U34 Preview 1 Feedback: Delvings

[CaerArianrhod]

Or maybe... they'll need to grab a friend and duo.

In that case, change the announcement please and mention explicitly that the Missions of the Delving system are not designed for solo!

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Bridge to Caranost on Tier 10 solo is just a completely bugged thing.
Tried for 48 minutes with my LM. Could not make it over the bridge.
Stats:
Morale 916K (vit: 194K)
Crit: 1,250K
Finesse: 830K
T. Mastey: 1,728K
---
Resistence: 673K
P. Mitigation: 834K
T. Mitigation: 835K
(+ the 10% mitigation scroll from the shop)

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It is an awful joke: kill a mob --> spans an add --> kill that add --> spans one more add
There is no progress possible as the barricades and mobs respawn after each death incredibly quickly.
I could make it to the 2bd barricade (could pass it), but that was always the end of the "fun".
The random reflect is not necessary for solo. Double group with 6 adds and all do have the reflection effect ... yay!

How one can manage to do this mission on tier 10?
Easy! --> Use your cool downs and just run through everything, including the barricades (they will not stop you). Just after you pass the 3rd row of barricades you can talk to the NPC, finish the mission, leave the mission, get your T10 chest.

[DoRonRon]

With the Class Essence usage set at 140 to 149 it's not providing the lasting benefits some got from the now max 109 essence. We have a year to obtain them before they become obsolete. The 150 Delvings will provide two years ofc.

Whatever the difficulty T10 arrives with on Live will it be likely that persevering with T10 for the RNG of chest drops is a good choice? How do they compare with standard Ember barter coffers, can't rival Key use can they? Note the few keys in season 4. They could have all 100 claims provide a key and it wouldn't match what's in my shared, still won't use them.

Like the RT it seems the better choice would be to save resources gained for a full two years of use. If the currency obtained now spans a cap rise. Perhaps lootboxes will include some of this currency? Might have to take some onto BR later to check.

I'm just glad as a nation (UK) we can bring so much mirth to other nations with our Laurel and Hardy (Liz and Boris) themed comedy routine. Season two was a bit short, we'll soon catch up with the tracker

[sting-sethkan]

More grindy filler only with more storage problems. The missions were bad enough without this mess.

[wersxtwe]

Several things.

1. Bugs, bugs everywhere. Several of the missions are bugged to hell and back. Ones I have personally experienced include: Scouts without the ring over them to talk to them and finish the mission, causing you to be booted and the delving quest to fail. Many, many scouts appearing at the end of the mission, none of which have rings (In Sigils and Signs, i think it's called.) Mob stacking, some reporting up to 20, although that's a bit of an exaggeration, I imagine. Mobs simply not appearing at all, making objectives impossible to complete to begin with.
2. Mission quality. They're boring. They're all variations of "Kill x mobs, gather x items." I hope this is just because these are placeholder missions for the first beta, but if not and these are actually planned to ship November 8th, I thought you should know they're not really interesting at all.
3. Trivial, but tedious. There isn't really much of a challenge on tier 10. Most classes can easily finish any of these missions, they're just tedious to finish because of the whole "mob spawning on death" thing. I was hoping there's be variety and was holding off till today to say this because I thought that, but I was clearly wrong. It's a HUGE no thank you on the whole mob on death spawning situation. Again. Not challenging. Tedious.
4. Rewards. Writs are a nightmare. I have no plans of running missions 50 times on tier 10 to get a single item. This sounds agonizing. The amount of writs for a T10 completion needs a SERIOUS buff. T10 boxes should NOT contain low-tier resources. No one needs resources from a lower tier. These resource boxes are fine, they just need to be selectable, and there needs to be far more than 3 from each. The rewards should not be ranging from low-tier useless inventory filler to raid gear equivalent, that makes no sense. Decrease the likelihood of getting raid gear if you have to, but make sure any reward you get from these boxes doesn't feel like a waste of time. It should feel rewarding.

Beta one looks unfinished, to say the least. Not impressed with Delvings, but hopeful that improvements will be made in time.

[DoRonRon]

The class essence in the tavern on Chiver Me Timbers; a hunter one with -50s on low cut worried me because the skill by default is 10 seconds. I hope it's not to set the default to 1m, just a rough placeholder. Not seen these class essence in the game myself, are they to be drops in the mission chests or on another barter I didn't find?

At the end of the day if all the efforts put in to obtaining a necklace and a cloak and then upgrade them (twice?) with expensive barter items and then to slot a lack lustre class essence with merely a year's usage I wonder why even start on some classes.

