Bullroarer Update 32 - Beta #2 - CLOSED

[nzringnut10]

We'll have additional changes to Houses of Rest coming, didn't make this BR. We'll have more info about that probably next week.

Like?

[CoatHangers]

SSG, and previous iterations, have shot themselves in the foot to appeal to the vast minority of players by having a poor system which caters to the minority of their player base and this player base has for the most part been nothing but abusive towards them as a thank you.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ha, is that why the game died after Helms Deep? When they entirely dropped endgame focus in favour of slogs of Big Battles.....

[auximenes]

- All Task Quest items now list the regions that they belong to in their description (excluding Housing Task Boards).
- Newly acquired Wayfarer's, Traveller's, and Adventurer's gear available from lootboxes or selection coffers will now bind to account rather than character.

/thumbsup

[Nanganark]

You are searching for something that does not exists.

The option to set this is already in game, and it's allowing 'everyone' to 'visit' your house or not.

That's the same option you had to set before for your older houses. It's just that for other neighborhoods, removing the 'visit' permission was 'closing' the door to your house for everyone, but not your yard.
Now that we have a door at the entrance of Erebor houses yards, setting this will also affect the ability to enter your yard.

Then tell me why it is not working? My House is private yes but my yard isn't, why?

[Starkorm]

Puddles, eyes, and ground effects are the best forms of mechanics.

Ah yes when I think of lotro instances I definitely think of puddles and eyes. I think they've been in every instance now since Dome.

[cbfan14]

Ah yes when I think of lotro instances I definitely think of puddles and eyes. I think they've been in every instance now since Dome.

Eyes and puddles really have been common mechanics in lotro for the longest time. I remember Barad Guldur being pretty heavy with puddles and eyes, especially the Twins fight and the Lieutenant fight. The instances in In Their Absence used quite them quite a bit too. I guess it's a staple mechanic at this point. That said, I greatly prefer puddles and eyes to RNG oneshots and constant unavoidable heavy AoEs.

[krism71]

Hello, can a kinship purchase more than 1 premium kinship house? I know accounts can have any number of premium houses but kinship housing is limited to 1 for regular houses

[WeirdJedi]

Hello, can a kinship purchase more than 1 premium kinship house? I know accounts can have any number of premium houses but kinship housing is limited to 1 for regular houses

They have been trying to come up with a way for us to own two kinship houses since the development of Rohan Housing. But it was stated during the Casual Stroll through Middle-Earth stream that they are still working on it.

[Zvim666]

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ha, is that why the game died after Helms Deep? When they entirely dropped endgame focus in favour of slogs of Big Battles.....

Sites that track MMO population estimates have LOTRO increasing in users and active players since Helm's Deep, it just pales in comparison to the market leaders. LOTRO has never been endgame focused, most expansions that produced raids produced one or two up until recently, most were fairly simplistic and just had two tiers of difficulty. Games that are end-game focused have a lot of end-game content, LOTRO doesn't. They just pushed a lot of the gearing pathway into the extreme end of their content and that leaves a lot of people dissatisfied.

I think Thrones/Old Anorien was probably the pinnacle of where the game was at, there was a lot of content for the average player, there weren't assine locks on non-raid encounters, you had a variety of different set gear, T1 thrones dropped the tokens, there was bonus from the T2C chests.

From Mordor onwards we started to see set pieces vanish, max level placed on older set pieces, favoured loot in instances, keys going to the store, teal world drops and eventually instance drops vanishing altogether and we got busted mechanics in the non-raid instances, all these challenge-loving hardcore players stopped running Naerband as soon as they patched out the LM Bear exploit. As soon as there is any exploit to make something easy/trivial, raiders are on to it like vultures, raiders always gravitate to the fotm broken dps, everyone desires the path of least resistance.

