Bullroarer Update 32 - Beta #7 - CLOSED

[laughatdo0m]

XD Possibly most of us just slotting the Slade Wrought Vitality essences instead.

Easiest solution to that would have been removing old vitality essences as well.

These new essences are only half the stat scaling rate of old essences; 140 Teals (Lively Delvers) have 2338 vitality while 130 Teals (Slade-Wrought) have 1837. So its not like the new ones are all that valuable anyway. Still its interesting to see developers walk back on a conscious design decision without making a comment on it.

[Snobs]

[*]Legendary Item Rewards
- Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.

"much too easy" btw ...

It requires multiple hundreds (if not thousands) of Ivar T2 CM runs per character to get full golden traceries. They already wanted to remove Sari Surma T2 as a farming method which already wasn't that great because you couldn't trade the traceries but now Ivar too??

There is no alternative method of reasonably obtaining golden traceries. Ivar T2 CM WAS the method to even get some of them. While Ivar T2 CM is an easy fight, it definitly isn't free to obtain full golden traceries because it is completely RNG and a huge grind.

There is no reason to simply remove that method when there is no (at least) equally good method of obtaining golden traceries.

[Frisco]

• Legendary Item Rewards
  - Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.
  - Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap.
• Legendary items may now reach item level 475.

So if I'm understanding this right: no more gold traceries in SS or OD. No more teal or gold enhancement runes from ANYWHERE until our LIs progress past 480?

And the reasoning is that "they're taking up inventory space"? Come on. You know there's not a single player complaining about the ability to save up teal and gold enhancement runes. If people are that upset, they can use them --there's nothing forcing us to save them until we hit 480/490. Why fabricate nonsense reasons?

We'll eventually need 207 gold enhancement runes to max even a single pair of LIs, and now we can't earn even a measly one per week from T5 HoR or a few from higher tier raiding?

If it turns out that we'll only be getting gold runes from T5 HoR and from high tiers of the raid, that will be like 4-7 gold runes per week we can obtain. So around 8 months to a year to max our LIs? Why do you guys only tell us the bad news? Why not also give us some hope by explaining where we'll be getting new LI currency that has thus far been randomly and haphazardly added to the game?

[Snobs]

So if I'm understanding this right: no more gold traceries in SS or OD. No more teal or gold enhancement runes from ANYWHERE until our LIs progress past 480?

And the reasoning is that "they're taking up inventory space"? Come on. You know there's not a single player complaining about the ability to save up teal and gold enhancement runes. If people are that upset, they can use them --there's nothing forcing us to save them until we hit 480/490. Why fabricate nonsense reasons?

We'll eventually need 207 gold enhancement runes to max even a single pair of LIs, and now we can't earn even a measly one per week from T5 HoR or a few from higher tier raiding? We already needed more avenues to earn more LI currency for the ridiculous grind, and now even the few ways we already have are being removed?

If it turns out that we'll only be getting gold runes from T5 HoR and from high tiers of the raid, that will be like 4-7 gold runes per week we can obtain. So around 8 months to a year to max our LIs? Why do you guys only tell us the bad news? Why not also give us some hope by explaining where we'll be getting new LI currency that has thus far been randomly and haphazardly added to the game?

These changes are outrageously bad.

[Joedangod]

• Legendary Item Rewards
  - Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.
  - Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap.

Why though?

The new LI system is a pretty massive grind that is overwhelmed by obnoxiously bad RNG and incredibly limited content variety. Gold traceries from current-cap instances are pretty much a no-go due to loot locks preventing people from actually running content, even if you do get a tracery drop there it'll be a random tracery from a list that's around 90 items long so...not a feasible option. I can certainly agree that the current drop system in scaling instances is awful and should be changed but it's not "much too easy" to earn the stuff, it's obnoxiously difficult to obtain the stuff.

The LI reward track isn't even a valid way to earn traceries. Due to the account-bound nature and complete lack of rewards it'll probably take a year+ to actually get one character with 2 maxed LI's. This is an exceptionally long grind and it's not even that rewarding. Think people would honestly prefer you stopped tweaking the LI system at this point because each patch makes it worse.

Stop shutting down the only tolerable methods for earning gold traceries and instead start opening up new avenues. Let people get gear without requiring them to treat LOTRO as a full time job.

[Harvain]

Well, not sure when SSG are going to have time for it but before or with the Level 150 Content Era LOTRO will require a Stat Squish and seeing Itemization Overhauled.

It's time to start planning to tackle the beast, tear down Stats to their roots, get a Long-Term Gameplan and better focus for how Classes and Itemization is dealt with throughout the whole Game.

Don't waste Time, Manpower and Resources making Items that have random Stats picked and thrown together.

