The much anticipated Dev. Diary on the Volume 1 revamp has been posted by Orion. We already knew many of the details, but I really appreciate the way all of these diaries (and this one is no exception) walk us through the process in how they attempted something particular. I’m all for the changes and not just because I want my pretty horse 🙂 I also appreciate that they were very concerned about not only the balance but the lore and remind us that all throughout the LOTR books there are cases where characters do things they probably shouldn’t normally be able to do. The general idea behind this is when doing quests that would normally be a full fellowship you will get a scalable buff to your morale, power, regen rates, incoming damage, and outgoing damage all of which scale based on how many others are in your fellowship. So this system allows you full flexibility in not only your initial play through but allows you to repeat these quests in any fashion as well, which was a draw-back to the system put in place for the Lone-lands revamp.
The addition of the “Elf-stones” allows them to tightly control the areas where these massive buffs will be allow during quests that are out in the open. However, maybe my memory is failing me, but I can really only think of one quest that is a fellowship quest out in the open. That quest is the find the rider quest in the Trollshaws, which other then farming trolls, there’s really no reason to go down there.
The other tidbit buried at the bottom of the post was that the Inspired Greatness buff will work during replays of instances via Reflecting Pools. This allows for solo players to obtain Marks of Triumph which previously were limited to only group runs. For those of you who forget (like me) you can use these marks to barter for all sorts of things including legendary runes and relics, but also the various armor sets, various consumables, and crafting components! So, there now is a path for all of us to go and get things like the Helegrod armor set, the Angmar armor set, and the Annunimas set! This is such an awesome move to allow us other ways to get stuff that we’ve out-leveled 🙂 Soon enough my Warden will look like the below picture and I can’t wait!!
