Hobbits to Isengard - Q/A with Sapience notes on what was said

[Mar-Evayave]

I am both thrilled at the new class and a little disappointed. I was finally starting to feel like I was almost done with learning my classes, as 6/9 of them are at max level and "done". Additionally, with 3 lights, 3 mediums and 3 heavies, as well as (in the most traditional terms) 3 heals, 3 DPS and 3 tanks... well, it seems like adding a new class is gonna ruin that 3some perfection. xD

That aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the run! ^_^

But please, for once and for all, can someone tell me: is it HoarseDev or HorseDev? I've seen it both ways and really can't keep track of it. I was posting about this on my kinship's website and want to be as accurate as possible.

Yep multiples of them https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...0532556&type=1 Grey Company Facebook page for Dwarrowdelf I posted about 80 pics from it

*wave* I wasn't too name-conscious but am I mistaken in assuming you were in raid with me and missed your app.? (Fayah here) I always enjoy meeting people from other servers.

[frickinmuck]

Please note: I am paraphrasing here. Anything said here is coming through my interpretation of what was said, and is subject to being corrected, so don't take all this as the final word.

If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.

Q&A Hobbits to Isengard - Bullroarer

Guests for this run: HoarseDev, Jinjaah, Aaron Campbell aka Rowan, Raina (bringer of pain), a quick MadeOfLions cameo for one question