Make every Item & Stat count for something and have a purpose from Landscape Drops, Quest Items, Crafted Items, Vendor Items, Instance/Raid Rewards and so on with multiple Options that ensures Classes have a way to get what they need.

[BotLike]

Jesus , the vitality essences comeback and the enchancement rune change are absolutely horrible.

Don't bring these 2 into live , it's a big mistake.

1 step forward , 2 steps backward. It's sad.

[Brolad]

Players complained about the old LI system being too much of a grind.
Now we have a new LI system that is much grindier than the old one.

Of course I'm not defending the old LI system in any way, just saying that the grind was the most commonly shared reason for complaints about it. The only reasons why the new LI system was welcome by a lot of players are:
- a lot of people completely skipped the new system level 140 grind because they had full teal traceries from appraising old LIs; these people will gradually keep discovering how bad the grind is though
- the DPS on new LIs is higher than on old LIs so new LI weapons are "better" than old ones in that aspect
- LI DPS stat is unlocked without the grind (simply removing the need for anfalas star-lit crystals would have achieved this)
- tracery percentage bonuses are sustainable because their "cap" won't increase with every major update (which was really necessary, this is the best part of the new system)

None of these outbalance the horrible RNG grind system attached to acquiring traceries. People want to log in to have fun, not to work.

[Laurelinarien]

Is there any chance you can implement keymapping options for the Reward Track and the Allegiance panel? Sure, we can put them in the toolbar but I like having keyboard shortcuts. Please, please, allow those.

I've nothing positive to say about the LI system & Reward track, both features embody decisions I dislike. Not even the UX/UI agrees with me. But oh well, it just makes people like me less involved in group content than before.

Erebor is growing on me, despite the chosen green... the Angle is looking great, my highlight is Faeron's quests. Any plans to add missions to that area like in Wildwood or nah?

Also, the Sunstone shard crafting recipe is yielding 1 shard a week. Didn't I read the original plan was to give us 2? Not like they are super useful. Max craftable essence is Flickering :/ and gear is ok-ish for t1 / landscape.

[TobiasEstForte]

while 130 Teals (Slade-Wrought) have 1837.

Pepper your angus.

Thanks for the featured instance update. You'd get a lot less grievance coming your way if you added a shattered or cracked tracery to the reward. Without that, when u32 comes out I hope you've prepared for some departures.

[theultimatekyle]

Is there an explanation to this one? It seemed like the design goal for this level cap was to remove vitality essences from the pool entirely; what made you change your mind?

I obviously can't say for certain, but looking at the gear stats we have now, it looks like they made the decision to remove vitality essences from the level cap *after* they had already designed the gear, and have now decided that they'd rather just add vit back to the cap instead of properly balancing all the new gear's stats.

[squirle]

The Featured Instance (Cap) quests will now require tier 2 completion of the instance. Sure i get it. You want people to not run the easy option. So surely we'll get more rewards? Nope 1 rare enhancement rune box. The same loot as a 132 quest.

The Featured Challenge quests have been removed. Will the rewards/pets/cosmetic for the old feature coins be moved?

The Delver's Essence boxes now allow selection of a vitality essence. Why?


Legendary Item Rewards
- Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. I get that you dont want gold traceries from 6-mans. Perhaps teals from 3-mans. Yet both school level 132 and 140. And Sword halls 132 and 140 now awards 1 yellow rune from their last boss.

Non-scaling instances remain unchanged. Do these actually give any LI rewards?

- Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap. What instance that is so often run and fast gives teal/gold runes then? Nothing that is known to me or anyone i asked. And is that really a problem? Weeklies still out teal runes.

In general, what is your gameplan? You really seem to say 1 thing and do other things.

Do you want us to play the latest content without grinding? Yet the largest source of is 1 set of 2 landscape instances. (forge/loft) To a point that it's far better to run as many of these on as much characters daily then anything else.
So you decide to (after 2,5 years) to update featured instances. To a point where we get 1/5 the reward 1 of the landscape instances give us. You require us to run them at the maxiumum level and tier to give us again the same 1/5th reward while nerfing the normal chests.. Only to have the tier 1 -8 levels award the exact same. Making it quicker, easier, better, more productive to run this as many times on as many alts as possible daily.

[HolyDuckTape]

[/LIST]
Classes:

• Guardian - Flash of Light now scales with weapon. Damage will now scale up much more effectively into the higher levels.
• Guardian - Flash of Light will now ONLY proc off of your active Take to Heart target. No more exponential AoEs. :P
  

So when is this finally going to be reverted? Literally no guardian asked for this, it's just yet another nerf to an already dead line. All you are doing with this change is nerfing the landscaping of guards bruh. FoL dmg has also remained basically the same at cap level aka extremely horrible. Fix yellow guards, you can start by reverting these horrible changes

[HolyDuckTape]

Players complained about the old LI system being too much of a grind.
Now we have a new LI system that is much grindier than the old one.