I really liked Anvil, we got higher tiers of non-raid instances, most which were tedious to run, I enjoyed TG T5, but I only ran it with other raiders, there is no conceivable way anyone who wasn't a raider would progress through the tiers of content up to T5 though via pugs. This type of content is exclusionary because this game does nothing really to incrementally prepare people for later tiers, there is a small minority that are competent enough from years of raiding beforehand. The game itself doesn't help anyone improve.

The current content is just creating a lot of burnout, whilst we still see new players, the pool that actively raid through the tiers has shrunk dramatically. I can't say if that anecdotal experience is common across all servers, but we have experienced a massive exodus to ESO, GW2 and FFXIV.

Yeah, I agree BGs were horrible, like a lot of systems (BGs, Mounted Combat, Skirmishes, Radiance, LoE, etc) they have been discontinued, missions is something else that will probably join the list in the future, the scaling is hilarious, the old 130 missions are significantly harder than the 140 versions. How could i forget allegiance, I am glad they brought that back from the dead :sarcasm:

Their crafting system is very good, the best gear comes from instances/raids and higher tiers but there is still plenty of engagement, a minority do their end-game content as well, it doesn't mean they completely ignore everyone else. Someone who doesn't do their highest tiers of content still has good pathways for gear progression, it isn't the same as the highest tier of gear, but they have a proper progression pathway. They don't have cockblocking mechanics like shards or solvents nor ptw elements like lootboxes/keys and their version of essences you just accumulate from playing the game doing the kind of content you are interested in.

I am glad we don't have to pick flowers for the best gear (going to forget how many rocks I picked up for my pocket pieces), but I think we need a more engaging system for progression across all levels, not just for the high-end. There is an extended progression path for raiders and it gets significantly worse from there. It doesn't mean you hand out the best gear to casuals, but the system of upgrading has to be as interactive for them otherwise they are paying the same amount of money for a considerably worse experience and that isn't sustainable. You end up in places like where we are now, which is less than ideal.

[J-Moneyforever]

Sites that track MMO population estimates have LOTRO increasing in users and active players since Helm's Deep.

Lmao what? This is just untrue and you don't even need to use fake data or shady sites that use "Reddit engagement" as a measure of MMO population. Lotro had 29 servers prior to the abject disaster that was Helm's Deep it now has 10. The game absolutely fell off a cliff and went into maintenance mode for years. It has recovered some of that playerbase but partially because it refocused on creating engaging endgame content. I have to assume you didn't play prior to the release of HD or you wouldn't make such an absurdly false statement.

I pretty much don't care about the overall discussion other than to say WoW has focused its gear on high level difficult endgame content and it has been the final boss of MMOs for the last 16 years. Take from that what you will.

[cwswim03]

I am glad we don't have to pick flowers for the best gear (going to forget how many rocks I picked up for my pocket pieces), but I think we need a more engaging system for progression across all levels, not just for the high-end. There is an extended progression path for raiders and it gets significantly worse from there. It doesn't mean you hand out the best gear to casuals, but the system of upgrading has to be as interactive for them otherwise they are paying the same amount of money for a considerably worse experience and that isn't sustainable. You end up in places like where we are now, which is less than ideal.

You can get extremely good gear from the 3 mans on T3. And they are not that hard. The instance quality in Gundabad has been poor is the main problem. All three instances basically released with some form of imbalance or gamebreaking bug (Pugh teleport).

Most of the best gear in the game comes from T3 or Below (raiding). And T3 content should be accessible to more people but people don't really want to do it.

[Kander]

Sites that track MMO population estimates have LOTRO increasing in users and active players since Helm's Deep, it just pales in comparison to the market leaders. LOTRO has never been endgame focused, most expansions that produced raids produced one or two up until recently, most were fairly simplistic and just had two tiers of difficulty. Games that are end-game focused have a lot of end-game content, LOTRO doesn't. They just pushed a lot of the gearing pathway into the extreme end of their content and that leaves a lot of people dissatisfied.