1. Can you show us the new inventory
   Sapience - Chris Martin, the engineer who worked on the revamp will be joining an inventory specific livestream on Monday to demo it and answer any questions.
2. Will housing changes allow us random placement, or will we still have hooks
   HoarseDev – Right now they’re prototyping how the new system will work, so he can’t say for sure how it will function, but that is something they will be looking into while prototyping.
3. Please pester Sapience to dye his beard pink and green (to fulfil the promise he made during Extra Life)
   Sapience (holds up the dyes, which he just got last night) – He will be doing it soon and will tweet the proof. He may try to do it for the livestream on Monday. When he shaved his beard last time tons of people were horrified and asked him to grow it back, so he’ll see how long the dye lasts before people ask him to wash it out.
   HoarseDev – Says he can keep the dye, just don’t shave again.
4. Is Bullroarer currently under NDA
   No, it is not under NDA, so if you want to post screenshots or anything like that, feel free.
5. Any word on keymapping for trait presets
   HoarseDev – Working on that right now. They had an internal discussion about how they would want it to work – whether they wanted to allow them to function basically as superstances, but right now they are just working on an elegant way to get it working for all players. They had the opportunity to sort of hack it in as a /command type thing, but instead they’re focusing on finding the right place to make it fit.
6. Is Rohan housing a possibility in the near future
   HoarseDev – They’ve considered other places, and it’s on the table but he wouldn’t say it’s in the near term. Right now they’ve got a lot of considerations to make about whether people will be allowed multiple houses, what the process would be in moving from one to the other, and there’s also asset creation. So they’re just trying to get 13 out the door, looking fresh, and handling some more immediate priorities right now. They’re looking at difficulty of the game which obviously is pretty easy right now, so they’re taking the nerf bat out, to fix that up a bit. So they have looked at Rohan housing but he can’t say yes or no right now, and it’s not in the immediate future.
7. What does your wife say about you dyeing your beard
   Sapience – She was glad when the threshold was reached, and is just grateful it’s not another shaving incident. She’s pretty much barred any shaving for any future endeavors.
8. Are First Agers going to be in U13, or 13.1
   HoarseDev – They’re putting them in the BR build on Monday, so they should be ready for U13. They’re looking at dropping them in T3 skirmishes, some of the classic instances, and then potentially as a platinum drop in Big Battles. So there will be several places to get them.
9. What about having multiple characters on one account on the same server have more than one house
   HoarseDev – This is part of the complication with having housing in different regions, will people have to foreclose on their house in one region to move to the other, what would that look like – they’re hoping to come up with a slick solution to handle all that. Some of the changes that were made to the system at the end of last year, even though they didn’t get as much housing stuff done as they’d wanted to, those changes facilitated moving that along. That and having a more modular housing inventory system – those are the things that have worked as interim steps toward getting that off the ground. Toward potentially – no promises – enable other housing down the road.
10. Is there any hope for RK DNF duration to be extended to match the cooldown so that they have the potential to have res up, so long as their target doesn’t die and consume it
    Jinjaah – He thinks that’s fair. They’ve been trying to play with the cooldown so that it’s not something that’s trivial to put on someone and not really have to think about, but they also don’t want people to put it on and then have to wait forever, so he thinks it’s a fair request.
11. Are there any plans to make the 3rd trait slot configuration free, or will it remain a store purchase
    HoarseDev – They’ll play it by ear. It’s not currently on the docket to change, but in a lot of cases what they do when something’s been up there for awhile is they put it on sale or get more lenient with it. So he can’t really speak to that “in fact” but it’s something they’ll consider.
12. Is there a possibility for the champ skill True Heroics will have more of an impact
    Jinjaah – There’s some stuff they can look at to make it feel a little sexier for people. When they had the forum thread for U13 a lot of people made some great suggestions that they wrote down. He thinks they can take a look at those in the future and take a look at what they might do to spruce it up a bit.
13. Any changes or fixes for the Minstrel
    Jinjaah – There aren’t really any specific major changes coming for any classes, but they are trying to sort out some issues under the hood with classes in general and how their primary stats contribute to their secondary stats, how mitigations factor in – stuff they need to clear up before they can nitpick on the individual classes.
    HoarseDev – They are always doing fixes here and there. The devs do read the forums pretty thoroughly, for better or for worse, and they are constantly making fixes. He sees bugs come through, suggestions come through all the time and they assign them, but right now they are definitely looking at the difficulty of the game, the stat contributions, and trying to build challenge in across the board. Now that they have the classes systemically at a place where they are a lot easier to work with, now they want to make sure that the challenge of the game gets to a point where people are happy with it. And from there they can really start digging into very individual skills and start picking them apart.
14. Weavers are reflecting dots and bleeds with Toxic Carapace. Is this a bug or is it working as intended because apparently it’s wreaking havoc with guardians and burgs and wardens
    Jinjaah – It is a reflect so you do have to be careful about it. He doesn’t know what the grace period is with the reflects, maybe there’s a bug in that, but it’s pretty obvious when it goes up so when it does you really just have to back off that target.
15. Have there been any thoughts given to a freep vs creep sparring circle in the Moors, where it’s sparring vs killing, or maybe just an arena for a little 1v1 action
    HoarseDev – They’ve considered it and kicked it around a bit. The Moors is the kind of place where it’s hard to find a good spot for something like that. Part of the fiction Turbine is working with is that there is no sparring going on – it’s a war. They end up with limitations sometimes on what they choose to do based on the fiction and lore of the game, and this is one of those places where that is an issue. It’s been brought up and in terms of fight mechanics it’s a good idea, but in terms of the war that’s raging it doesn’t sit so well with some people. So it floats out there as an idea, but if they were to do it, it would probably be in a different space. But to be honest they haven’t put that much weight behind it.
16. Is it true that F2P players will be able to go into the Moors – can you tell us how it works, when they can go and at what level
    Jinjaah – Visiting your stable master when you see the travel path to the Moors you will see a buff that you can buy for Mithril coins that will last for 6 hours, that enables you to enter the Moors at will. You can stack the buff if you’d like to stay longer, and it will work similar to Big Battles in that it will scale your gear up to an item level that’s on par with your main level. There are also three new vendors at the Freeps base where you can buy gear that level scales a bit differently than regular gear. It will actually maintain its max 95 level item level for 10 levels instead of just one. Those are statted in such a way as to make them comparable to an actual 95 version of their class with that character wearing PvMP armour.
    HoarseDev – It’s important to keep in mind that this starts at level 20 so at level 20 you can go there but the gear is statted in such a way as to really promote you moving forward and getting XP in the Moors (if that’s what you want to do), but it’s not going to be the best gear in the game. Even though it’s statted for PvP so you can hang on and contribute, but the goal isn’t for someone to come in at level 23 and be as powerful as someone who is at cap and has gone through all the rigours of the Moors.
    Jinjaah – He’s been reading the forums and getting tons of feedback, the council forums have been great in giving feedback too on how level scaling is working right now. If anyone has a BR client he really encourages you to get out there in the moors and try it out and give feedback on how you think it’s working.
17. Weavers roots have had their grace period removed, is this working as intended or is it a bug
    Jinjaah – there are some issues with grace periods right now. They did some work on it to try to make them a little bit more exciting for U12 and they tweaked some things they didn’t mean to tweak. He’d like to go back through creep CC in general and adjust it but right now it’s definitely not working as intended. You can also see it with the Defiler, Tenderize is working really weirdly. There’s just a lot of irregularities right now with the CC that they need to get sorted out.
18. Is there a way to access the Entwood from the Fangorn area without completing Vol 3 B 13
    MadeOfLions (via Sapience) – He believes so, it should not be gated by the epic
19. Mention of Flooded Isengard not having a world map associated with it
    HoarsedDev – It’s being worked on
    Sapience – It will appear in a later BR build, they’re aware of it
20. Any plans to expand the horse trait trees, or earn extra points for your steed
    HoarseDev – Part of the reason they brought mounted combat in was because we’re going to Rohan and it’s a very iconic thing – you basically can’t go to Rohan without having mounted combat. As we get to Helm’s Deep it’s very much “time on the wall.” If you think about where the story is going, he’s very hopeful that there will be more opportunities for MC. There are a lot of big fights coming up where when they get into the meat of the conflict there will be a chance to build encounters and spaces with MC in mind. So, yes we will be continuing with mounted combat.
21. Is there any news on the possibility of transfers between US and EU servers
    Sapience – It’s not something that’s going to happen, as there are a number of technical issues that prevent it. So it’s just not in the cards.
22. Are there any planned changes to kinship management
    HoarseDev – He’s a big fan of kinships, and he’s looking at adding some new things to kinships to give people more reasons to work together, more reward for working together in a kin. More value to being in a tight kin. As they work on this there will be more management needed just to get these new systems working, and hopefully along the way they will be able make it easier for kin leaders and officers to do more with their kins.
23. How do you select the players that you group with on these runs
    Sapience – When he logs in, the very first raid group that invites him, he tends to select them and they tell him who to follow and they’re off and running. So there’s not a lot of science to it. It’s a question of being first and being organized. And as far as he’s concerned it’s the most fair way of doing it because it’s the same on every server, it’s not pre-arranged, it’s the luck of the draw.
24. Ancient Master LMs, in order to do debuffing, have to consume the currently fairly useless capstone skill. Is there any hope of making the AOE status of LM debuff become a passive boost once they invest in that specific trait
    HoarseDev – They can talk to the specific designer about that. He thinks it’s a reasonable thing to look into. They’ll consider that. (Writes it on his whiteboard)
25. Mention of people spamming the chat with repeat questions
    Sapience – Asks people to please not do that. If he skips over a question, it’s often because it’s something that they’ve answered many times in the past. If you want to see what has been asked and answered before, go to (this forum thread) and see the transcripts from past runs. Says he saw frickinmuck earlier in the chat so knows she there and probably writing furiously, and will get the answers to this chat posted after the run is over. [Actually, no I was running alongside him in-game on my hunter Jebido hehe. But FYI, I plan on transcribing all these runs, and I do tend to get most answers up later that day or the next day unless it’s an unusually busy weekend for me, in which case it takes a couple days at the most - frickinmuck]
26. Raina cackles and cheers as she manages to wipe most of the raid, along with Hadacar, via her many nefarious monsters. HoarseDev crosses the office to Raina’s desk to give her a high-5
27. Can creeps get LIs to help balance out the apparent overpowerdness of Freeps, and why do creeps have no mail
    Jinjaah – There’s a bunch of reasons why there’s no mail or LIs for creeps, but there has been a problem in the past where creeps have not been properly scaled with each expansion, or with rolling out of each new Third, Second or First Age LI. So one of the things they’ve been doing behind the scenes with PvMP is working on ways to make it more sustainable, so that when they reach points of balance that they’re happy with they can sustain them past level bumps and First Ages coming out and things like that. So will we be getting First Agers or LI, no, but hopefully we will be getting a system that will properly scale once an increase in potency comes to one side.
28. In the last update there was a patch note that said monsters will be more aggressive and use their high powered skills more often. Will you be continuing to make monsters more powerful, or will you work on making the classes less powerful, or a bit of both for U13
    HoarseDev – Monsters need to be more dynamic and keep us on our toes, so they do need powerful skills, that’s part of it, but if they just crank that up there will still be a problem where people are hitting their stat caps really easily. Basically under the hood there are a bunch of big magical formulas and whatever, and right now people are getting too close to stat cap without having to get better gear. So what they want to make sure they do on a release when they ratchet up level cap is to ensure people are facing new monsters that do new, interesting things, and that there’s a really good reason to go out and get better gear. So to widen that band of what you currently have to where you are striving to get to. And they’re really confident they can do that. Between 13 and 13.1 with a little course correction along the way because they never know what’s going to happen until the live players get their hands on it, no matter how much they put it out on Bullroarer. He believes they can get to a sweet spot where things are interesting and challenging again, where people don’t feel like they’re just rolling over the bad guys.
29. How often do you guys roll up a new character and level it up to cap normally, without using any tricks. In short, how often do you create for yourself the new player experience
    Sapience – Points out that he’s rolling out new characters on every server for these Hobbits to Isengard runs, so he feels he’s got the 0 – 10 experience nailed. He knows exactly what that experience is like. But on a personal level, he has 5 accounts and an awful lot of alts. Not all of them are to cap, but a lot of them are mid-level.
    HoarseDev – He doesn’t get a new character to cap very often, but he does go in and play new characters up to level 30 or 40 pretty regularly. Especially because there are so many different new player experiences, and a lot of the changes they make affect that a lot. When they make tweaks to quests and things they go back in and evaluate how that affects the new player experience. But generally speaking he doesn’t roll alts and then blitz them all the way to cap. He kind of has a portfolio of different characters at different levels, several to cap, several just getting into LI, and some lower.
    Jinjaah – Says he’s kind of in the same boat. He has one of each class but he’s mainly playing a Rune-Keeper and a Champ right now off and on, they’re in the mid 40’s range right now. He’s also kind of sporadic in his play, he likes to see all the different content, all the different classes that he talks about in meetings but doesn’t get a direct hand in implementing. Says he’s probably switching to a Guardian soon, and DeviledEgg and HoarseDev have been really pushing him to seriously play a Warden so he’ll probably do that soon as well.
30. Please pass along to the devs, thank you to all of you at Turbine for making such a great game. 3 years playing and it’s still my favourite MMO (from Witchypoo)
    Sapience – Says they probably enjoy making it as much as we enjoy playing it. It’s just a great honor for him to work on this IP.
    HoarseDev – Hopes we enjoy playing it as much as they enjoy making it (laughs). But they really do enjoy making the game, everyone does. There are people on their own time at 3am working to crank things out. It does get tough around a release, they kind of have Sapience as a shield to keep them from having to read the forums too much when it gets really rough, but they do read the complements and they love those, and they do read the criticism and they love that too, but really it’s a passion and sometimes it gets tough but they keep coming in and making new stuff.
31. The writs of health have been a useful skill to Rune-Keepers, will we be seeing this as a main skill in the near future
