Ungrind LOTRO!

[Dovakhim]

*Sorry for the double post, but I find the following a very relevant suggestion for any patches after U17.1 for the future! If an admin wants to delete one of my double posts, please let this one stand and delete the other one in the General Forum. Thank you.*

While I do not agree with everything written by the OP, I do agree to the following suggestions, and would find the numbers well-balanced, so /signed:

Since we are needing 5x the amount of the ASOEs and 3x the amount for ASCs we used to need before imbuement, it would be reasonable to decrease the prices of these items by +/- 75%.
This is a list of how the prices should be in order to be reasonable:

Anfallas Scroll of Empowerment:

- Relics quartermaster (Dol Amroth): It currently costs 30 silver tokens and 10 gold tokens -> Change it to 5 gold tokens and no silver tokens.

- Rangers of Ithilien and Dol Amroth quartermaster: Currently, the price is at 100 Amroth Silver Pieces/Eastern Gondor Pieces -> Change to 25 Amroth Silver Pieces/Eastern Gondor Pieces.

- Merit Committee: 250 Stars of Merit. -> Revert it to 75 Stars of Merit.

- Morgul Crests: Currently it is 5 morgul crests -> 2 or 3 morgul crests would be more reasonable. That way we could get one ASOE per run.

- Roving Threat Quartermaster: It currently is 75 Gift-giver brands -> Change it to 10 Gift-giver brands. (The fact that I need to do around 30 RTs just to get 1 ASOE is not reasonable at all)

- Skirmish Camp: 3,782 Marks and 586 Medallions currently -> Change it to 900 marks and 150 medallions.

- NEW LOTRO Store: 295 TP currently -> Change it to 60 TP.

- NEW Mithril Coins: 29 Mithril Coins currently -> Change it to 6 Mithril Coins.

Anfallas Star-lit Crystal:

- Merit Committee: 500 Stars of Merit -> Revert it to 150 Stars of Merit.

- NEW LOTRO Store: 495 TP currently -> Change it to 60 TP. (I really don't know why upgrading the main stat of an LI is much more expensive using TP than if you buy mithril coins and upgrade with it, so I suggested that both the prices for crystals and scrolls are the same in the Store)

- NEW Mithril Coins: 29 Mithril Coins currently -> Change to 6 Mithril Coins.

[Spydre]

- Skirmish Camp: 3,782 Marks and 586 Medallions currently -> Change it to 900 marks and 150 medallions.

Agreed. The Eorlings scrolls cost ~650 Marks. This is a 5x increase and is a tad ridiculous.
The whole system is artificially inflated to the point to making it a super grind or persuade the use of the store.

[pittcrew1]

While I think that some of these may be a bit extreme, I agree with most of them. If you're going to take away the silver tokens of DA from the scroll cost though, maybe add it as an option itself though (I'd say ~30 per, still, because they can be easy to get, and no need to make DA dailies even more lucrative).

The reason why I doubt these will be done, even though it would do wonders for morale of players, is because people feel that every game needs a long-term goal for player retention. Generally that's true, but in my opinion, an ever-increasingly powerful item is not the way to go about this retention. I think these long term goals should be more cosmetic, and have roughly equal numbers of them spread all throughout the game modes (unique for each, so people don't just farm the easiest, and to encourage dabbling in other modes). I know LotR has issues giving out super flashy or lore-inappropriate items, but there are still very cool things they can give out, rather than making us grind for weapons and stat-based gear just to chase the curve. I think lotro really needs a cutback on all stats, and re-balance everything. Obviously not going to happen with resources available, and it's another issue, but I think it's the same root problem.

One example cosmetic could be a Cargul robe obtained from PvMP (for freeps). I don't think the robes themselves possess power, so it shouldn't conflict there, but I mean people dressed up as Cargul may be a slight issue.

Also, if any of these are to be added, they need to be done with a relatively fresh start. Don't just have a bunch of stuff required for it be possible to obtain already. For example, in moors, using Commendations is a good way to limit prep ability because there is a cap. So if to get this item (or a part of it) you need to buy and turn in 5 items that cost 5k Comms, then that will require effort after the release.

But yeah, the rewards need to be noticeable and usable basically all the time. Obviously this is all just my preference on grind and stuff, but I'd like to see a shift to grind for things that are cool, but less important.

[Thorondir]

*Sorry for the double post, but I find the following a very relevant suggestion for any patches after U17.1 for the future! If an admin wants to delete one of my double posts, please let this one stand and delete the other one in the General Forum. Thank you.*

While I do not agree with everything written by the OP, I do agree to the following suggestions, and would find the numbers well-balanced, so /signed:

This proposal is bad, really bad for a MMO .. we do not need to buff solo grind. What we need is that T2 (especially Raids) are much more efficient in grinding than solo/T1 stuff. Therefore they should look at buffing T2 rewards as depicted in my thread over there:

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...lack-of-reward

With the descripted changes, doing T2 would cut down the grind alot due to the much higher rewards. It would result in more group activities (good for a MMO) and overall better game.

