So real-life has been a bit of a drain lately for me and I’ve been very quiet of late both here on my blog as well as in-game. It is a combination of a bunch of different things, but much of it will pass here soon.
So to re-cap on a few things, I did want to comment on some LOTRO items and also some non-LOTRO ones that were of interest too.
My in-game activities have been rather enjoyable, just limited after my fun in Volume 3. I’ve been playing much more on my Minstrel lately and have quite enjoyed not only soloing through content in war-speech but also running the various Mirkwood instances as a healer. I did notice more of my skills being resisted but really didn’t seem to be too big of a problem, but it was good to see that it has in fact been changed as commented on by CStM and confirmed by the devs on the forums as well. On a more positive note, I think I’m getting pretty close to having enough tokens for the radiance sets on him but will probably take a few more runs through SG. My legendary items still need quite a bit of work although I have a couple that are somewhat promising. I do have some of the legacies that help out on the resists, so I may actually play around with leveling them up instead of just leaving them at rank 1. Sadly, outside of the Volume 3 activity I really haven’t been on my Warden too much outside of an SG run or two. She still is 2 pieces from being eligible for BG, so a few more SG runs are in my future. And for those of you that actually do have your BG armor sets, there will be a change made to the set bonus as commented on the forums. Essentially the current bonus is broken (not that a 5% chance shield mastery will debuf your target was all that exciting) and will be changed to a 10% chance to provide a 10% melee damage bonus for the Warden. I’m glad they’re looking at those bonuses and that is a better bonus, but I would’ve loved a 10% threat bonus!
Up on the Warden boards there a pretty detailed discussion on threat. from precise blow and comparing it to damage done. Essentially numerically comparing how much threat was done to counter a certain amount of damage. The numbers worked out to about 1750 damage (or ~100DPS, which is pretty darn low) to counter the threat from a single precise blow, which does seem to indicate that you do need to work and continually apply our ToTs to keep ahead of DPS classes.
So many have already commented on this, but I wanted to add my comments on the Quality Assurance Developer Diary which was a good insight to that part of the process. As I’ve mentioned before, I have been part of a number of the beta tests for Turbine and have worked with a bunch of the QA folks previously so it was good to see them get the attention they deserve. A good part of it was the discussion of the amount of work required to check out the Volume 1 revamp as part of the latest content update and making sure all classes and levels worked well. Couple that with the scaling buff with regards to fellowship size and holy cow does that sound like a testing nightmare! As cool as that jobs sounds, it is hugely unappreciated, and is a TON of work 😉 and this diary gives us some insight into that job.
There was an article over on Massively.com in their continued feature on LOTRO that details the reasons why you should pick LOTRO over other MMOs. Many the reasons listed are exactly the things I like about LOTRO so it was nice to see that appreciation of those items. But for me, I think the Community, Lore, and story are the main draws for me and I’m really excited to see where our story goes and how it will be woven in with the lore.
One last thing I wanted to comment on was a post I saw over on MMORPG.com talking about Star Trek Online and their visibility to the developer team. I found this as a very interesting idea for Cryptic to try and help ease the community as I have heard and read many of the rumblings. So I applaud them for opening this up to the outside world, but I’d be curious to see how they keep this up to date. Cryptic basically breaks out the developer activities as items “In Testing” which are about 2 weeks from Live, “Under Investigation” which covers “bug” items they’re still trying to understand, and finally “In Development” which covers new features more then 3 weeks from live. The MMORPG.com article can be found here which then links to the official STO forums, so we’ll see how this plays out.
Hopefully I should be back on a better schedule here soon, so look forward to more updates.