    Jinjaah – As of right now he likes the writs being split out among the different specializations, but maybe something that is weaker but functions similarly for the general skills may be in the future. But in the U13 thread, a lot of great ideas came out of that on how to bring back some general healing skills so the DPS build can still do heals but focuses more on damage.
32. Is there any chance that we will get war-steed appearances of kindred faction mounts in the future
    HoarseDev – Can’t really speak to that much, it needs to go to the Art crew in terms of what they have cooked up. They do look at places where there is a theme people have enjoyed and they try to carry that over, but he doesn’t really know what’s on the docket for that in the near future.
33. Is there any plan to work on Weaver pets to get them up to par with their level
    Jinjaah – He was actually just looking that at this morning. There have been a couple of suggestion bugs in the background made about those, on things to do with them. He thinks they’re going to get a bit of a boost, at least in their survivability so that they’re not just dead when someone sneezes on them.
34. Since Oath-Breaker pets are no longer gated by traits, can we please get Oath-Breaker armaments recipes for lower level Captains, maybe as world drops or loot
    HoarseDev – Writes it on his whiteboard
35. With the Moors are there any plans to add creep classes to match up with Rune-Keepers or Wardens, maybe Angmarim or Dourhand or something like that
    Jinjaah – Currently there are no plans, but if you step on the forums there are tons of excellent suggestions that he loves reading. But currently, no, there are no plans.
36. In years gone by there were random teal drops from landscape mobs. They were extremely rare and you had to grind for hours to get them. Is there any possibility of something like that returning
    HoarseDev – He is a big fan of extremely rare but awesome drops on landscape. Over the years they’ve moved away from that. There are really two schools of thought on the issue. On the one hand there’s the view of, “Is that lottery pull really really awesome” which he personally believes, and on the other side there’s, “Will everyone want it but not be able to get it.” He tends to lean more towards cool things from as many places as possible, but sticking to rarity. So he’s working on it, but it has to fit in and it has to be comprehensive across this huge game world. He doesn’t want to make it so that people just farm the areas so much that it’s hard for people to complete quests there. But philosophically he’s a big fan of that exact thing.
37. Is there any chance we will get an improved LI system that enables us to truly level one item with us, instead of having to scrap it every 10 levels. Is there any talk happening around that type of approach
    HoarseDev – They’e going to try something else first – something that is not specifically attached to LIs – and see how that flies. It is a big big undertaking to pull the engine block out of the LI system and change it. But he’s always thought philosophically that if you find a legendary item, you should be leveling that pretty much permanently, with finding other things to make it better being the drops you get, rather than having a hockey bag full of items you are grinding. They can’t crack the LI nut in the immediate future, but they are looking at other ways to involve other gear to get things to a point where that may be a possibility. He’d personally love to see a change.
38. Is any thought being given to scaling skirmishes around the chosen level to negate the ability for higher levels to slaughter lower level skirmishes
    HoarseDev – They haven’t really talked about that specifically, no. He hopes that the paltry rewards for killing low level skirmishes are enough to deter that, but they’ve been doing a lot with level scaling, so in terms of the technology they have now, it brings them a lot closer to having something like that on the table. The main work of building the Big Battles was in making it possible for players of any level to be able to get in and play. The flipside of that is being able to cater other content to scaling in a more pleasing manner. But right now they are focused on scaling in the Moors, and getting that as right as they can. When it comes out there will be a lot of feedback and they’ll want to tighten that up a lot before looking at other things.
39. People in chat freaking out about all the crazy high level creatures running around in the Lone Lands
    Sapience – Because BR is the test server. Because it’s not a live server and they do occasionally wipe data, they are a lot more free to do crazy stuff in terms of unleashing mayhem and insanity. So for this run they’ve decided (or rather, Raina has) to unleash raid bosses and other scary stuff onto the landscape to fully squash Sapience at every possible moment.
40. Up through Mirkwood there were shard-droppers and then warbands were touted as the replacement for that. Is there any chance of shard-droppers returning to the game in areas where mounted combat is not allowed, so that we can have tougher on-level mobs running around those regions like before
    HoarseDev – Loves this kind of thing. Loves questing and seeing some big scary thing show up that he can get his kin together to fight for a good drop. We’re at a point in the timeline of the story of the game where bigger threats are moving into areas where they didn’t before, so it makes sense to do stuff like this. So he thinks it’s more than a possibility that this will happen in the future. Right now it’s high on his list. He’s hoping later this year to get more really tough mobs out there that the average person would not be able to solo.
41. Will BR ever be available to non-US players
    Sapience – It’s been available to everyone for a couple of years now, so anyone can go and download and install it. Well, when there is an installer available. Currently there isn’t one ready to download but there will be another one coming soon – probably after a build or two of U13 on Bullroarer. But once it is available you will be able to login and play there, and you can copy characters from any server to Bullroarer. There are some strange situations where if you are on an EU server you may not be able to copy a particular character, but you should be able to copy a character for the most part.
42. With Moors scaling, can you explain why older players get some audacity with the scaling, while newer ones don’t
    Jinjaah – That has to do with some of the concepts under the hood about how gear is distributed at certain levels. They talked about it in the council for awhile about how if they were going to do scaling in the Moors, they would need to provide some sort of audacity bump because they felt that walking them out into the Moors without audacity would just be a killing spree, especially for the low level guys. But feel free to play with it and give feedback, it’s something they can definitely tweak and add more audacity at the levels people think it needs to be added in order to make things fair. This is just the initial implementation for this test, just to see how it goes. The idea is to give them some audacity temporarily to offset the fact that there are some things that don’t scale well with them, they don’t have LIs, etc. That’s sort of to make up for that gap. But if you have a compelling argument to why you want more audacity at a certain level please post in the forums. He reads every post for better or for worse.
43. Sapience – further Bullroarer clarification for those who don’t understand it, Bullroarer is an open test server, any player can sign in and test things out there. It’s not always available, only when updates are being tested. They recently changed the schedule for when it will be available. It will be open from Thursday to Monday when they have stuff to test, otherwise it will be down and will come back up for the next update or patch or whatever they need to test on Bullroarer. You don’t need an invitation. Invitations and NDAs only apply when Bullroarer is being used to test expansion packs. They don’t apply when testing updates and patches.
44. Question about PvMP First Agers
    Jinjaah – They didn’t get them ready in time for U13, they will most likely be in the next patch after U13. If they have the ability to throw them in for 13.1 then they will.
45. Why must we spend so much comms to get gear for Freeps in the Moors. 75, to 85, to 95 gear spending over 100,000 comms seems a little pricey
    Jinjaah – That’s fair, it does get pricey. A lot depends upon the average playtimes and how many comms players are getting. It also varies from server to server so it’s hard to predict. But if you do feel it’s too expensive feel free to leave feedback on Bullroarer and he will take a look at it. They want to make something that people can feel they are working towards but if you pass the level before you can afford to get the gear then that’s not what they want. So test it out while Bullroarer is up and give your feedback.
46. What are the item level numbers on equipment used for. Is it a future development thing
    HoarseDev – The item level gives them a way of differentiating the potency of an item when compared with another item. For example if you are level 85 and can wield an item that is in the low hundreds, there may be many items in that range that you can wield. This gives you another way to compare them to decide which will be better for you. Item level tells you how much juice the devs put into a particular item. It’s not a future development thing so much as just another way of differentiating items. As part of getting difficulty level on track they need a broader variety of items available than simple equip level and rarity could provide.
47. The change to kinships where they no longer disband when membership falls below a certain number, does that mean that anyone can just start up a kinship now and have as many people as they want
    HoarseDev – Pretty much. He talked to the engineer who worked on that, and it seemed like it was just an old rule from the golden age that doesn’t really hold up anymore, and they’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying why do you even do this anymore, and so they just pulled it.
48. Question about whether the exclusive Rohan horse-related pre-order quests might come back
    HoarseDev – He can’t really speak to that
49. Currently item level is not showing on scaled Moors LIs, can we get that looked at
    Jinjaah – That sounds like a bug and he’s written that down to take a look at it.
50. Executive Producer Aaron Campbell aka Rowan joins the chat
51. Are there any plans to add more heals to DPS builds or DPS to heal builds to make Steady Hands more viable
    Jinjaah – That is something they talked about for U13 but some things came up that prevented them from being able to do the work they had wanted to do. But they’ve written up a pretty good revamp of some of the things to give them back some general skills to enable them to be good at both, but really good at the one they are specialized in. There’s definitely things they can do it’s just a matter of finding the time to do them.
52. Is there any chance we will be able to combine LI XP runes
    HoarseDev – Adds it to his whiteboard
53. Is Kate’s surprise now your surprise, and are you willing to give us a hint of what it might be – there are cookies to bribe you if need be
    Rowan – One of his duties is to provide ale to the team, and he just brought some in and put it between HoarseDev and Jinjaah for later. On the surprise, yes, it’s his surprise now, and he’s waiting on Jinjaah and HoarseDev to give him the go-ahead to talk about it because they are the two who will be working on it.
    HoarseDev – Gives the go-ahead to talk about it
    Rowan – They are working on adding a new class, for later in the year.
    Sapience – He’s been following the speculation and the consensus in the forums was that it was a new class, but he wasn’t about to confirm it.
54. Could you expand a bit more on group content and how it’s being looked at moving forward
    Rowan – It’s about focus. Right now focus 1 is on building story content and great new landscape content, expanding on the world. And focus 2 is to ensure they’re sustaining and developing systems they’ve produced, taking a hard look at epic battles and polishing that off, and adding more epic battles to the game, and more group content through that mechanic.
55. Is there any chance of having a creep invasion of Freep maps
    Jinjaah – It’s something that they’ve thought about, but who knows. He likes to think that the players think it’s some giant lever somewhere in the building that is under lock and key and heavy security, and he has to find a way to break through and pull the plug so that creeps just pour out of the Ettenmoors.
    Rowan – He knows where that lever is, and he and HoarseDev have talked about it.
    Jinjaah – Thinks maybe Rowan can pull some strings and distract some people
    HoarseDev – As he’s said a few times in this dev chat, they’re at a point in the story where things are pretty miserable all over Middle Earth, and the enemy is encroaching. He’d love to see it but there would be a lot of hoops to get through to get it to work, but maybe they’ll accidentally flip that switch some weekend and see what happens.
56. Are there any hopes for the kinship system to get a facelift – maybe enable leaders to customize kinship commands each rank has, or maybe another couple of ranks
    Rowan – That’s lower on the priority list, but definitely on the list.
    HoarseDev – They are working on a new item system for the game that is going to be tied into kinships, and some more stuff for kins to do together. A lot of times when they work on one initiative that’s tied to something else, in this case to kins, they get to pull a lot of stuff in with it because they are already in the UI and already messing with things so the hope is that with the changes that they already have slated, they will be able to pull some other things along for the ride.
57. New class – Freep or creep
    Rowan – He has to keep some mysteries. It’s freep, but he’ll leave it at that.
58. What kind of active role do you take in development – what exactly does an Executive Director do
    Rowan – He spends most of his days looking at spreadsheets and lists of features, and talking to lots and lots of people. No one wants him coding. That would be a bad idea.
    Sapience – Is glad, that means someday he can be an Executive Producer, because no one wants him coding either. But he’s not good with spreadsheets either.
59. We understand there will be no focus on new raids or instances – what about the scaling of old instances
    Rowan – It’s a question of approach. Where do they get the most bang for their buck, basically. There are a lot of different kinds of group content that exist in LotRO, they need to find the ones that make the most sense, that give the players the best experience, that the team can do the most efficiently and with the most quality. That’s how that balances out. They’ve used scaling in the past, they’ve used skirmishes obviously, there are so many options.
60. Will hunters ever receive pets, even non-combat ones
    Rowan – He thinks Sapience already answered that one with a Twitter pic he posted the other day.
    Sapience –Says go check out Twitter and his little friend there. He can say the easy answer to that is, yes. There is a longer answer they will probably talk about in future updates, but for U13 there is a little friend for anyone who is fortunate enough to find him and earn him.
    Rowan – There are three versions, too.
61. Endless stream of new class questions in the chat
    Rowan – He will say that he is confident the new class is well within the lore of the trilogy. He did his research and there are multiple mentions and he thinks it’s a good fit.
    Sapience – Remembers that he recently mentioned a conversation with Tolkien Enterprises and he seemed pretty happy afterward.
    Rowan – Confirms that he was indeed really happy with how that conversation went.
62. Question about whether the new pet is on Bullroarer yet
    Sapience – Consults Raina, says they’re not sure. There are a series of quests that need to be completed to get it, and he’s not sure they’re all finished and on Bullroarer for this build. The actual pet is in, but the ability to get it may not yet be. But it will be in for U13.
63. Will we ever be able to bind more than one milestone, or get more swift travel routes to different places
    Sapience – He can answer the first part. You can already buy extra milestone bindings in the LotRO store. You can buy quite a few actually.
    Rowan – Generally the content team works out the routes they want people to take. Because they are proud that this is a game that has a lot of contiguous landscape that people can travel, they tend to hold the cards to their chest in terms of revealing too much too easily. They do go back from time to time, especially when doing revamps, and take a look at the pathing to see if anything needs changing, but for the most part they try not to put too much fast travel out there because it’s a game about seeing the world. But if there are specific spots that are a problem they can take a look at it and review.
64. Will you be adding female Dwarves
    Rowan – Is confused, because they already have female Dwarves.
    Sapience – Yes, right now when you create a Dwarf there is no gender assigned. You are just creating a Dwarf. The reasoning for that is because in the lore, male and female Dwarves are virtually indistinguishable from each other, right down to the beard. Tolkien himself said that even Dwarves have a hard time telling the genders apart. So for those who want to create a Dwarf, just put it in a dress. A lot of people do. It really is up to you what you perceive your Dwarf to be.
65. Sapience thanks Raina for spawning so much mayhem and death for all of us to enjoy