Of course I'm not defending the old LI system in any way, just saying that the grind was the most commonly shared reason for complaints about it. The only reasons why the new LI system was welcome by a lot of players are:
- a lot of people completely skipped the new system level 140 grind because they had full teal traceries from appraising old LIs; these people will gradually keep discovering how bad the grind is though
- the DPS on new LIs is higher than on old LIs so new LI weapons are "better" than old ones in that aspect
- LI DPS stat is unlocked without the grind (simply removing the need for anfalas star-lit crystals would have achieved this)
- tracery percentage bonuses are sustainable because their "cap" won't increase with every major update (which was really necessary, this is the best part of the new system)

None of these outbalance the horrible RNG grind system attached to acquiring traceries. People want to log in to have fun, not to work.

Huge +1 This new LI grind is very sneaky and deceptive, it's literally so much worse than before.

[*]Legendary Item Rewards
- Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.
- Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap.

This is literally the biggest meme i have ever seen, It is literally an insult to think we will fall for such a bad excuse. That's really the worst excuse i have ever seen in my life (not exaggerating).

Give us back our golden enhancement runes and golden traceries from scalable instances. Revert this nonsense grind.

[ivan582]

The reward track have a lot of negative feedbacks now. In fact, it is completely useless and make people to grind more and more. Maybe It is better for developers to abandon the idea of LI reward and focus on creating a user-friendly interface for the new LI system.

[wispsong]

Players complained about the old LI system being too much of a grind.
Now we have a new LI system that is much grindier than the old one.

Of course I'm not defending the old LI system in any way, just saying that the grind was the most commonly shared reason for complaints about it. The only reasons why the new LI system was welcome by a lot of players are:
- a lot of people completely skipped the new system level 140 grind because they had full teal traceries from appraising old LIs; these people will gradually keep discovering how bad the grind is though
- the DPS on new LIs is higher than on old LIs so new LI weapons are "better" than old ones in that aspect
- LI DPS stat is unlocked without the grind (simply removing the need for anfalas star-lit crystals would have achieved this)
- tracery percentage bonuses are sustainable because their "cap" won't increase with every major update (which was really necessary, this is the best part of the new system)

None of these outbalance the horrible RNG grind system attached to acquiring traceries. People want to log in to have fun, not to work.

Exactly this. I have given up on end game a long time ago because it is no fun at all since the grind has been increased tremendously. Deeds are the next on my chopping list. They are no fun to begin with but requiring to wait for hours on a respawn of a rare ... boooring. And treasure caches still are not numbered.

I just stop playing new content if LI dps sticks and quest rewards make it to tedious to go on.

[Fantomex]

• Legendary Item Rewards
  - Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.
  - Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap.

Awful changes. Same issue as proposed ember/mote/figment change. If you don't want us using a certain method for upgrading LIs, you have to give us a newer one first. Without OD the only recurring source of gold traceries is 1 Halls of Rest t4 per week. And it's random from of huge pool of useless traceries. Awful experience. Situation is easily addressed by one of the following:

(a) replace the random gold tracery from HoR with a gold barter token
(b) add a 50% chance of getting a gold barter token when disenchanting gold traceries
(c) add gold traceries to t4+ 3-man chests as well
(d) change the number of OD chest locks from the absurd 10/day to something like 10/week


Enhancement rune inventory issue is a complete fabrication. Veterans are saving level 131 teal and gold enhancement runes for future use, but they take up 1 slot each because they stack just like we want them to. They are absolutely usable now if someone wishes to use them.

If you're just misinterpreting real player feedback, let me clarify that lower level enhancement runes are the ones that we have no use for (massive stacks from the pre-Gundabad appraisals) and feel bad about just trashing.

If you're just trying to prevent us from anticipating and preparing for future content (which aligns with the intentions of the scrapped embers change), then reduce the grind so we don't feel the need to. I know this is a tall order that requires a significant, coordinated effort, but imagine how we feel as players having to spend half our game time checking beta forums so some ill-conceived changes don't get rammed through without pushback. This isn't fun anymore.

Surely there must be a way to solicit player feedback through some means other than a patch note that feels like a hammer hanging over our collective heads that will drop if we don't scream loud enough.

[Harvain]

The reward track have a lot of negative feedbacks now. In fact, it is completely useless and make people to grind more and more. Maybe It is better for developers to abandon the idea of LI reward and focus on creating a user-friendly interface for the new LI system.

SSG won't be abandoning their Reward Track and first attempt at a Battle Pass but they definitely should not let it go Live with Update 32.