Similar mission travel options would not go amiss for the new missions npc, travelled there on alt f2p account.

[Bondamar]

Day 2 Edits/additions in Red.

I edited my original post on page 1 instead of copy pasting the wall of text again. I added in my experience with Hunter doing T10 delvings in green, ilvl 465 t1 gundabad E&G vendor gear.

[why-becauseIcan]

SSG, can you at some point understand that just scaling up enemies isn't a good solution to make challenging content. Try to figure out how to make an encounter challenging without buffing mobs 10x times, then maybe we could finally get some decent content again.

We all know that just buffing mobs dmg/morale is a cheap way for you to advertise "challenging content".. But it's boring.

One thing you did good with the epic battle system was making the highest difficulty(earning platinum medal) require actual strategy and working with mechanics. It was challenging to earn that platinum medal, not because you buffed enemies 10x times, but because you needed to play the content in a certain way to achieve success. Some scaling is fine, but generally, difficulty shouldn't only be about numbers.

This system is a main feature gated behind a 20-100$ expansion, and its not impressive.

People hated epic battles, but lets be honest, its a gem compared to this lackluster system. Both missions and the addition of delvings.

[Yuffie67]

Hate reflect in general.

You do more damage, then your own morale. So even a reduce reflect is deadly. Deadly is wrong word...Its just broken.


If Damage and Morale was differently scaled, reflect wouldn't be a issue.(It could be a fun counter)
Give example of older area. Dragnets in Moria. On level.. my Champ will kill herself hitting 1, let alone 2 with blade wall. Cause damage we do is so much higher then morale we have.

Same issue with instance in Forochel. Were you had remove the effect, and if your removal skill did damage, you could in fact... kill yourself trying to remove said effect.
1 crit could ruin the whole fight. and 25% ratio is pretty decent.


With Bloated Damage Number we do, compared to Morale we have... Reflect should not be a game mechanic we have in LotrO. Outside of Raids...in set sections maybe.

[DoRonRon]

I edited my original post on page 1 instead of copy pasting the wall of text again. I added in my experience with Hunter doing T10 delvings in green, ilvl 465 t1 gundabad E&G vendor gear.

Was contemplating similar strategies for my hunters. Were you toggling auto attack off especially for QS/Endurance portions? The confirmation that you feel better geared will just raise difficulty suggests that taking a broad level range of crafted bows along would help. May take some moving of choicer traceries.

Butter Knife used to be de rigueur for Narnûlubat in the Rift, that's 200% reflect. Until we removed it ofc.

Perhaps the morale stacking least resistance path forced on raiders will turn out to be the best strategy. For those of us who don't have the spare slots for morale our damage incoming is best controlled via our weapon choice, finding a sweet spot we can handle. Cheaper than emptying out all essence and replace with morale.

For my yellow Champ for instance; Blade of Courage induces a heal proc at 20% chance for a 5% heal. Dire Need's base 2m CD for 30% and the base 3m CD of Fight On 30% over 20 seconds. Bracing Attack at 30 CD for 25% (and suspect change note) but like the proc damage done and received in gaining the heal. I should move over my Champ to check on the Bracing Attack change, it does suggest being the skill to sway the choice of weapon to employ.

As a kiter on every class I play including melee ones the last season's 2% in-combat run speed Heraldries offer up an option. You only need to be faster than the next guy when a grizzly charges, after all. Depends on if the lay of the landscape lends itself to finessing mob AI to get them chasing, then can use a skill at your choosing, having switched off auto. Beats a defeatist strategy any day.

Or pay a healer? Orion did say we'd need the gold! He hasn't managed to persuade Marketing to change the copy from Higher Level inclusion, so we aren't going to see duo in there.

As a proper solo challenge for classes not overtly healers then it appeals to me. Just not the means to gain rewards. If it's all bound to account rewards then the RK and Minstrel can do the grind if needed, they have plenty of unused trait tree slots. Need to finalise the class essence before I'll buy in, so after the Live feedback rolls in, can't trust the deck 'til then.

[Plidak]

With all the reflect how fir rk and wrd are supposed to do this solo ?
Mobs shouldnt reflect dots/bleeds

[Bragolos]

SSG, can you at some point understand that just scaling up enemies isn't a good solution to make challenging content. Try to figure out how to make an encounter challenging without buffing mobs 10x times, then maybe we could finally get some decent content again.

We all know that just buffing mobs dmg/morale is a cheap way for you to advertise "challenging content".. But it's boring.