[frickinmuck]

please, for once and for all, can someone tell me: is it HoarseDev or HorseDev? I've seen it both ways and really can't keep track of it. I was posting about this on my kinship's website and want to be as accurate as possible.

*wave* I wasn't too name-conscious but am I mistaken in assuming you were in raid with me and missed your app.? (Fayah here) I always enjoy meeting people from other servers.

It's HoarseDev, and hey Eldalleth - so you were the guard in my group! I was Jebido the hunter who was giving Hadacar his run speed buff. *waves* That was a great group overall.

[Pony-o]

HoarseDev – Monsters need to be more dynamic and keep us on our toes, so they do need powerful skills, that’s part of it, but if they just crank that up there will still be a problem where people are hitting their stat caps really easily. Basically under the hood there are a bunch of big magical formulas and whatever, and right now people are getting too close to stat cap without having to get better gear. So what they want to make sure they do on a release when they ratchet up level cap is to ensure people are facing new monsters that do new, interesting things, and that there’s a really good reason to go out and get better gear. So to widen that band of what you currently have to where you are striving to get to. And they’re really confident they can do that. Between 13 and 13.1 with a little course correction along the way because they never know what’s going to happen until the live players get their hands on it, no matter how much they put it out on Bullroarer. He believes they can get to a sweet spot where things are interesting and challenging again, where people don’t feel like they’re just rolling over the bad guys.

HoarseDev, you deserve a big /hug for this answer!

So far I was getting more and more under the impression that the current lack of challenge in the game since HD launch was more or less working as intended, save for minor details here and there.

Glad there is still hope that T2C will regain its meaning, and we don't have to rename the "Priestess of Flame" to "Priestess of eye-candy puddles you can stand around in for ages while the healer is taking a nap".

[Calta]

Please note: I am paraphrasing here. Anything said here is coming through my interpretation of what was said, and is subject to being corrected, so don't take all this as the final word.
[*]Any changes or fixes for the Minstrel
Jinjaah – There aren’t really any specific major changes coming for any classes, but they are trying to sort out some issues under the hood with classes in general and how their primary stats contribute to their secondary stats, how mitigations factor in – stuff they need to clear up before they can nitpick on the individual classes.
(Calta insert: I'm very very sad at this point)

HoarseDev – They are always doing fixes here and there. The devs do read the forums pretty thoroughly, for better or for worse, and they are constantly making fixes. He sees bugs come through, suggestions come through all the time and they assign them, but right now they are definitely looking at the difficulty of the game, the stat contributions, and trying to build challenge in across the board. Now that they have the classes systemically at a place where they are a lot easier to work with, now they want to make sure that the challenge of the game gets to a point where people are happy with it. And from there they can really start digging into very individual skills and start picking them apart.
(Calta: my emphasis. I start to perk up at the bold bits.)
snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ _______________________[*]In the last update there was a patch note that said monsters will be more aggressive and use their high powered skills more often. Will you be continuing to make monsters more powerful, or will you work on making the classes less powerful, or a bit of both for U13
HoarseDev – Monsters need to be more dynamic and keep us on our toes, so they do need powerful skills, that’s part of it, but if they just crank that up there will still be a problem where people are hitting their stat caps really easily. Basically under the hood there are a bunch of big magical formulas and whatever, and right now people are getting too close to stat cap without having to get better gear. So what they want to make sure they do on a release when they ratchet up level cap is to ensure people are facing new monsters that do new, interesting things, and that there’s a really good reason to go out and get better gear. So to widen that band of what you currently have to where you are striving to get to. And they’re really confident they can do that. Between 13 and 13.1 with a little course correction along the way because they never know what’s going to happen until the live players get their hands on it, no matter how much they put it out on Bullroarer. He believes they can get to a sweet spot where things are interesting and challenging again, where people don’t feel like they’re just rolling over the bad guys.

(Calta: Dynamic monsters! doing new new interesting things. You have been reading the suggestions about balance-Hoarsedev and not just those about nerfing class or upping mob DPS. Thanks! )
snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ _________________________[*]In years gone by there were random teal drops from landscape mobs. They were extremely rare and you had to grind for hours to get them. Is there any possibility of something like that returning
HoarseDev – He is a big fan of extremely rare but awesome drops on landscape. Over the years they’ve moved away from that. There are really two schools of thought on the issue. On the one hand there’s the view of, “Is that lottery pull really really awesome” which he personally believes, and on the other side there’s, “Will everyone want it but not be able to get it.” He tends to lean more towards cool things from as many places as possible, but sticking to rarity. So he’s working on it, but it has to fit in and it has to be comprehensive across this huge game world. He doesn’t want to make it so that people just farm the areas so much that it’s hard for people to complete quests there. But philosophically he’s a big fan of that exact thing.
(Calta: At least he's personally enjoyed this stuff, and is receptive to the idea, and is aware of the previous open instance/landscape quest farms/issues. Happy to wait to avoid the Limlight issues pre-open tapping, and the RoR loot farmfests post open tapping while they sort out the mechanism)
snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ __________________________[*]Is there any chance we will get an improved LI system that enables us to truly level one item with us, instead of having to scrap it every 10 levels. Is there any talk happening around that type of approach
HoarseDev – They’e going to try something else first – something that is not specifically attached to LIs – and see how that flies. It is a big big undertaking to pull the engine block out of the LI system and change it. But he’s always thought philosophically that if you find a legendary item, you should be leveling that pretty much permanently, with finding other things to make it better being the drops you get, rather than having a hockey bag full of items you are grinding. They can’t crack the LI nut in the immediate future, but they are looking at other ways to involve other gear to get things to a point where that may be a possibility. He’d personally love to see a change.
(Calta: Fair enough. I'm still maxing mine. I'll be doing that until Mordor anyway, at my rate. But i do hate destoying my beautiful Mastersmith-crafted antique named relic encrusted swords and my personally illuminated manuscript precious heirloom songbooks.)

snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ___________________________[*]Is any thought being given to scaling skirmishes around the chosen level to negate the ability for higher levels to slaughter lower level skirmishes
HoarseDev – They haven’t really talked about that specifically, no. He hopes that the paltry rewards for killing low level skirmishes are enough to deter that, but they’ve been doing a lot with level scaling, so in terms of the technology they have now, it brings them a lot closer to having something like that on the table. The main work of building the Big Battles was in making it possible for players of any level to be able to get in and play. The flipside of that is being able to cater other content to scaling in a more pleasing manner. But right now they are focused on scaling in the Moors, and getting that as right as they can. When it comes out there will be a lot of feedback and they’ll want to tighten that up a lot before looking at other things.
(Calta: the paltry rewards are sufficient disincentive. Allowing higher players to continue in lower skirms allows kins to teach groups of new players the mechanics. Not all higher players in skirms 'slaughter everything'. And if they do-meh. Their choice. But agree the option of scaliing down the player would be nice-just not likely.
Important bit. Working on player scaling up in Moors. After testing player scaling up in BBs. Ponders next step after that....up for raids?)

snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________
[*]Up through Mirkwood there were shard-droppers and then warbands were touted as the replacement for that. Is there any chance of shard-droppers returning to the game in areas where mounted combat is not allowed, so that we can have tougher on-level mobs running around those regions like before
HoarseDev – Loves this kind of thing. Loves questing and seeing some big scary thing show up that he can get his kin together to fight for a good drop. We’re at a point in the timeline of the story of the game where bigger threats are moving into areas where they didn’t before, so it makes sense to do stuff like this. So he thinks it’s more than a possibility that this will happen in the future. Right now it’s high on his list. He’s hoping later this year to get more really tough mobs out there that the average person would not be able to solo.

(Calta: YAY!!!!!)
snip__________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ _______
[/LIST]

HoarseDev, you deserve a big /hug for this answer!

So far I was getting more and more under the impression that the current lack of challenge in the game since HD launch was more or less working as intended, save for minor details here and there.