I think Thrones/Old Anorien was probably the pinnacle of where the game was at, there was a lot of content for the average player, there weren't assine locks on non-raid encounters, you had a variety of different set gear, T1 thrones dropped the tokens, there was bonus from the T2C chests.

From Mordor onwards we started to see set pieces vanish, max level placed on older set pieces, favoured loot in instances, keys going to the store, teal world drops and eventually instance drops vanishing altogether and we got busted mechanics in the non-raid instances, all these challenge-loving hardcore players stopped running Naerband as soon as they patched out the LM Bear exploit. As soon as there is any exploit to make something easy/trivial, raiders are on to it like vultures, raiders always gravitate to the fotm broken dps, everyone desires the path of least resistance.

I really liked Anvil, we got higher tiers of non-raid instances, most which were tedious to run, I enjoyed TG T5, but I only ran it with other raiders, there is no conceivable way anyone who wasn't a raider would progress through the tiers of content up to T5 though via pugs. This type of content is exclusionary because this game does nothing really to incrementally prepare people for later tiers, there is a small minority that are competent enough from years of raiding beforehand. The game itself doesn't help anyone improve.

The current content is just creating a lot of burnout, whilst we still see new players, the pool that actively raid through the tiers has shrunk dramatically. I can't say if that anecdotal experience is common across all servers, but we have experienced a massive exodus to ESO, GW2 and FFXIV.

Yeah, I agree BGs were horrible, like a lot of systems (BGs, Mounted Combat, Skirmishes, Radiance, LoE, etc) they have been discontinued, missions is something else that will probably join the list in the future, the scaling is hilarious, the old 130 missions are significantly harder than the 140 versions. How could i forget allegiance, I am glad they brought that back from the dead :sarcasm:

Their crafting system is very good, the best gear comes from instances/raids and higher tiers but there is still plenty of engagement, a minority do their end-game content as well, it doesn't mean they completely ignore everyone else. Someone who doesn't do their highest tiers of content still has good pathways for gear progression, it isn't the same as the highest tier of gear, but they have a proper progression pathway. They don't have cockblocking mechanics like shards or solvents nor ptw elements like lootboxes/keys and their version of essences you just accumulate from playing the game doing the kind of content you are interested in.

I am glad we don't have to pick flowers for the best gear (going to forget how many rocks I picked up for my pocket pieces), but I think we need a more engaging system for progression across all levels, not just for the high-end. There is an extended progression path for raiders and it gets significantly worse from there. It doesn't mean you hand out the best gear to casuals, but the system of upgrading has to be as interactive for them otherwise they are paying the same amount of money for a considerably worse experience and that isn't sustainable. You end up in places like where we are now, which is less than ideal.

Many servers pretty much died after HD: At recent HD release the numbers weren't that bad and some people came back to the game instantly after an underwhelming East Rohan. Shortly after (a couple of months) numbers started to go lower and it reached the lowest ever. Numbers only started to rise again and activity increased when Throne cluster was released, which again goes greatly against your claim that raids aren't important for most people, maybe for most people in number, but certainly most active are into raiding, if those most active people stop playing, suddenly there's a drop in overall population and servers get quite empty.

Throne was the pinacle probably after HD, and still in terms of instances it was Dome, Silent Street and easy scaled instances, that's it. Rest was either only done by exploiting, by skipping 90% of the instance, or with a really restricted class setup like quays of harlond with cappy + champ + warden, basically all expansions previous to RoR were better than anything post HD. To me In their absence and Rise of Isengard was when the game was as its peak by far (Angmar was probably great too but I never played it on release so I can't tell how it compares). Moria was an insanely great cluster too but in my opinion, single bosses raids were a bit worse compared to other raids and some of the instances were tedious or simply too class-restricted back then.