We've not had said Reward Track since the New Legendary Item System went Live. It's not going to kill LOTRO to see the Reward Track take 3 Months, 6 Months or longer to be Delayed further and being a much better Idea, Concept & UI looking far better.

Otherwise it will hurt LOTRO in the Short Term going Live in a Rushed, Unready from just a First Impression & Visual Perspective and Lacking Features if it's with Update 32.

[Vilan]

- Older scaling instances made it much too easy to farm legendary rarity LI items. As a result scaling instances have had their top end LI drops reduced to Incomparable rarity. Non-scaling instances remain unchanged.
- Players are ending up with lots of inc. or leg. rarity enhancement runes that they have little current use for taking up inventory space. At cap level, rune rewards are now limited to the highest rarity required by a maximum level legendary item. This has no effect on any drops below cap.

???

I can understand limiting the rewards from scaling instances. I think raids should be allowed to drop gold items, but that would probably bring the return of Thorog farms, so I can see just quietly throwing the whole thing in the dumpster.

But the second part... man. I don't know who these people are that are overflowing with teal and gold runes, but whoever they are, maybe they can just, you know, vendor them? We don't need you to "save" us. This sounds like either a big misunderstanding or an attempt to make an unpopular change with a fake excuse and something resembling a straight face.

[Ethirielll]

Vit essences are bad

Stop making this game into a job, thx.

[Joedangod]

It's not going to kill LOTRO to see the Reward Track take 3 Months, 6 Months or longer to be Delayed further and being a much better Idea, Concept & UI looking far better.

They could delay it forever; it's not going to salvage the mess that is the LI system.

[Awelina]

So when is this finally going to be reverted? Literally no guardian asked for this, it's just yet another nerf to an already dead line. All you are doing with this change is nerfing the landscaping of guards bruh. FoL dmg has also remained basically the same at cap level aka extremely horrible. Fix yellow guards, you can start by reverting these horrible changes

Couldnt agree more on this. Revert please. (+make it viable in other ways).

[gildhur]

People want to log in to have fun, not to work.

You could just, you know, do that. That's what I do. I have characters at all level ranges, I login and play them, do some quests, run some instances, join a PUG or three, upgrade my LIs a little, and log off. The "grind" for all-gold maxed LIs is entirely optional. Just opt-out.

[theultimatekyle]

Just tried the 'updated' version of the reward track on beta. For 269,106,000 LIExp (from rank 0 to 100 in the reward track) I was able to get:

4000 Embers
4000 Figments
9900 Ancient script (this is including me breaking down rare and incomparable traceries)
35 of the uncommon (yellow) upgrade runes
156 of the rare (purple) upgrade runes
1 random gold tracery for my class
6 Shattered traceries to trade for incomparable (teal) traceries in Rivendell
3 Cracked traceries to trade for legendary (gold) traceries in Rivendell

Y'all have to be kidding right? This is awful. You're stripping out the majority of ways we can acquire gold traceries (even if they were RNG) and all you're giving us back is 3 tokens per reward track season to share on all of our toons? You can't seriously be this detached from the player base and game.

[Gamlieldar]

So if I'm understanding this right: no more gold traceries in SS or OD. No more teal or gold enhancement runes from ANYWHERE until our LIs progress past 480?

And the reasoning is that "they're taking up inventory space"? Come on. You know there's not a single player complaining about the ability to save up teal and gold enhancement runes. If people are that upset, they can use them --there's nothing forcing us to save them until we hit 480/490. Why fabricate nonsense reasons?

We'll eventually need 207 gold enhancement runes to max even a single pair of LIs, and now we can't earn even a measly one per week from T5 HoR or a few from higher tier raiding?

If it turns out that we'll only be getting gold runes from T5 HoR and from high tiers of the raid, that will be like 4-7 gold runes per week we can obtain. So around 8 months to a year to max our LIs? Why do you guys only tell us the bad news? Why not also give us some hope by explaining where we'll be getting new LI currency that has thus far been randomly and haphazardly added to the game?

I'm bumping this reply. To replace the Gold Tracery grind that SSG left us for the past 4 months with a Rewards Track that doesn't even make up for the loss of Gold Tracery drops is beyond ridiculous. At least allow us to have a daily/weekly Cracked Tracery Gold barter token for completing T2 of the Feature Instance. The "no more gold traceries from scaling instances" change is going to require a LOT of damage control on your part, SSG.

As for the enhancement rune change, I LIKED stocking up teal/gold enhancement runes in anticipation for when those levels would be unlocked. To revert ALL Sources to purple max because "They were taking up inventory space" is a bullcrap excuse, not a valid design explanation. If anything, PLEASE revert this change. These runes are BoA, and we have bank alt/storage alts to offset the fact that blue/gold enhancement runes are "flooding" 2 units of inventory/bank space.