Glad there is still hope that T2C will regain its meaning, and we don't have to rename the "Priestess of Flame" to "Priestess of eye-candy puddles you can stand around in for ages while the healer is taking a nap".

Hooray for the HoarseDev! More grounds for hope in here, just in these snips, than in last 6 months of obfuscation.

[Dolamrothdame2]

Thank you, frickinmuck! That's a really coherent summation of a really wild time. I can't believe you were playing too!

[Mar-Evayave]

It's HoarseDev, and hey Eldalleth - so you were the guard in my group! I was Jebido the hunter who was giving Hadacar his run speed buff. *waves* That was a great group overall.

You were in the group too?! *waves*

And thanks for the spelling correction.

[SouthernBelle0927]

Hooray for the HoarseDev! More grounds for hope in here, just in these snips, than in last 6 months of obfuscation.

*waves at Calta*

Sorry I couldn't follow up on my minstrel question--I was trying to work at the same time (huge deadline Monday--EEK!), and my multi-tasking skills were overloaded. The response HoarseDev gave regarding the capstone skill for the other class and the response we got on balancing made me feel better. I get the sneaking suspicion our dev is working on more than two classes, though. Might be one reason we're not getting the love our Minstrels need at the moment.

I will be running in the Meneldor run (with my minstrel, of course!) Friday, and hope to be watching the Anduin run on Wednesday. I have LOTS more questions to ask for us.

[DJ_JD]

*waves at Calta*

Sorry I couldn't follow up on my minstrel question--I was trying to work at the same time (huge deadline Monday--EEK!), and my multi-tasking skills were overloaded. The response HoarseDev gave regarding the capstone skill for the other class and the response we got on balancing made me feel better. I get the sneaking suspicion our dev is working on more than two classes, though. Might be one reason we're not getting the love our Minstrels need at the moment.

I will be running in the Meneldor run (with my minstrel, of course!) Friday, and hope to be watching the Anduin run on Wednesday. I have LOTS more questions to ask for us.

The answers given to the very specific questions were awesome, so I hope you get some good answers about minstrels! I'm looking forward to reading the transcript of that run (:

[SouthernBelle0927]

The answers given to the very specific questions were awesome, so I hope you get some good answers about minstrels! I'm looking forward to reading the transcript of that run (:

I will do my best! *crosses fingers*

[Calta]

*waves at Calta*

Sorry I couldn't follow up on my minstrel question--I was trying to work at the same time (huge deadline Monday--EEK!), and my multi-tasking skills were overloaded. The response HoarseDev gave regarding the capstone skill for the other class and the response we got on balancing made me feel better. I get the sneaking suspicion our dev is working on more than two classes, though. Might be one reason we're not getting the love our Minstrels need at the moment.

I will be running in the Meneldor run (with my minstrel, of course!) Friday, and hope to be watching the Anduin run on Wednesday. I have LOTS more questions to ask for us.

Super southern charm for the win! ./cheer Good luck with run and questions.
Jingaah had a bit to do with the developing the classes where specific questions which were answered. At least 'nitpicking' after the balance review holds some hope for those broken class buff skills being fixed. BTW just noticed CtG is fixed for cappies in new patch test notes -they should get defeat response back in 13.

[Galuhad]

Thanks for the write-up I am really gutted that I missed the run (had family commitments) - looked like it was a good laugh when I watched the video back.

p.s. Sapience, how exactly do the British drink beer?

[Orodbril]

It's HoarseDev, and hey Eldalleth - so you were the guard in my group! I was Jebido the hunter who was giving Hadacar his run speed buff. *waves* That was a great group overall.

20% buff right?

[frickinmuck]

20% buff right?

21! But if I'd gone blue-line I could have buffed even more. Not that it really would have mattered a lot because... LOL

The one thing I wished for was that Raina, if she wasn't going to let us get to Isengard, would have at least brought it to us. Maybe a few gate trolls, a few Sarumans, etc.

[Beaniemooch]

*waves at Calta*

Sorry I couldn't follow up on my minstrel question--I was trying to work at the same time (huge deadline Monday--EEK!), and my multi-tasking skills were overloaded. The response HoarseDev gave regarding the capstone skill for the other class and the response we got on balancing made me feel better. I get the sneaking suspicion our dev is working on more than two classes, though. Might be one reason we're not getting the love our Minstrels need at the moment.

I will be running in the Meneldor run (with my minstrel, of course!) Friday, and hope to be watching the Anduin run on Wednesday. I have LOTS more questions to ask for us.

Thank you for the minstrel question. I'm disappointed there are no real class changes but if there's at least someplace to take the OP minstrel it might make it more palatable. Southern charm goes a long ways. Still discouraged but will wait and see.

[Orodbril]

Hi,

I have a little request for a player who'll participate in the chat of the next live stream and it would be great if someone could ask the following two questions:

The 1st would be if there is any chance to reduce the requirements to start "The Defence of Lorien"-instances/quests. Right now you still have to do 600 preparation quests to start them while this region isn't endcontent any more and less players are doing these quests, so it would take a really long while to start one and for the 5th level of the associated deed you need to do the instance 10 times which would take nearly an eternity to finish them. So it would be great if these requirements could be taken away or at least reduced a lot to something like 50 or 100 or even less.
The 2nd would be that the armour-gear-sets are told to come later (here is the referring post) at a time where some aspects of itemization are straightened away and the other reasons are fulfilled. So the question is if we can expect them with U13.1 or U13.2 etc. or not until U14 or if there is any more specific information how far they are with the armour sets and when we could expect them.

(Sorry when they are written a little bit complicated or not in "normal" English, so kind of weird verbalism. )

Orodbril

[Sapience]

Please note: I am paraphrasing here. Anything said here is coming through my interpretation of what was said, and is subject to being corrected, so don't take all this as the final word.

If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.

Q&A Hobbits to Isengard - Bullroarer

Guests for this run: HoarseDev, Jinjaah, Aaron Campbell aka Rowan, Raina (bringer of pain), a quick MadeOfLions cameo for one question