[Ethrildar]

I agree with all but the store prices. 100TP per scroll is high, but reasonable. 300 is an absolute joke when you need so many.

Frankly, I'd just like to see the mark/med cost reduced to something like 1.5k/200 respectively. It'll never happen though. They've been going up and up at a rate 3-4 times quicker than the rewards instances grant have been, for... What? 5 years?

I see no changes coming.

Wish they would though. The empowerment scroll grind is utterly gamebreaking at the moment, if you want to play more than one character.

[gripply]

This proposal is bad, really bad for a MMO .. we do not need to buff solo grind. What we need is that T2 (especially Raids) are much more efficient in grinding than solo/T1 stuff. Therefore they should look at buffing T2 rewards as depicted in my thread over there:

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...lack-of-reward

With the descripted changes, doing T2 would cut down the grind alot due to the much higher rewards. It would result in more group activities (good for a MMO) and overall better game.

Why not do both? Forcing people who prefer to solo, or husband wife teams who dislike drama, to go with you into an instance is asking to fail (at best, some people avoid fellowship because they know they can't handle social pressure - why would you want them to be forced into your group?).

So in the end, you're creating a choice to QQ due to the death grind vs. a forced socialization scenario.

Sounds dysfunctional to me.

Better to make the grind a bit more reasonable for the solo/duo/husband-wife teams, and also have the carrot out there for raid/instance kins who can get this stuff much faster by buffing the rewards too.

Keep in mind though, that if you get all your stuff quickly, you'll just complain that you have nothing to do. The grind now is maybe a bit steep, but the crafted jewellery has taken some pressure off. And it would, yes, be reasonable to buff the drops in all the level 100 instances. I'm not even sure it's possible to have an essence removal scroll drop, but it's totally required for the current armor setups. If you want to yell cash grab, yell about that. Getting the tier 44 legacies may take some of us some time, but at least by level 25 they're the equivalent of a maxed non-mbued weapon, and all the legacies are at the current max, not just 2 or 3. So you still get something better than ever at level 28 legacy.

[siipperi]

- Skirmish Camp: 3,782 Marks and 586 Medallions currently -> Change it to 900 marks and 150 medallions.

Agreed. The Eorlings scrolls cost ~650 Marks. This is a 5x increase and is a tad ridiculous.
The whole system is artificially inflated to the point to making it a super grind or persuade the use of the store.

You know they dropped old prices because those items are useless....

[Kander]

You know they dropped old prices because those items are useless....

I think they didn't drop that much, I think all Empowerment scrolls of lvl cap were for around 1k marks and 100 meds each, and turning a bit cheaper as new level cap raises, but the last anfalas scrolls of empowerment were like 3x usual price, people complained but since you only used like 6-8 per weapon you could just buy them anyways, now you use nearly 80 per weapon, which should have been brought along with a drastic reduction of empowerment prices to 1k marks or less, and still you would need more than 60k marks per weapon, in my case I got like 12 weapons in total, I don't know how much time will I take to get the marks, but even doing mindless grind of the best instances to get marks I would get only 2k marks/run. That's 1680 runs in thorog for example, in order to get the required 3.3M marks, considering 10 minutes per thorog run that would mean 280h of only doing thorog for me, just to get the marks required. Even 1/4 of that time is too much already for setting LIs...we should spend our time doing quests, instances, raids, not just getting our LIs ready for some future content that will require it.
Why not just add a daily lock on challenges and increase mark/med drops x2? that will encourage people to do stuff on different alts, do different challenges...

[Xrhstaraf]

Grind on LOTRO is much worse as it used to be...Why Turbine? WHY?!

[Leopoldio]

./signed
123123

[Ethrildar]

You know what'd be nice?

1 Thorog run giving 2 Empowerment scrolls. Rather than the opposite way around. How good would it be, to only have to do ~90 Thorogs per character?! *-* (just for LIs)

[Humbabumba]

Its not just the scrolls. MInas tirith quest line is cemetary for alts.. sad.

Wot about putting emp scrolls, crystals, golden essences in t3 chests, atleast one per run. For skirmishes, instas, dare i say, make em barter items for comms?

Getting 3rd toon thru minas tirith, and iam sorry, i dont have any kind words for turbine.

What the ppl are thinknig there, for god sake, its theres day job on the line!

[Humbabumba]

I would just like to first start off by stating that, I can completely understand where the majority of the community is coming from in wanting a massive overhaul in what is needed for us to acquire in order to "finish" / "complete" our characters. However in my opinion I don't think there is anything wrong with the current game/system.