One thing you did good with the epic battle system was making the highest difficulty(earning platinum medal) require actual strategy and working with mechanics. It was challenging to earn that platinum medal, not because you buffed enemies 10x times, but because you needed to play the content in a certain way to achieve success. Some scaling is fine, but generally, difficulty shouldn't only be about numbers.

This system is a main feature gated behind a 20-100$ expansion, and its not impressive.

People hated epic battles, but lets be honest, its a gem compared to this lackluster system. Both missions and the addition of delvings.

I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Despite the fact that I'd like to see cool mechanics as well (as long as it's perfectly doable solo, which is the point of this new system), just the single fact of buffing the enemies every tier for a system with 10 different tiers would already be something that could be a bit more challenging, something we've not really seen (besides the T1-T3 skirms), and if more challenging also means more rewarding, which seems the intention here, it already gives me as a solo player a bit more reason to log in, try to upgrade my characters and play those Delvings/Missions. And to be honest, although I play a lot of RPG's with varying difficulty on Switch and PC, I can also enjoy a bit more simple (but challenging) content, I do not always want to 'learn' stuff before I can get into it. It's due to the combination of not having as much time/flexibility as I'd want to be able to be online for hours in continuance AND the fact that you constantly have to 'learn' new mechanics that I normally do not participate in the raid cycles.

Anyway, since it's clear it won't be just buffing, but also certain effects changing on a daily basis, some minor mechanics and perhaps more to come, I'm all for this system, much more than at the start of the Epic battle thing back in 2013. And for the pricetag of € 19,95 I'm OK with the 2 new really big zones, a lot of (low level) content, a new skirmish, a new upcoming six-man and this new system, that will most likely roll out to more (old) content in the near future.

[DoRonRon]

Taking a look at more of the class essence in the tavern it's become noticeable that quite a few involves procs you perhaps would not want to trigger in this reflect environment if playing at the margins. Perhaps it's good they become obsolete at level 150 for the start of the grind of their replacements.

[savetheroadtodoriath]

I've tried quite a few T10 Delvings now and as far as I can tell they all have the same effects. How frequent is the rotation meant to be? These other 'Malices' are going to have to be amazingly different from the current ones for me to have any interest in this system which so far seems to simply be increasing the damage and morale of mobs, there's no strategy or creativity involved, just bigger numbers on auto attacking mobs. Now and then you get a curable effect I guess, but they are immediately cured and effectively don't exist. This is doubly true because the universal reflect malice heavily encourages you to pull only 1 mob at a time, you are never overwhelmed except maybe by boredom. Quite literally every single encounter in every single Mission/Delving follows the same approach.

I was expecting something a lot more after these months with a long lull in content from Gundabad to here in order to keep me interested in the game. And this definitely isn't it.

[CasualActual]

These missions have the same problems that make the others not fun. There is no map, there is no direction or flow. Missions look like a bunch of landscape artwork copy and pasted all over the place. So when you complete something and then need to go back to the beginning to find and place the stone you cannot find your way, again no map and no flow, no direction.

More feedback,

• I wish the stones were not stored in inventory. I don't want more junk in my bags.
• When in a group both players cannot advance the stones at the same time, hopefully this is a bug.
• Prices for the rewards are too high or enough writs are not being awarded.
• Primary stats, Might, Agil, Will - need buffed to be more competitive with similar gear for the same slot.

[Denthemen]

I suppose that if you role a particular class you expect slower or faster play through, but for tank classes like guard and captain the regular missions are already slow. I often wish they could be done duo across the board or give some sort of inspiration buff to level the time playing between classes. You could give characters a boost if they have multiple adds on them at the same time: this would give tank characters a leg up without hampering other classes...maybe.

[DoRonRon]

Anyone else getting General Errors throwing up on the hoops?

[shazbaat]

I ran quite a few of these missions and I feel they can be broken into 2 categories.

- ones that you can complete with minimal killing by skirting around or running through mobs and completing on T10.
- those that are too much of a slog to do with the reflect, so just do them on T8.

It seems like the reflect mechanic is just another unfun mechanic introduced to slow down the average time to complete a mission. There has been an obvious progression in this regard starting with the Limlok dailies that could be completed in 1-2 minutes, to the first true missions from three peaks, then you put clickies in almost all the missions so it's less advantageous to round everything up and kill it all at once. Now we have ridiculous reflect that just makes you kill one mob and die, or run with a slow healing build, or just wait between pulls to regen health.

