This week there are two posts about the radiance system in LoTRO I'd like to highlight. This post by Unwise lays out pretty clearly most of the issues I have with it. This counterpoint post by Middle Earth Adventurer points out that Turbine will likely lessen the requirements for content as time goes on, and that casual players will get to see everything eventually. He is likely correct in that, and adding radiance gear that you can get in three man dungeons will make it fairly easy for even casual players to get up to 40 effective radiance. However, that still doesn't address my main gripe with the radiance system. It marginalizes crafted gear and the gear that your can get doing PvP.
In pre-MoM LoTRO, you could gear up for the Rift doing whatever you enjoyed whether it was standing in the woods farming thousands of hides from wargs (i.e., crafting), bashing creeps in the moors, or running instances. I'm very happy to see the variety of instances that radiance gear drops from being increased. It's a great change. But we are still forced to run instances repeatedly to gear up for the final raid in the game. I like to beat an instance once or twice to see it. I don't enjoy farming them for drops.
For me gearing up through crafting and then going through the Rift a couple of times to see it was perfect. I didn't even roll on drops my second time through, I never had any intention of running it enough to get geared. I liked that I could focus my major efforts on what I enjoyed (tailoring), and still get to dabble in the rest of the content. That simply isn't going to be possible with the new 12 man raid we are getting in Book 8.
In others news, as I am starting to sound like a broken record on this issue, I think this will be my last post on it for a while :-)
Interesting what WAR is doing with their high end gear. You need to get special gear (such as Radiance) to do the King PVE raids - or you don't have a chance in killing him.
ReplyDeleteNext patch, instead of dropping the gear required (I forget the name) they will be dropping gear 'tokens'. The tokens don't give you gear, but instead attach to your existing gear so it is powerful enough to do the King PVE.
To put that in LOTRO perspective, instead of Radiance Gear drop Radiance tokens that can be attached to your existing gear. That will negate the Gloom effect - but you still have to make sure the stats on your gear are enough to kill the sucker =)
I support your idea, that would be great. There would be one less angry blogger in the world if we could add radiance tokens to whatever armor we liked.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I'm planning to try WAR again once my new PC arrives.
Thanks for speaking out on the radiance issue. There were a lot of things I didn't like about SoA, but nothing so bad that it made me quit outright.
ReplyDeleteTurb seems to just love to their new 'Lord of the Radiance Online: Token Collectors of Moria' setup though, so I guess I won't be returning anytime soon...