Although it's true that T1 raiding and T2c raiding weren't as different/further apart as T1 and T5 are today, T1 nowadays is story mode and can be easily undermanned with quest-geared random classes, while back at lvl 65/75 in raids you required still some coordination and decent players to do it reliably, let's say it wasn't as casual-friendly as it is today, while t2c was quite similarly demanding as t5 is nowadays, just in a different style as not everything was dps race and surviving big random hits.

[Thorondir]

Throne was the pinacle probably after HD, and still in terms of instances it was Dome, Silent Street and easy scaled instances, that's it. Rest was either only done by exploiting, by skipping 90% of the instance,

Lol, just lol ..

Dome: skip nearly all the mobs with moving at the side of the movable area.

Silent Street: Avoid all puddles in the final fight if you stand at a specific spot trivializing the fight.

The above was done by most of the player base - it was impossible to find groups in WC that didn't do them ...

[WeirdJedi]

Although it's true that T1 raiding and T2c raiding weren't as different/further apart as T1 and T5 are today, T1 nowadays is story mode and can be easily undermanned with quest-geared random classes, while back at lvl 65/75 in raids you required still some coordination and decent players to do it reliably, let's say it wasn't as casual-friendly as it is today, while t2c was quite similarly demanding as t5 is nowadays, just in a different style as not everything was dps race and surviving big random hits.

I am quite fascinated when people discuss about why people leave and come back. When evaluating my own experience, I have found that I've temporarily left the game every time there was a raid. My departures lasted anywhere from one month to three years. I always came back when the next big expansion was announced.

This cycle stopped when they introduced T1 Story Mode. For some reason, I've stuck around since War of Three Peaks. I liked the idea of finally being able to clear a raid upon release with all my friends. Not feeling like such a failure because everybody didn't have the best gear, we didn't have the right class composition, or the bosses didn't have some weird/buggy mechanics.

But I don't think the reason why I left was because of the raids. I think it was about progression. Let's take for example the biggest hill of Helm's Deep. Rohirrim server-wide war-steed marches were awesome. Big battles were great. But I remember how difficult it was to do anything to get better. You needed like 250 Westemnet Iron Coins per Eorlingas Scroll of Empowerment, 300 for Eorlingas Scroll of Delving, and 150 for an Emerald Shard. The only avenue to earn more was obtaining 10 from each of the Warbands. I must have gotten 900 coins, since I recall getting both horses and ports. Every slayer deed required like 300 mob defeats to complete. And this was all before the disaster of Derndingle. It wasn't until 3 years later they offered you 5 additional coins per task (which barely helped the matter). At least now you don't have to worry about the scrolls, and the shards can now be obtained from the Skirmish Camp.

[Blastoyz]

Please for the love of god consider the current morale pools on HoR bosses at T3 and how boring and mind numbing this fight will become with equivalent T5 morale pools. It's already a slog for a 6 man. Not to mention if dps are required to be even more tanky due to increased T5 damage.

[Nanganark]

is it possible to do a data wipe and a update to the Beta? and extend it until 01/08 3:00 PM EST?

[Vilan]

This cycle stopped when they introduced T1 Story Mode. For some reason, I've stuck around since War of Three Peaks. I liked the idea of finally being able to clear a raid upon release with all my friends. Not feeling like such a failure because everybody didn't have the best gear, we didn't have the right class composition, or the bosses didn't have some weird/buggy mechanics.

I'm also grateful they finally got around to making T1 story mode raids. Not sure why T1 3 and 6 mans have historically been story mode while T1 raids are considerably more difficult. There should also absolutely be high difficulty tiers too, but LOTRO has a lot of casual players who want to experience the story and aren't necessarily gear-driven. I ran Remmo because I wanted to see what happened to Shelob. I didn't really care what gear or trophies I got... sure I'm happy to get cool stuff, but I know that in 6-12 months all my gear will be thrown in the trash, so I'm not going to stress it. I'm a decent player, but it is not trivial to clear Remmo, even T1. Same with Abyss and Anvil. So I'm glad that Threshold and FOKD were easier on T1 so that more people got to experience them.