It also occurred to me that delvings would be much more fun if you just put increasingly more/difficult skirmish lieutenants in as the tiers went up or give their powers to the enemies that are in there. This makes every run different if you have to pay attention to different strategies each run. Currently in skirmishes, most groups ignore the mechanics because our characters are so overpowered, but when skirmishes first came out and your tank couldn't just stand there and tank 4 brothers of destruction and the enraged giant they were much more dynamic. For example, Priest of Vengeance puts a deadly reflect on one of his buddies, but you can play around that, not just stack morale so you can kill the enemy before you kill yourself, and even though that lieutenant doesn't show up in solo skirmishes, there is no reason it can't be.

I'm having fun figuring out how to beat these missions, but they will have almost zero replayability at T9 and T10 because they will quickly become an unfun slog.

[SSG_Orion]

These missions have the same problems that make the others not fun. There is no map, there is no direction or flow. Missions look like a bunch of landscape artwork copy and pasted all over the place. So when you complete something and then need to go back to the beginning to find and place the stone you cannot find your way, again no map and no flow, no direction.

More feedback,

• I wish the stones were not stored in inventory. I don't want more junk in my bags.
• When in a group both players cannot advance the stones at the same time, hopefully this is a bug.
• Prices for the rewards are too high or enough writs are not being awarded.
• Primary stats, Might, Agil, Will - need buffed to be more competitive with similar gear for the same slot.

Stones will likely remain stored in inventory for a little while We are working on a better way to store them.

When one player chooses the difficulty it should offer the quest to the other player in the fellowship duo. Then, either player with the stone should be able to advance the quest and the second player should also see the quest advance to the "Complete the mission and find the scout" phase of the quest. If this was not functioning this way it is likely it missed inclusion in this version of Bullroarer, but it will be in the next.
Prices for rewards may change a little, but the system is not meant to reward you with a piece of gear every run - it should be a steady progression toward those gear pieces you want.
Thanks for the suggestion on the primary stat adjustment, we will look at how far apart they are, but they are not supposed to be exact to other pieces of gear, rather they should be equivalent with some variation.

[SSG_Orion]

I've tried quite a few T10 Delvings now and as far as I can tell they all have the same effects. How frequent is the rotation meant to be? These other 'Malices' are going to have to be amazingly different from the current ones for me to have any interest in this system which so far seems to simply be increasing the damage and morale of mobs, there's no strategy or creativity involved, just bigger numbers on auto attacking mobs. Now and then you get a curable effect I guess, but they are immediately cured and effectively don't exist. This is doubly true because the universal reflect malice heavily encourages you to pull only 1 mob at a time, you are never overwhelmed except maybe by boredom. Quite literally every single encounter in every single Mission/Delving follows the same approach.

I was expecting something a lot more after these months with a long lull in content from Gundabad to here in order to keep me interested in the game. And this definitely isn't it.

They will likely rotate weekly at first until there is a large enough library to move them into a more standard potential daily rotation. We're not sure where this will settle at the initial launch.

[Quenton_1]

They will likely rotate weekly at first until there is a large enough library to move them into a more standard potential daily rotation. We're not sure where this will settle at the initial launch.

The thing I liked most about the delving's initial description was that Malices would rotate daily so there would never be an extended period where some especially undesirable combination or not running it at all were the only two possibilities.

I'd appreciate it if you could list more of the Malices that are currently implemented in the potential selection pool with the understanding that numbers can change.

Please also note if some malices only exist in content over certain tiers.

[Zvim666]

I think damage reflect will be a difficult mechanic to balance. Damage reflect is more common in ARPGs which have near infinite damage scaling, this mechanic was essentially put in as a hard lock to stop people going full glass cannon, and they usually have a form of passive life steal, regeneration and life on hit mechanics to offset reflect.

The problem with reflect in MMOs is not so much the amount reflected but the period of time it is reflected in.

In Lotro reflected damage is negated, this means that with 25% damage reflect a 4m morale mob effectively has 5.3m morale, it has the added con of making a mob even tankier on top of the reflected damage.

The other issue is amounts you can realistically heal vs dps output.

Most classes can do 250k to 500k dps, assuming people are doing 250k it would take about 21 seconds to inflict 5.333m damage to a 4m mob with a 25% reflect. Assuming you take no damage from that mob, you would take over 1.3m damage in that 21 seconds or 1.1m if you used a morale pot.

Speed/dps is a significant variable and the reflect damage would be problematic even in a duo environment with a dedicated healer, if the dps is on the higher end of the spectrum. At 500k dps the mob will go down in about 10-11 seconds so that reflected damage would be applied in a shorter window, you would need something like over 100k HPS (with a morale pot used). It is far beyond anything healers are currently able to perform. This is just at 25%. This gets significantly worse the higher the reflect rate.

