Radiance Gear in LoTRO

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 :-)