I finally got around to trying the new glory system in LoTRO, and I have to say I think it's brilliant. "Glory" refers to a massive buff that you now get when you attempt to solo epic quests meant for a full party. These quests are some of the best content in the game, and a lot of players that aren't in big kinships simply aren't able to get PuGs going for them these days. Turbines' solution is to give players the stats of a raid boss when they try an instance solo. In the first instance I tried with my 65 hunter, she went up to over 20K morale and was hitting for over 1000 damage per shot. My qualm with the system, was that I figured that it would force everyone to either get a full party together or solo all their epic quests. Thus, it would become even harder to find a group if you wanted to, since most players would opt for solo.
What I did not realize is that the glory bonus scales to larger parties. It is now possible to solo, two man, or three man the epic quest chains. The more players you bring, the less of a glory bonus everyone gets. However, the advantage of having another player along more than outweighs the reduction in your glory bonus. I two manned several quests with a member of my KS, and it was a lot of fun. All in all, I think that glory is a great system.
In other news, PvP is still happening in LoTRO (at least on my server) more than a year after Turbine made it almost utterly pointless for freeps to engage in it. Last night was our weekly Kinship night, and the players that showed up were too spread out in levels for us to organize anything. Someone had the bright idea to roll wargs on the moors and quest there. We ended up with a full party of freshly minted wargs, and headed out to see what we could do. There were several quest chains to kill hobbits for their limbs, which was pretty fun in a demented way. However, the big surprise is that there was a full freep raid out there trying to take keeps and a full creep raid harrying them.
Rather than join the main raid, we decided to hang at the edge of the battle and pick off stragglers, as well as use stealth to disrupt their keep boss attempts. Several times we popped out of sleath in the middle of a boss fight and disrupted their healers and crowd control just enough for the boss they were fighting to murder everyone. We also suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a hunter/ burgler pair. We later managed to take them both down, but being two manned the first time we came upon them was pretty embarrassing. Live and learn (hint: take down the hunter first!) It was a lot of fun, and not of the type I normally associate with LoTRO. There is really almost no incentive to PvP in LoTRO these days, I was honestly surprised we were able to find so much action.
Monster play is something I have wanted to try for some time. My problem is not knowing what to do. It does sound like a lot of fun though, makes me almost wish my sub was still active.
ReplyDelete@Jaybdub: back when the PvP gear was as good as anything you could get by raiding, it was the defacto end game for a lot of players. Gear up as well as you can, then head out to the moors and fight creeps.
ReplyDeleteThe gear is pointless now. Crafted gear is a lot better. However, there is still a unique black horse you can earn if you get up to PvP rank 9. I doubt more than ten players on any given server have it.
From the creep perspective, there are a lot of really neat classes to play around with out there. For example, LoTRO is the only MMO I am aware of that lets you play a wolf or a spider.
As far as how to get started as a creep, I typed out a long ass primer and then realized it needed to be it's own post :-)
The glory system sounds like a good approach, glad to see that Turbine seems to do some good things.
ReplyDeleteIf people do something, like PvP, without big carrots hanging in front of them it probably means that the gameplay itself is good and fun.
Which is as it should be.
It's one thing for them to do something like Glory right. But the fact that it's even better than we expected is particularly cool. Have to give Turbine kudos for going above and beyond.
ReplyDelete@Adingworld: I tend to agree that if folks are still doing the PvP just for giggles after all this time, that's a good sign that it's fun. I just can't help but wonder how it would take off if Freeps could earn some of their radiance gear out there.
ReplyDelete@Anjin: I have to say the glory system really was a pleasant surprise. They really outdid themselves this time.