[SSG_Orion]

The thing I liked most about the delving's initial description was that Malices would rotate daily so there would never be an extended period where some especially undesirable combination or not running it at all were the only two possibilities.

I'd appreciate it if you could list more of the Malices that are currently implemented in the potential selection pool with the understanding that numbers can change.

Please also note if some malices only exist in content over certain tiers.

We will share more as we get closer.

[SSG_Orion]

I think damage reflect will be a difficult mechanic to balance. Damage reflect is more common in ARPGs which have near infinite damage scaling, this mechanic was essentially put in as a hard lock to stop people going full glass cannon, and they usually have a form of passive life steal, regeneration and life on hit mechanics to offset reflect.

The problem with reflect in MMOs is not so much the amount reflected but the period of time it is reflected in.

In Lotro reflected damage is negated, this means that with 25% damage reflect a 4m morale mob effectively has 5.3m morale, it has the added con of making a mob even tankier on top of the reflected damage.

The other issue is amounts you can realistically heal vs dps output.

Most classes can do 250k to 500k dps, assuming people are doing 250k it would take about 21 seconds to inflict 5.333m damage to a 4m mob with a 25% reflect. Assuming you take no damage from that mob, you would take over 1.3m damage in that 21 seconds or 1.1m if you used a morale pot.

Speed/dps is a significant variable and the reflect damage would be problematic even in a duo environment with a dedicated healer, if the dps is on the higher end of the spectrum. At 500k dps the mob will go down in about 10-11 seconds so that reflected damage would be applied in a shorter window, you would need something like over 100k HPS (with a morale pot used). It is far beyond anything healers are currently able to perform. This is just at 25%. This gets significantly worse the higher the reflect rate.

It is important to remember that the reflect does not appear until the tier 9 version of this delving flavor as we have been calling them internally. When you reach tier 9 and 10 the difficulty is meant to be very, very, hard to defeat. Completing a delving at that tier should be a moments of accomplishment - and not every player is going to attempt to speed run through these.

With that said, we are aware that there is some tuning that needs to happen to make these less punishing and more - moment to moment alteration in game play. Remember that this is a beta version and only the first of five flavors that we are working on. With some luck, we'll hope to turn on a different flavor during the next Bullroarer cycle to see how the effects, skills, and abilities in that next flavor plays and changes the approach to the completion of the delving.

It is clear, from the initial run that the delvings are not overly tuned yet. We want there to be an appreciable difference as you progress so that there are those moments of seeing that you have made some significant growth with your character and play. There are some players who will undoubtedly chew this new system up, quickly. That typically does happen when new systems are introduced. Our goal is not to make these overly punishing - instead - we want them to be a challenge.

We're already discussing what might change with that tier 9 effect and how we can make it more of an experiential choice in the course of the combat.

Now, it is also important to note that the mid-tier effects are not doing what we expected them to do so there is likely some tuning that will happen in that band as well. I am hoping that we can get the dev diary out to you soon so that the functionality of the system is more clear.

In a nutshell, we're not done tweaking and we want to make sure that this exists to provide a wide breadth of players a new challenge and twist.

Before I close this one, I want to thank you for your feedback, apologize for the state of many of the missions - assure you that we are ironing out the major issues and revising some of the missions based on what we are seeing here.

See you in the next round,

Orion

[Vehdren]

In Lotro reflected damage is negated

Reflected damage is not necessarily negated. Negated damage is negated. Typically this is two seperate effects.

Compare the Guardian skill Redirect which Reflects and Negates damage and the Champion skill Exchange of blows which only reflects

[CasualActual]

[QUOTE=SSG_Orion;8162579
Prices for rewards may change a little, but the system is not meant to reward you with a piece of gear every run - it should be a steady progression toward those gear pieces you want.
Thanks for the suggestion on the primary stat adjustment, we will look at how far apart they are, but they are not supposed to be exact to other pieces of gear, rather they should be equivalent with some variation.[/QUOTE]

We didn't get into bullroar until late today before the server shutdown. Between trying to figure out where to go and how to use the delving system we ended up completing maybe 5 missions. I believe at the end we had about 30 writs, we both checked out the barter and saw that some jewelry was 15,000 (I'm guessing on the numbers really, I didn't write them down) and we both kind of came to the conclusion that it was going to require too many days to complete in order to make it worthwhile to us.

Bottom line, I think if you are intending to make this a nice bonus for people who already do missions then things are good this way. If the intent is to draw more players (maybe even end game raiders) into missions the prices need lowered and the stats need bumped.