematical terms.  So while I know the perception is less First Ages per run, the actuality is 100 less Watcher kills to get the weapon or class item you want.  This doesn’t even bring into account the tokens that drop in the Turtle raid and Dar Narbugud.  For that poor Captain, we have just saved him 2 years of unsuccessful Banner drops!!

Finally, if after all that you don’t like the item when you identified it, we are leaving the First Ages BOE so you can offer it up in the Auction House to someone who might prefer the legacies that are on the item.

Radiance Requirements:

In terms of Radiance, some of the major complaints were the number of hoops you had to jump through to get outfitted for the Watcher, and also the worry that you would have to do the same for the next raid.  With the new three-piece +15 radiance set, players will now have 3 more hard-mode options to gain gear for the Watcher and they will also be able to outfit for Dar Narbugud with only six hard-mode runs pieces:

+15, +15, +15, +10, +10, +10 = +75 +50 (Hope Token) = +125 Radiance*

*Radiance does in fact round down so that +125 Radiance is +120 effectively

120 Radiance is enough to counteract the -160 Gloom that the bosses of Dar Narbugud produce.  You will be fighting in -40 Gloom (obviously not optimal) which allows for you to avoid cowering the whole time!  And with the Watcher, you will be fighting in -20 Gloom without Destiny Point Hope or anything else. We hope that with more radiance pieces and more options, we are allowing players to find their own instance play-style to access the Raids. This will get easier with time as we move forward, of course!

As We Go Forward:

We’ve made a very conscious choice with these changes to loosen the restrictions of raiding as we put out new raids.  Dar Narbugud is now being released, so that means that the people who are “done” with the Watcher now have something new to challenge them.  We really like keeping the Watcher relevant so we put in measures to do just that!  The Watcher now becomes more accessible to those who were having some difficulty with the challenge level and it has the added bonus of being a place to get First Age tokens twice a week.  Hopefully this change will mean more people get a shot at the early Moria raids and can work their way towards the more challenging Dar Narbugud.  In the future, as we continue to release more raids and instances, we will do our best to continue to make previous content more accessible.  This way, players never feel like they have a huge ladder to climb just to get to the newest raid or instance.  We will also do our best to provide other alternatives to the next big huge raid for players who do not necessarily enjoy that experience. As always, we hope that you guys enjoy our changes. We’ve put a lot of effort, energy, late hours watching Raid runs, and thought into this and we hope it shows! Have fun and good luck taking the Mistress down!

What evil lurks deep in Her lair?

While it won’t be as long as Orion’s first blog, I too have been waiting for this for some time.  This blog will give me the ability to centralize my comments on major themes that I see within the forums and not be the lurking troll that I usually am.

For a lot of you in the Instances and Raids forum, you know who I am.  For those that don’t, I’m a content designer on LoTRO and I’ve been doing it for several years.  I focus mainly on Raids and Instances, but I’ve dabbled in almost everything.  (Probably too much dabbling if you ask my co-workers!)

Currently, we are polishing the heck out of some instances for Book 8.  We are pretty excited about what we have coming up and I won’t take away from Sapience’s thunder, but we will be revealing more and more information in the weeks ahead as we get closer to Book 8.  

I know there is a lot of unrest right now about hardcore vs. casual, raiders vs. non-raiders, etc.  I just want it to be clear that we try to have something for everybody.  That has been our stance since the beginning and while we have slowly made instances harder during Moria and beyond, that doesn’t mean we ever want to leave anyone in the dust when it comes to difficulty.  We have very deliberate plans going forward to make sure that everyone has a chance to play the content that they want to play.  I know right now there is not much in terms of information about our plans going forward, but we know your concerns and we are burning midnight oil to make sure that we address as many as we humanly can.  (Well… within reason!)

I look forward to blogging as much as I can.  Right now, I’m elbow deep in encounters for some future instances and trying to come up with evil, evil plans for you players… er, I mean, fun!

Talk to you all soon!

-Amlug