In the past, it has been very easy for players to have multiple characters and for all of these characters to be very well geared, in legendary items, gear and jewelry. At level 75, there was the Tower of Orthanc, anyone could get the armour just by Pugging a Tier1 run which was relatively easy, and the jewellry was rather easy to get especially after the introduction of the Great River region. At level 85, a simialr occurance, for the first week or so, First Age symbols mistakenly dropped in T1 version of the Erebor raids, and after completing all the raids on T1, also relatively easy, you could barter for the "lesser" version of the armour, which really held no difference against the "greater" versions. Some people even continued to use the Hytbold set (Yes, do you remember Hytbold? - You remember how long of a grind that took? There was less QQ about that than there has been since we have been at Level 100..). At level 95, you could easily craft everything for the best end-gear equipment, and then just farm BB's for your potential gold jewellry.

However, at lv100 - for which we have now been at for well over a year, turbine has reshaped the game we know. It is no longer easy/possible to have, I'd say more than 3-4 "Well" geared characters, and even less possible to have more than 2-3 completely geared characters. Honestly, I think this is Turbines aim - it means people have to focus more on a single, or two characters, properly, rather than every player being able to pick up and play every class. People should be recognised for how good they are at one-class, not how many geared up alts they have and "can" play. And this applies directly to myself, at lv95 I used to have a well-geared character of each class. I now only play 2 of those 9 characters, because it is too difficult to play the others and have them all "complete", but there is "Nothing" wrong with that at all. For too long, we as a community, have played the game under the "Now" factor. The only difficult part about the game generally used to be waiting for a certain jewellry piece to drop in a raid, or waiting for a First Age Symbol once they had been released; and once you had your symbol, it was relatively easy to, within under an hour complete your Legendary Item, providing you had saved up before the update, which is what most end-game players had done. The game wasn't difficult, everything was relatively easy to obtain, jewellry and armour, once you had the tactics for the raids down, Legendary items if you had just done a bit of pre-planning.


However, the majority of the player base are now in an absolute uproar, because they can't complete their Legendary Items overnight. Oh, boo-hoo. You actually have to work for something? The idea of the Legendary Item system is that, these are weapons that "grow" in power as you do... The more you play, the more they will grow, because you have the option to upgrade them as you can until at last they reach the maximum. The satisfaction of finally reaching the max imbued level on a legendary item is wonderful and feels like a job well done. (The majority of you could take the easy route you know, a lot of legacies don't need to be upgraded past lv35, if you are going to complain this much about it).


We have had no "end-game" content for a while, no substantial raids, and until recently no good PvP action. So, they gave us a grindy system to play with, that seperated the actual players from the casual ones. A casual player can still be good, however they should never be as good as a player who has spent a lot more time and effort on the game. The only way a casual player can now do this, is if they pay for it. And we all know how much that costs.. However turbine are finally listening to their player base, they have revamped PvP and things are a "bit" more balanced, and we are finally getting a new raid!


So, if after reading this post - you still want to QQ about the grind, then go ahead. But in my honest opinion, there is nothing wrong with it.

Please be patient with me, and please do not consider anything i say targeted at you. I just voice the opposite point of view, and i do respect the fact that you have different one.

There are few things id like to point out:

- fewer alts in game
means less money to turbine, as long as you are in game, and happy about it, you are inclined to spend some money, well why not i like it style. ofc. Now, as you mentioned alting is just too much, and ppl are running the same, same, same same bbs and instas to get what is needed. They are not too happy about it, so they are inclined to use store less

- why o why would someone purchase additional character slots
from turbine, knowing that they are not able to use em properly? Again less income.

- gearing,
have not been ever easier then now, as crafted armor and jewellry are good enough for most of things you want to do. Thats not the issue at all. The essences to slot in em is the issue. I have been playng now for 4 weeks or so. Have a guess how many morale essences have i got from drops. Right. None. SOmething to craft from, well iam sorry frst 10 times of crafting them is fun, you go beyond 30 and it gets old, fast. and recipies and ahh
Turbine devs who have come out with this, go and grind yourself!

The issues are:

Trait points.
You do need wikipedia to find every last of em, and minas tirith ones with slayer deeds are just awful.
Theres limits. everyone have limits. Why turbine makes ppl unhappy and hostaile with this kind of numb grind, i dont know.
Main thing is that ppl are running 1000 time the same stuff, and well, they arent happy.

Working to achieve something
is just not working, as long as rng is invovlved. The rng governers how often you get crystals, big and small. Some ppl grind the grind out of grind, getting nothing.
Some get lucky fast. Okey, lets say that theres store, yes, but iam soirry, trait point grind made me abit hostile, so try to sell me somethingm, right..