[Snowlock]

Please for the love of god consider the current morale pools on HoR bosses at T3 and how boring and mind numbing this fight will become with equivalent T5 morale pools. It's already a slog for a 6 man. Not to mention if dps are required to be even more tanky due to increased T5 damage.

Cord streamed today that additional work is being done on HOR with the release next week:

Tentative for next Wednesday

HoR T3 deed "Leading the charge" will now be active until march 2nd

HoR Boss 3:
- Health reduced
- will use skills differently

HoR Boss 2:
- Health reduced
- Blizzard will be slower on lower difficulties
- Some skill damage reduced
- Area of effect damage increased
- Darkness consumed is now a limited area of effect and does less damage

Reward vendor for HoR to be added

AoD is having Scion buffs removed from boss fights

[Zvim666]

Lmao what? This is just untrue and you don't even need to use fake data or shady sites that use "Reddit engagement" as a measure of MMO population. Lotro had 29 servers prior to the abject disaster that was Helm's Deep it now has 10. The game absolutely fell off a cliff and went into maintenance mode for years. It has recovered some of that playerbase but partially because it refocused on creating engaging endgame content. I have to assume you didn't play prior to the release of HD or you wouldn't make such an absurdly false statement.

I pretty much don't care about the overall discussion other than to say WoW has focused its gear on high level difficult endgame content and it has been the final boss of MMOs for the last 16 years. Take from that what you will.

As someone that came from Silverlode, that server had an abysmal population for a long time before HD. I don't know what the others were like. Even though a minority of players use the steam client, there is 10 years of data on that and numbers have been fairly flat there for 10 years.

WoW players have declined alarmingly over the years, I used to progression raid in WoW and even now, current estimates are about 5% to 15% of the playerbase does mythic raiding, they can get a ballpark idea from the tracking sites. What WoW was good at was having horizontal content and it appealed heavily towards a very casual player base. It had become much poorer in catering to their core audience which is why their numbers fell off a cliff, despite them continuing to roll out what was pretty good raid content. Raid content is great and important, but if you neglect the majority of your playerbase you are going to lose a lot of it.

This is the main challenge for older mmos like LOTRO and WoW, newer mmos are increasingly becoming more forward thinking and identifying the weaknesses of the old guards. An example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRX6IQsWfnc in this video they are talking about Lost Ark, which is slightly different as it is an ARPGMMO which will be released by Amazon, this video talks a bit about horizontal vs vertical progression and content.

I think there is an amazing opportunity for SSG and other MMOs, but if we stand still then the genre is going to pass us by at light speed. I want LOTRO to do well for a long time into the future.

[CaerArianrhod]

Aoe Attack is fine if you cap your mits.

.

No, is not OK.
They are two attacks. (In the german client they have two different names).
The first is shadow damage (approx 500k-900K depending on your mitigation). The second is common damage (approx 300k-500K depending on your mitigation).
The boss do both attacks in the same second.

SSG was very sure about, that no vitality essences are needed with Gundabad. Now the only one strategy is to stack mitigation and vitality gear and old vitality essences.
We are already close to the point where we can not get more morale through gear/virtues etc. How these attacks are scaled on T5? Does a player need 2 million Moral to survive it?

SSG did the same old bull#### as always. Instead of mechanics* just plain high damage and a gazillion of morale for a mob.
On T3 the boss has approx. 500 000 000 morale. What does he have on T5? 1 100 000 000????


Ad *)
What is the purpose of the small field, the boss is casting?
We tested it: let the boss stay in, not stay in, we are staying in. no one stays in.
Testing the AoE damage: We are sticking close to each other, we are spreading out and and and ... we wasted about an hour to find any mechanics for these two things, just to find out: there are no mechanics at all there.
All the fields in this fight has no meaning. You can stay in or not. It simply doesn't matter. Same for the AoE. As it has been said: just stack mitigation and moral to the point where a DD do the same damage as the tank.