1. Can you show us the new inventory
   Sapience - Chris Martin, the engineer who worked on the revamp will be joining an inventory specific livestream on Monday to demo it and answer any questions.
2. Will housing changes allow us random placement, or will we still have hooks
   HoarseDev – Right now they’re prototyping how the new system will work, so he can’t say for sure how it will function, but that is something they will be looking into while prototyping.
3. Please pester Sapience to dye his beard pink and green (to fulfil the promise he made during Extra Life)
   Sapience (holds up the dyes, which he just got last night) – He will be doing it soon and will tweet the proof. He may try to do it for the livestream on Monday. When he shaved his beard last time tons of people were horrified and asked him to grow it back, so he’ll see how long the dye lasts before people ask him to wash it out.
   HoarseDev – Says he can keep the dye, just don’t shave again.
4. Is Bullroarer currently under NDA
   No, it is not under NDA, so if you want to post screenshots or anything like that, feel free.
5. Any word on keymapping for trait presets
   HoarseDev – Working on that right now. They had an internal discussion about how they would want it to work – whether they wanted to allow them to function basically as superstances, but right now they are just working on an elegant way to get it working for all players. They had the opportunity to sort of hack it in as a /command type thing, but instead they’re focusing on finding the right place to make it fit.
6. Is Rohan housing a possibility in the near future
   HoarseDev – They’ve considered other places, and it’s on the table but he wouldn’t say it’s in the near term. Right now they’ve got a lot of considerations to make about whether people will be allowed multiple houses, what the process would be in moving from one to the other, and there’s also asset creation. So they’re just trying to get 13 out the door, looking fresh, and handling some more immediate priorities right now. They’re looking at difficulty of the game which obviously is pretty easy right now, so they’re taking the nerf bat out, to fix that up a bit. So they have looked at Rohan housing but he can’t say yes or no right now, and it’s not in the immediate future.
7. What does your wife say about you dyeing your beard
   Sapience – She was glad when the threshold was reached, and is just grateful it’s not another shaving incident. She’s pretty much barred any shaving for any future endeavors.
8. Are First Agers going to be in U13, or 13.1
   HoarseDev – They’re putting them in the BR build on Monday, so they should be ready for U13. They’re looking at dropping them in T3 skirmishes, some of the classic instances, and then potentially as a platinum drop in Big Battles. So there will be several places to get them.
9. What about having multiple characters on one account on the same server have more than one house
   HoarseDev – This is part of the complication with having housing in different regions, will people have to foreclose on their house in one region to move to the other, what would that look like – they’re hoping to come up with a slick solution to handle all that. Some of the changes that were made to the system at the end of last year, even though they didn’t get as much housing stuff done as they’d wanted to, those changes facilitated moving that along. That and having a more modular housing inventory system – those are the things that have worked as interim steps toward getting that off the ground. Toward potentially – no promises – enable other housing down the road.
10. Is there any hope for RK DNF duration to be extended to match the cooldown so that they have the potential to have res up, so long as their target doesn’t die and consume it
    Jinjaah – He thinks that’s fair. They’ve been trying to play with the cooldown so that it’s not something that’s trivial to put on someone and not really have to think about, but they also don’t want people to put it on and then have to wait forever, so he thinks it’s a fair request.
11. Are there any plans to make the 3rd trait slot configuration free, or will it remain a store purchase
    HoarseDev – They’ll play it by ear. It’s not currently on the docket to change, but in a lot of cases what they do when something’s been up there for awhile is they put it on sale or get more lenient with it. So he can’t really speak to that “in fact” but it’s something they’ll consider.
12. Is there a possibility for the champ skill True Heroics will have more of an impact
    Jinjaah – There’s some stuff they can look at to make it feel a little sexier for people. When they had the forum thread for U13 a lot of people made some great suggestions that they wrote down. He thinks they can take a look at those in the future and take a look at what they might do to spruce it up a bit.
13. Any changes or fixes for the Minstrel
    Jinjaah – There aren’t really any specific major changes coming for any classes, but they are trying to sort out some issues under the hood with classes in general and how their primary stats contribute to their secondary stats, how mitigations factor in – stuff they need to clear up before they can nitpick on the individual classes.
    HoarseDev – They are always doing fixes here and there. The devs do read the forums pretty thoroughly, for better or for worse, and they are constantly making fixes. He sees bugs come through, suggestions come through all the time and they assign them, but right now they are definitely looking at the difficulty of the game, the stat contributions, and trying to build challenge in across the board. Now that they have the classes systemically at a place where they are a lot easier to work with, now they want to make sure that the challenge of the game gets to a point where people are happy with it. And from there they can really start digging into very individual skills and start picking them apart.
14. Weavers are reflecting dots and bleeds with Toxic Carapace. Is this a bug or is it working as intended because apparently it’s wreaking havoc with guardians and burgs and wardens
    Jinjaah – It is a reflect so you do have to be careful about it. He doesn’t know what the grace period is with the reflects, maybe there’s a bug in that, but it’s pretty obvious when it goes up so when it does you really just have to back off that target.
15. Have there been any thoughts given to a freep vs creep sparring circle in the Moors, where it’s sparring vs killing, or maybe just an arena for a little 1v1 action
    HoarseDev – They’ve considered it and kicked it around a bit. The Moors is the kind of place where it’s hard to find a good spot for something like that. Part of the fiction Turbine is working with is that there is no sparring going on – it’s a war. They end up with limitations sometimes on what they choose to do based on the fiction and lore of the game, and this is one of those places where that is an issue. It’s been brought up and in terms of fight mechanics it’s a good idea, but in terms of the war that’s raging it doesn’t sit so well with some people. So it floats out there as an idea, but if they were to do it, it would probably be in a different space. But to be honest they haven’t put that much weight behind it.
16. Is it true that F2P players will be able to go into the Moors – can you tell us how it works, when they can go and at what level
    Jinjaah – Visiting your stable master when you see the travel path to the Moors you will see a buff that you can buy for Mithril coins that will last for 6 hours, that enables you to enter the Moors at will. You can stack the buff if you’d like to stay longer, and it will work similar to Big Battles in that it will scale your gear up to an item level that’s on par with your main level. There are also three new vendors at the Freeps base where you can buy gear that level scales a bit differently than regular gear. It will actually maintain its max 95 level item level for 10 levels instead of just one. Those are statted in such a way as to make them comparable to an actual 95 version of their class with that character wearing PvMP armour.
    HoarseDev – It’s important to keep in mind that this starts at level 20 so at level 20 you can go there but the gear is statted in such a way as to really promote you moving forward and getting XP in the Moors (if that’s what you want to do), but it’s not going to be the best gear in the game. Even though it’s statted for PvP so you can hang on and contribute, but the goal isn’t for someone to come in at level 23 and be as powerful as someone who is at cap and has gone through all the rigours of the Moors.
    Jinjaah – He’s been reading the forums and getting tons of feedback, the council forums have been great in giving feedback too on how level scaling is working right now. If anyone has a BR client he really encourages you to get out there in the moors and try it out and give feedback on how you think it’s working.
17. Weavers roots have had their grace period removed, is this working as intended or is it a bug
    Jinjaah – there are some issues with grace periods right now. They did some work on it to try to make them a little bit more exciting for U12 and they tweaked some things they didn’t mean to tweak. He’d like to go back through creep CC in general and adjust it but right now it’s definitely not working as intended. You can also see it with the Defiler, Tenderize is working really weirdly. There’s just a lot of irregularities right now with the CC that they need to get sorted out.
18. Is there a way to access the Entwood from the Fangorn area without completing Vol 3 B 13
    MadeOfLions (via Sapience) – He believes so, it should not be gated by the epic
19. Mention of Flooded Isengard not having a world map associated with it
    HoarsedDev – It’s being worked on
    Sapience – It will appear in a later BR build, they’re aware of it
20. Any plans to expand the horse trait trees, or earn extra points for your steed
    HoarseDev – Part of the reason they brought mounted combat in was because we’re going to Rohan and it’s a very iconic thing – you basically can’t go to Rohan without having mounted combat. As we get to Helm’s Deep it’s very much “time on the wall.” If you think about where the story is going, he’s very hopeful that there will be more opportunities for MC. There are a lot of big fights coming up where when they get into the meat of the conflict there will be a chance to build encounters and spaces with MC in mind. So, yes we will be continuing with mounted combat.
21. Is there any news on the possibility of transfers between US and EU servers
    Sapience – It’s not something that’s going to happen, as there are a number of technical issues that prevent it. So it’s just not in the cards.
22. Are there any planned changes to kinship management
    HoarseDev – He’s a big fan of kinships, and he’s looking at adding some new things to kinships to give people more reasons to work together, more reward for working together in a kin. More value to being in a tight kin. As they work on this there will be more management needed just to get these new systems working, and hopefully along the way they will be able make it easier for kin leaders and officers to do more with their kins.
23. How do you select the players that you group with on these runs
    Sapience – When he logs in, the very first raid group that invites him, he tends to select them and they tell him who to follow and they’re off and running. So there’s not a lot of science to it. It’s a question of being first and being organized. And as far as he’s concerned it’s the most fair way of doing it because it’s the same on every server, it’s not pre-arranged, it’s the luck of the draw.
24. Ancient Master LMs, in order to do debuffing, have to consume the currently fairly useless capstone skill. Is there any hope of making the AOE status of LM debuff become a passive boost once they invest in that specific trait
    HoarseDev – They can talk to the specific designer about that. He thinks it’s a reasonable thing to look into. They’ll consider that. (Writes it on his whiteboard)
25. Mention of people spamming the chat with repeat questions
    Sapience – Asks people to please not do that. If he skips over a question, it’s often because it’s something that they’ve answered many times in the past. If you want to see what has been asked and answered before, go to (this forum thread) and see the transcripts from past runs. Says he saw frickinmuck earlier in the chat so knows she there and probably writing furiously, and will get the answers to this chat posted after the run is over. [Actually, no I was running alongside him in-game on my hunter Jebido hehe. But FYI, I plan on transcribing all these runs, and I do tend to get most answers up later that day or the next day unless it’s an unusually busy weekend for me, in which case it takes a couple days at the most - frickinmuck]
26. Raina cackles and cheers as she manages to wipe most of the raid, along with Hadacar, via her many nefarious monsters. HoarseDev crosses the office to Raina’s desk to give her a high-5
27. Can creeps get LIs to help balance out the apparent overpowerdness of Freeps, and why do creeps have no mail
    Jinjaah – There’s a bunch of reasons why there’s no mail or LIs for creeps, but there has been a problem in the past where creeps have not been properly scaled with each expansion, or with rolling out of each new Third, Second or First Age LI. So one of the things they’ve been doing behind the scenes with PvMP is working on ways to make it more sustainable, so that when they reach points of balance that they’re happy with they can sustain them past level bumps and First Ages coming out and things like that. So will we be getting First Agers or LI, no, but hopefully we will be getting a system that will properly scale once an increase in potency comes to one side.
28. In the last update there was a patch note that said monsters will be more aggressive and use their high powered skills more often. Will you be continuing to make monsters more powerful, or will you work on making the classes less powerful, or a bit of both for U13
    HoarseDev – Monsters need to be more dynamic and keep us on our toes, so they do need powerful skills, that’s part of it, but if they just crank that up there will still be a problem where people are hitting their stat caps really easily. Basically under the hood there are a bunch of big magical formulas and whatever, and right now people are getting too close to stat cap without having to get better gear. So what they want to make sure they do on a release when they ratchet up level cap is to ensure people are facing new monsters that do new, interesting things, and that there’s a really good reason to go out and get better gear. So to widen that band of what you currently have to where you are striving to get to. And they’re really confident they can do that. Between 13 and 13.1 with a little course correction along the way because they never know what’s going to happen until the live players get their hands on it, no matter how much they put it out on Bullroarer. He believes they can get to a sweet spot where things are interesting and challenging again, where people don’t feel like they’re just rolling over the bad guys.
29. How often do you guys roll up a new character and level it up to cap normally, without using any tricks. In short, how often do you create for yourself the new player experience
    Sapience – Points out that he’s rolling out new characters on every server for these Hobbits to Isengard runs, so he feels he’s got the 0 – 10 experience nailed. He knows exactly what that experience is like. But on a personal level, he has 5 accounts and an awful lot of alts. Not all of them are to cap, but a lot of them are mid-level.
    HoarseDev – He doesn’t get a new character to cap very often, but he does go in and play new characters up to level 30 or 40 pretty regularly. Especially because there are so many different new player experiences, and a lot of the changes they make affect that a lot. When they make tweaks to quests and things they go back in and evaluate how that affects the new player experience. But generally speaking he doesn’t roll alts and then blitz them all the way to cap. He kind of has a portfolio of different characters at different levels, several to cap, several just getting into LI, and some lower.
    Jinjaah – Says he’s kind of in the same boat. He has one of each class but he’s mainly playing a Rune-Keeper and a Champ right now off and on, they’re in the mid 40’s range right now. He’s also kind of sporadic in his play, he likes to see all the different content, all the different classes that he talks about in meetings but doesn’t get a direct hand in implementing. Says he’s probably switching to a Guardian soon, and DeviledEgg and HoarseDev have been really pushing him to seriously play a Warden so he’ll probably do that soon as well.
30. Please pass along to the devs, thank you to all of you at Turbine for making such a great game. 3 years playing and it’s still my favourite MMO (from Witchypoo)
    Sapience – Says they probably enjoy making it as much as we enjoy playing it. It’s just a great honor for him to work on this IP.
    HoarseDev – Hopes we enjoy playing it as much as they enjoy making it (laughs). But they really do enjoy making the game, everyone does. There are people on their own time at 3am working to crank things out. It does get tough around a release, they kind of have Sapience as a shield to keep them from having to read the forums too much when it gets really rough, but they do read the complements and they love those, and they do read the criticism and they love that too, but really it’s a passion and sometimes it gets tough but they keep coming in and making new stuff.
31. The writs of health have been a useful skill to Rune-Keepers, will we be seeing this as a main skill in the near future
