Hytbold Aiding the Eastment quest revamp is nice, but half complete

The Hytbold revamp is nice, doubling the amount of tokens each Aiding the Eastment quest gives 10 tokens instead of only 5. However, trading the tokens in requires you to hit Ally or Kindred with one of four possible factions and you still earn rep with these factions exactly the same as before, which means we have to do the same quests as before to get to those rep levels since there is no Rohan rep item that drops from mobs in each area.

Example: 1 sprocket and 1 widget together make a thingamabob (rather techincal terms, too long to explain here). If you have 6 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can make 5 thingamabobs. If you double the number of sprockets, so that you have 12 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can still only make 5 thingamabobs.

The Aiding the Eastment quest reward boost is nice, but it doesn't really help. Hytbold is enough of a grind that I'm not very likely to finish it before I level past it and it becomes absolutely useless and a pointless grind that I'll just ignore, just like finishing the meta deeds to complete "enough" quests in each section of Moria. Those deeds are likely to remain forever. And that's kind of too bad -- I wish the revamp had taken the full equation into account.

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Originally Posted by Banaticus

The Hytbold revamp is nice, doubling the amount of tokens each Aiding the Eastment quest gives 10 tokens instead of only 5. However, trading the tokens in requires you to hit Ally or Kindred with one of four possible factions and you still earn rep with these factions exactly the same as before, which means we have to do the same quests as before to get to those rep levels since there is no Rohan rep item that drops from mobs in each area.

Example: 1 sprocket and 1 widget together make a thingamabob (rather techincal terms, too long to explain here). If you have 6 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can make 5 thingamabobs. If you double the number of sprockets, so that you have 12 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can still only make 5 thingamabobs.

The Aiding the Eastment quest reward boost is nice, but it doesn't really help. Hytbold is enough of a grind that I'm not very likely to finish it before I level past it and it becomes absolutely useless and a pointless grind that I'll just ignore, just like finishing the meta deeds to complete "enough" quests in each section of Moria. Those deeds are likely to remain forever. And that's kind of too bad -- I wish the revamp had taken the full equation into account.

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I think it depends on your approach and how you level. You can enter Rohan at level 74 if I'm not mistaken. If you complete all the quests for each zone...you should be at, or very close, to ally with all of the Rohan factions by the time you start the Hytbold dailies. I'm not sure how Turbine could have negated the rep requirement for Hytbold unless they made the requirement to be friend and ally vs. ally and kindred?

If you complete every single quest in every zone, you don't even get to Ally on any faction. The only solution is to use reputation boosts from skirmish camp while questing. However, half of your set will become obsolete once you do the first bit of epics in West Rohan (and you have to do that to unlock quests). The change to Hytbold was basically for people who use the stone of tortoise (xp blocker) and stay at 85 for a while.

Hytbold is 100 times easier than it use to be. It is not supposed to be easy or quick. I actually felt a bit let down when I took a recent alt there knowing how much work I had to put in for Thane. Most of my characters wear the sets until early 90s just for the bonuses.

The one thing they could do is add rep to the task boards which should have been there all along.

EDIT
The idea was to get the remaining rep from doing the actual Hytbold quests by the way. There was no need for accelerators.

It's not 100 times easier, it's the same. Sure, you can unlock all the initial bits easily because you have 50 tokens to barter with after your first set of five quests instead of only 25 tokens, but from then on it really doesn't matter how many tokens you have because you won't be able to spend them anywhere -- you'll have to do the same quests that you would have done to get the rep, and then you can spend some of the tokens that you have on the rep vendor that you've unlocked. Right now, I have 168 tokens that I can't do anything with. Going from Ally to Kindred requires 25 quests, which is 250 tokens. If I were to continue trying to cap out my rep with those groups for the full Hytbold (or to get a level 85 set), I can see that I would literally have hundreds of tokens that I couldn't do anything with. I suppose I could buy cosmetic housing items, but I'm not in LOTRO to play Sims and nobody else can really see my house unless they want to travel far off into the boonies.

Hytbold requires the same grind that it did before -- the grind is gated by the other half of the equation this time. :)

Remember: If you have 6 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can make 5 thingamabobs. If you double the number of sprockets, so that you have 12 sprockets and 5 widgets, you can still only make 5 thingamabobs.