    Jinjaah – As of right now he likes the writs being split out among the different specializations, but maybe something that is weaker but functions similarly for the general skills may be in the future. But in the U13 thread, a lot of great ideas came out of that on how to bring back some general healing skills so the DPS build can still do heals but focuses more on damage.
32. Is there any chance that we will get war-steed appearances of kindred faction mounts in the future
    HoarseDev – Can’t really speak to that much, it needs to go to the Art crew in terms of what they have cooked up. They do look at places where there is a theme people have enjoyed and they try to carry that over, but he doesn’t really know what’s on the docket for that in the near future.
33. Is there any plan to work on Weaver pets to get them up to par with their level
    Jinjaah – He was actually just looking that at this morning. There have been a couple of suggestion bugs in the background made about those, on things to do with them. He thinks they’re going to get a bit of a boost, at least in their survivability so that they’re not just dead when someone sneezes on them.
34. Since Oath-Breaker pets are no longer gated by traits, can we please get Oath-Breaker armaments recipes for lower level Captains, maybe as world drops or loot
    HoarseDev – Writes it on his whiteboard
35. With the Moors are there any plans to add creep classes to match up with Rune-Keepers or Wardens, maybe Angmarim or Dourhand or something like that
    Jinjaah – Currently there are no plans, but if you step on the forums there are tons of excellent suggestions that he loves reading. But currently, no, there are no plans.
36. In years gone by there were random teal drops from landscape mobs. They were extremely rare and you had to grind for hours to get them. Is there any possibility of something like that returning
    HoarseDev – He is a big fan of extremely rare but awesome drops on landscape. Over the years they’ve moved away from that. There are really two schools of thought on the issue. On the one hand there’s the view of, “Is that lottery pull really really awesome” which he personally believes, and on the other side there’s, “Will everyone want it but not be able to get it.” He tends to lean more towards cool things from as many places as possible, but sticking to rarity. So he’s working on it, but it has to fit in and it has to be comprehensive across this huge game world. He doesn’t want to make it so that people just farm the areas so much that it’s hard for people to complete quests there. But philosophically he’s a big fan of that exact thing.
37. Is there any chance we will get an improved LI system that enables us to truly level one item with us, instead of having to scrap it every 10 levels. Is there any talk happening around that type of approach
    HoarseDev – They’e going to try something else first – something that is not specifically attached to LIs – and see how that flies. It is a big big undertaking to pull the engine block out of the LI system and change it. But he’s always thought philosophically that if you find a legendary item, you should be leveling that pretty much permanently, with finding other things to make it better being the drops you get, rather than having a hockey bag full of items you are grinding. They can’t crack the LI nut in the immediate future, but they are looking at other ways to involve other gear to get things to a point where that may be a possibility. He’d personally love to see a change.
38. Is any thought being given to scaling skirmishes around the chosen level to negate the ability for higher levels to slaughter lower level skirmishes
    HoarseDev – They haven’t really talked about that specifically, no. He hopes that the paltry rewards for killing low level skirmishes are enough to deter that, but they’ve been doing a lot with level scaling, so in terms of the technology they have now, it brings them a lot closer to having something like that on the table. The main work of building the Big Battles was in making it possible for players of any level to be able to get in and play. The flipside of that is being able to cater other content to scaling in a more pleasing manner. But right now they are focused on scaling in the Moors, and getting that as right as they can. When it comes out there will be a lot of feedback and they’ll want to tighten that up a lot before looking at other things.
39. People in chat freaking out about all the crazy high level creatures running around in the Lone Lands
    Sapience – Because BR is the test server. Because it’s not a live server and they do occasionally wipe data, they are a lot more free to do crazy stuff in terms of unleashing mayhem and insanity. So for this run they’ve decided (or rather, Raina has) to unleash raid bosses and other scary stuff onto the landscape to fully squash Sapience at every possible moment.
40. Up through Mirkwood there were shard-droppers and then warbands were touted as the replacement for that. Is there any chance of shard-droppers returning to the game in areas where mounted combat is not allowed, so that we can have tougher on-level mobs running around those regions like before
    HoarseDev – Loves this kind of thing. Loves questing and seeing some big scary thing show up that he can get his kin together to fight for a good drop. We’re at a point in the timeline of the story of the game where bigger threats are moving into areas where they didn’t before, so it makes sense to do stuff like this. So he thinks it’s more than a possibility that this will happen in the future. Right now it’s high on his list. He’s hoping later this year to get more really tough mobs out there that the average person would not be able to solo.
41. Will BR ever be available to non-US players
    Sapience – It’s been available to everyone for a couple of years now, so anyone can go and download and install it. Well, when there is an installer available. Currently there isn’t one ready to download but there will be another one coming soon – probably after a build or two of U13 on Bullroarer. But once it is available you will be able to login and play there, and you can copy characters from any server to Bullroarer. There are some strange situations where if you are on an EU server you may not be able to copy a particular character, but you should be able to copy a character for the most part.
42. With Moors scaling, can you explain why older players get some audacity with the scaling, while newer ones don’t
    Jinjaah – That has to do with some of the concepts under the hood about how gear is distributed at certain levels. They talked about it in the council for awhile about how if they were going to do scaling in the Moors, they would need to provide some sort of audacity bump because they felt that walking them out into the Moors without audacity would just be a killing spree, especially for the low level guys. But feel free to play with it and give feedback, it’s something they can definitely tweak and add more audacity at the levels people think it needs to be added in order to make things fair. This is just the initial implementation for this test, just to see how it goes. The idea is to give them some audacity temporarily to offset the fact that there are some things that don’t scale well with them, they don’t have LIs, etc. That’s sort of to make up for that gap. But if you have a compelling argument to why you want more audacity at a certain level please post in the forums. He reads every post for better or for worse.
43. Sapience – further Bullroarer clarification for those who don’t understand it, Bullroarer is an open test server, any player can sign in and test things out there. It’s not always available, only when updates are being tested. They recently changed the schedule for when it will be available. It will be open from Thursday to Monday when they have stuff to test, otherwise it will be down and will come back up for the next update or patch or whatever they need to test on Bullroarer. You don’t need an invitation. Invitations and NDAs only apply when Bullroarer is being used to test expansion packs. They don’t apply when testing updates and patches.
44. Question about PvMP First Agers
    Jinjaah – They didn’t get them ready in time for U13, they will most likely be in the next patch after U13. If they have the ability to throw them in for 13.1 then they will.
45. Why must we spend so much comms to get gear for Freeps in the Moors. 75, to 85, to 95 gear spending over 100,000 comms seems a little pricey
    Jinjaah – That’s fair, it does get pricey. A lot depends upon the average playtimes and how many comms players are getting. It also varies from server to server so it’s hard to predict. But if you do feel it’s too expensive feel free to leave feedback on Bullroarer and he will take a look at it. They want to make something that people can feel they are working towards but if you pass the level before you can afford to get the gear then that’s not what they want. So test it out while Bullroarer is up and give your feedback.
46. What are the item level numbers on equipment used for. Is it a future development thing
    HoarseDev – The item level gives them a way of differentiating the potency of an item when compared with another item. For example if you are level 85 and can wield an item that is in the low hundreds, there may be many items in that range that you can wield. This gives you another way to compare them to decide which will be better for you. Item level tells you how much juice the devs put into a particular item. It’s not a future development thing so much as just another way of differentiating items. As part of getting difficulty level on track they need a broader variety of items available than simple equip level and rarity could provide.
47. The change to kinships where they no longer disband when membership falls below a certain number, does that mean that anyone can just start up a kinship now and have as many people as they want
    HoarseDev – Pretty much. He talked to the engineer who worked on that, and it seemed like it was just an old rule from the golden age that doesn’t really hold up anymore, and they’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying why do you even do this anymore, and so they just pulled it.
48. Question about whether the exclusive Rohan horse-related pre-order quests might come back
    HoarseDev – He can’t really speak to that
49. Currently item level is not showing on scaled Moors LIs, can we get that looked at
    Jinjaah – That sounds like a bug and he’s written that down to take a look at it.
50. Executive Producer Aaron Campbell aka Rowan joins the chat
51. Are there any plans to add more heals to DPS builds or DPS to heal builds to make Steady Hands more viable
    Jinjaah – That is something they talked about for U13 but some things came up that prevented them from being able to do the work they had wanted to do. But they’ve written up a pretty good revamp of some of the things to give them back some general skills to enable them to be good at both, but really good at the one they are specialized in. There’s definitely things they can do it’s just a matter of finding the time to do them.
52. Is there any chance we will be able to combine LI XP runes
    HoarseDev – Adds it to his whiteboard
53. Is Kate’s surprise now your surprise, and are you willing to give us a hint of what it might be – there are cookies to bribe you if need be
    Rowan – One of his duties is to provide ale to the team, and he just brought some in and put it between HoarseDev and Jinjaah for later. On the surprise, yes, it’s his surprise now, and he’s waiting on Jinjaah and HoarseDev to give him the go-ahead to talk about it because they are the two who will be working on it.
    HoarseDev – Gives the go-ahead to talk about it
    Rowan – They are working on adding a new class, for later in the year.
    Sapience – He’s been following the speculation and the consensus in the forums was that it was a new class, but he wasn’t about to confirm it.
54. Could you expand a bit more on group content and how it’s being looked at moving forward
    Rowan – It’s about focus. Right now focus 1 is on building story content and great new landscape content, expanding on the world. And focus 2 is to ensure they’re sustaining and developing systems they’ve produced, taking a hard look at epic battles and polishing that off, and adding more epic battles to the game, and more group content through that mechanic.
55. Is there any chance of having a creep invasion of Freep maps
    Jinjaah – It’s something that they’ve thought about, but who knows. He likes to think that the players think it’s some giant lever somewhere in the building that is under lock and key and heavy security, and he has to find a way to break through and pull the plug so that creeps just pour out of the Ettenmoors.
    Rowan – He knows where that lever is, and he and HoarseDev have talked about it.
    Jinjaah – Thinks maybe Rowan can pull some strings and distract some people
    HoarseDev – As he’s said a few times in this dev chat, they’re at a point in the story where things are pretty miserable all over Middle Earth, and the enemy is encroaching. He’d love to see it but there would be a lot of hoops to get through to get it to work, but maybe they’ll accidentally flip that switch some weekend and see what happens.
56. Are there any hopes for the kinship system to get a facelift – maybe enable leaders to customize kinship commands each rank has, or maybe another couple of ranks
    Rowan – That’s lower on the priority list, but definitely on the list.
    HoarseDev – They are working on a new item system for the game that is going to be tied into kinships, and some more stuff for kins to do together. A lot of times when they work on one initiative that’s tied to something else, in this case to kins, they get to pull a lot of stuff in with it because they are already in the UI and already messing with things so the hope is that with the changes that they already have slated, they will be able to pull some other things along for the ride.
57. New class – Freep or creep
    Rowan – He has to keep some mysteries. It’s freep, but he’ll leave it at that.
58. What kind of active role do you take in development – what exactly does an Executive Director do
    Rowan – He spends most of his days looking at spreadsheets and lists of features, and talking to lots and lots of people. No one wants him coding. That would be a bad idea.
    Sapience – Is glad, that means someday he can be an Executive Producer, because no one wants him coding either. But he’s not good with spreadsheets either.
59. We understand there will be no focus on new raids or instances – what about the scaling of old instances
    Rowan – It’s a question of approach. Where do they get the most bang for their buck, basically. There are a lot of different kinds of group content that exist in LotRO, they need to find the ones that make the most sense, that give the players the best experience, that the team can do the most efficiently and with the most quality. That’s how that balances out. They’ve used scaling in the past, they’ve used skirmishes obviously, there are so many options.
60. Will hunters ever receive pets, even non-combat ones
    Rowan – He thinks Sapience already answered that one with a Twitter pic he posted the other day.
    Sapience –Says go check out Twitter and his little friend there. He can say the easy answer to that is, yes. There is a longer answer they will probably talk about in future updates, but for U13 there is a little friend for anyone who is fortunate enough to find him and earn him.
    Rowan – There are three versions, too.
61. Endless stream of new class questions in the chat
    Rowan – He will say that he is confident the new class is well within the lore of the trilogy. He did his research and there are multiple mentions and he thinks it’s a good fit.
    Sapience – Remembers that he recently mentioned a conversation with Tolkien Enterprises and he seemed pretty happy afterward.
    Rowan – Confirms that he was indeed really happy with how that conversation went.
62. Question about whether the new pet is on Bullroarer yet
    Sapience – Consults Raina, says they’re not sure. There are a series of quests that need to be completed to get it, and he’s not sure they’re all finished and on Bullroarer for this build. The actual pet is in, but the ability to get it may not yet be. But it will be in for U13.
63. Will we ever be able to bind more than one milestone, or get more swift travel routes to different places
    Sapience – He can answer the first part. You can already buy extra milestone bindings in the LotRO store. You can buy quite a few actually.
    Rowan – Generally the content team works out the routes they want people to take. Because they are proud that this is a game that has a lot of contiguous landscape that people can travel, they tend to hold the cards to their chest in terms of revealing too much too easily. They do go back from time to time, especially when doing revamps, and take a look at the pathing to see if anything needs changing, but for the most part they try not to put too much fast travel out there because it’s a game about seeing the world. But if there are specific spots that are a problem they can take a look at it and review.
64. Will you be adding female Dwarves
    Rowan – Is confused, because they already have female Dwarves.
    Sapience – Yes, right now when you create a Dwarf there is no gender assigned. You are just creating a Dwarf. The reasoning for that is because in the lore, male and female Dwarves are virtually indistinguishable from each other, right down to the beard. Tolkien himself said that even Dwarves have a hard time telling the genders apart. So for those who want to create a Dwarf, just put it in a dress. A lot of people do. It really is up to you what you perceive your Dwarf to be.
65. Sapience thanks Raina for spawning so much mayhem and death for all of us to enjoy

great job!

Also a small heads up, we're going live at 3Pm today for an indepth look at the new Inventory/Bag system coming with Update 13.

[Dernudan]

Sapience, could you also post the video on your website for those who can't watch the live stream.

[PKCrichton]

great job!

Also a small heads up, we're going live at 3Pm today for an indepth look at the new Inventory/Bag system coming with Update 13.

Another informative, helpful and great back and forth on the issues livestream.

For those who missed it here is a link.
http://www.twitch.tv/lotrostream/b/511964559

[Sapience]

Sapience, could you also post the video on your website for those who can't watch the live stream.

We're looking into moving the really good, informative ones, like Friday and Today's to our YouTube channel.

[mynamewastakenvandel]

Sapience

I just watched the video about the new inventory. What is the button to the left of the configuration button? Chris only mentioned the configuration, lock button and search tool.

Thanks

[chrisli]

Sapience

I just watched the video about the new inventory. What is the button to the left of the configuration button? Chris only mentioned the configuration, lock button and search tool.

Thanks

Pretty sure that was the button to buy more slots.

[Schinderhannes]

Sapience, could you also post the video on your website for those who can't watch the live stream.

From Twitch past broadcasts:

Take The Hobbits to Isengard &
Bullroarer Event and Discussion with the LOTRO Dev Team about Update 13

New Inventory/Bag Discussion

I think you can watch these videos without having an twitch account.

There were a lot of great information given, too bad I missed the live stream. I always have some questions about Lotro...

[Eldalleth]

It's HoarseDev, and hey Eldalleth - so you were the guard in my group! I was Jebido the hunter who was giving Hadacar his run speed buff. *waves* That was a great group overall.

please, for once and for all, can someone tell me: is it HoarseDev or HorseDev? I've seen it both ways and really can't keep track of it. I was posting about this on my kinship's website and want to be as accurate as possible.

*wave* I wasn't too name-conscious but am I mistaken in assuming you were in raid with me and missed your app.? (Fayah here) I always enjoy meeting people from other servers.

I suck at quoting multi quotes lol so copying and pasting will have to do Yep I was the guard in group 4 that was right on Hadacar's rear most of the time, unless I was getting bounced a ways away courtesy of something evil Raina tossed at us lol. Can honestly say that run definitely tested my shield wall never have needed the legacy to extend it those extra few meters on live but sure could have used it then lol. *gets tossed by Nurzum, runs quickly back to Hadacar who is moving again, tries to put shield wall back on, has to wait for them to stop moving to get it back on. Just gets it back on gets thrown again....Rinse and repeat* I was usually the female voice yelling oh #### Balrog ahead, and another and another Nurzum ahead nope make that 4 of them...Lots of fun though made my afternoon.

[q945]

The change to kinships where they no longer disband when membership falls below a certain number, does that mean that anyone can just start up a kinship now and have as many people as they want
HoarseDev – Pretty much. He talked to the engineer who worked on that, and it seemed like it was just an old rule from the golden age that doesn’t really hold up anymore, and they’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying why do you even do this anymore, and so they just pulled it.

Wow! Old rule from the golden age huh? Well you'd better add a whole lot more kin houses to the housing areas because I forsee a massive shortage come U13! This rule is probably a lot less relevant in the post f2p era where anyone can create alt accounts to create a dummy kinship, but there was definitely a good reason for that rule originally...