I think the rep bonus from the quests should be doubled -- it actually comes through the Aiding the Eastment, so only a single quest would need its reputation reward tweaked to finish the Hytbold conversion. The token increase is nice (and I've actually been saying that to be polite) but ultimately pointless without the other half.

The rep was always a hindrance. In addition you had to unlock so much with tokens that you had to save for gear. It was never simple. Yes you have extra tokens now, but when you do hit rep you can immediately unlock and buy gear. You could not do that before. All tokens went to unlock.

I agree the rep was always a challenge and it should be. Like I said, the task boards should have had rep like every other task board. Seems like they could do that now to lesson the rep requirement. However, to be kindred x4 at 84, doing short Hytbold quests for 4-5 days and ending up with a full set of armour is unreasonable in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by KuriosLOTR

The rep was always a hindrance. In addition you had to unlock so much with tokens that you had to save for gear. It was never simple. Yes you have extra tokens now, but when you do hit rep you can immediately unlock and buy gear. You could not do that before. All tokens went to unlock.

I agree the rep was always a challenge and it should be. Like I said, the task boards should have had rep like every other task board. Seems like they could do that now to lesson the rep requirement. However, to be kindred x4 at 84, doing short Hytbold quests for 4-5 days and ending up with a full set of armour is unreasonable in my opinion.

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Perhaps a solution is a combination of putting rep on task boards as you rightly suggest along with lowering the rep requirements for completing the build quests and accessing armour. If I recall correctly, of the four areas only Entwash Vale got me to ally just by questing (or was it Northcorfts). Perhaps allow the top rep benchmark to be friend for all hytbold quests and armour?

From a certain point of view, the changes received by Hythbold in the last update are nice: they effectively remove all the importance from the Hythbold tokens: you receive a lot of them (twice than before) and you only spend 1 for each rebuilding quest (the 'kindred' quest before needed 10 each, and that was a nightmare...).
This also more or less halves the time needed to complete everything (without using rep accelerators, if I remember correctly from Fredelas guide, you needed about 44 tragic days to complete the full rebuilding. Now you only need to become kindred with every E.Rohan faction and you have enough tokens to finish everything immediately. With 6000 total rep a day you need 20 days (30000 * 4 / 6000) to go from Ally to Kindred plus 2-3 days more in advance to reach Ally, assuming you did all the quest with rep, bringing the total to 22-23 days which, hating grinding in general, I find terrible anyway ;) ).

So why the rep requirements have not been modified? My personal opinion is that this is not going to change soon because of the rep -> TP equation. Ally + Kindred for 4 factions means 140TPs gained and I suppose that Turbine doesn't like much to make this easier to get if they can avoid it... :(

Ally to kindred is 25 quests. 30,000 / 1,200 = 25. You can do 5 quests a day = 5 days. 4 factions = 20 days. Now add on the time necessary to get up to ally. Let's say another two days for each, that's more or less 30 days. You're right, that's less than 44. Still too long in my opinion.

Perhaps if Hytbolt was changed so that the quests could be started at 80 instead of 84 -- although I blew through 80 to 84 in just a few days, so even that potential change to the level of when the Hytbold quest is introduced might not help keep Hytbolt from complete obsolescence.

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Originally Posted by Mennhabar

So why the rep requirements have not been modified? My personal opinion is that this is not going to change soon because of the rep -> TP equation. Ally + Kindred for 4 factions means 140TPs gained and I suppose that Turbine doesn't like much to make this easier to get if they can avoid it... :(

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FYI: You can purchase Reputation Boosters in the Skirmish Camp for Marks. I think is the the 1000 bonus rep increment.

One issue is that the old armor sets are no longer very good. The hyper stat inflation caused by Helms Deep caused L86 common drops to be better than L85 Hybolt Teals

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Originally Posted by bahgweed

FYI: You can purchase Reputation Boosters in the Skirmish Camp for Marks. I think is the the 1000 bonus rep increment.

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Yup, they are really cheap as well. (sssh don't look here store people)

You can, I think, still reset the wrapper quest with MC. So, you can speed things up a bit that way, too; but you'll have to use the Store.

My first go didn't take 44 days, but that was because I could and did play the server reset time game. I also splurged a few MC on resets.

The second go likewise didn't take 44 days either, for the same reasons.

I'll soon have several more alts doing Hytbold. It will take me less than 20 days for them, each.