Legendary empowerment scrolls.
Thing is, you bought char slots, you unlocked with mithril trait trees, okey, now all that is halfdone until skills are backed up by legacys.
And having classes that really do need multipe sets of legendarys, is a nightmare right now. This is overselling to current customer base, that shows clear signs of rejecting it all together.
So inability to play to the fullest the characters you have bought, leveled, deeded and grinded just because legendarys are unattainable, is not fun, not nice, not sweet. Its bad.

And the mother of all grinds. Essences.
Running 1000 times the same boring to death instas or dailys or whatever,is just boring to death. Not fun, nothing like this. Its just grinding essences.

So working is not gonna get you the most important items anyhow, its RNG, and grind.

All that makes ppl.. how to say it nicely.. theres long time since i heard someone saying nice about turbine. That is not expanding playerbase, there is no word of mouth advertising going on, or if it is, its the wrong way around.
People do come to world chat saying "my friends told me to roll a creep because freep grind is over the top" and asking some advice on classes. Currently, would you give your friend advice to make a new toon in lotro?

I must say, for newcomers, creeping looks like much more reasonable and surely its more of a FUN to play, 45 mins and you are out of gates fighting thru ranks. You are not requiered to run 1000 times to gate and back for 2 weeks or gather slop, or cache some dumb fish, or find some stupid mob. Youre with yur friends in raid havin as much fun as you can. That is the way it suppouse to be!
Not a 3 months of grinding and running in same stupid circles.


Lets cut it short right here.

Ungrind trait points, Make em to be earned in combat, for god sake, not by catering 3 drunkards in bar.

Make crystals, scrolls and essences, golden and blue drop in t1 t2 t3 so ppl would be motivated to bunch up an go and get em.
Weekly runs, i miss em. Not daily daily daily and you get essence of fate by rng. Thats bad and wrong.

And i dont mean that they should not be available by dailys and rng and crafting, by all means. What iam saying is, there should be more ways of getting them, the more the better, who wants does dailys, who wants, run raids, the more the merrier.


All and all. currently the game is too restrictive, pushing ppl towards only one option, the grind, and still having rng ontop of it.

Lets say like this. As paying customer of turbine, i do feel like i am being bullied. And a word of advice for turbine. Do not bullie your customers, if you want to keep em.

The time is running out for this game, seriously. I dont think there is gonna be round 2 of server merges. Ungrind lotro fast, and bring fun back to game. or start planning alternative employment. Pll are not paying for having, no fun.

And iam not even touching the subject of lag and crashing, i expect it to be solved with new harwhere

[Humbabumba]

I will reply to each point you made;

The issue with trait points is null and void in my honest opinion; whilst levelling a character up, everything that you "should" have done whilst levelling contributes to trait points, also prior to the trait point system contributed to class traits themselves. All the class character deeds need to be done as before, same with all the class quests, same with the first 6 books of the moria epic, the same with getting kindred with iron garrison guards. All of this, should you have levelled properly, should have been done - the only issue there is, if you use Turbines sham of a cheat valar box and skip that process. Up until lv85, all trait points are acquired on the "old" system. After that, yes, "Unfortunate" to some, you actually have to play ALL the content to get all those trait points - sorry, I see nothing wrong with this? Yes its unfortunate that turbine are forcing players to play all the content to be the best.... Wait.. Sorry, no thats not unfortunate at all. Thats the way it should be.

Yes I admit, the current instances are getting old, but farming thorog every day to complete your legendary items was no different than farming any prior raid for your armour or your jewellry for weeks on end? When I referred to gearing up, I included essences in what I was saying. Because just having the base jewellry with no essences is not gear. And let me bring this to my earlier point of casual players VS full time end-game players; it is quite easy for "casual" players, to get essences, majors and greaters are easily obtainable, and given the content available to casual players who don't necessarily raid, major and greater essences will do fine in order to complete any of the content that they play. For end-game players, yes, they should be made to grind, and so they should; if you dont like RNG, which I don't myself there are a multitude of other options to getting essences, crafting them yourself, and buying them with gold - quite frankly, if you know what you are doing - gold is "Not hard" to obtain, whatsoever, its easy to make a butt load of gold these days, very quickly. So, just buy your essences, problem solved if you don't want to grind.

Coming onto the subject of characters... Anyone who wishes to continue playing 3-4 alts must come to terms with the reality that these characters are not going to be the best geared as they can be. If you don't come to terms with that fact, you are wasting your time. You can continue playing all of your alts if you want, but these alts would have to be casual characters - pick a main and gear it up. Once you have geared it, move on if you want to. So yes, you can still play all of your characters if you want, just gotta accept a few truths. And in my opinion - an "ALT" character, should never be as good geared, or as good as your "MAIN" character; that is why they are called ALTs and MAINs??

I play a runekeeper as my main character, right now she has 3 sets of fully completed legendary items, a stone and bag for all 3 trait trees. Because she is my main character and as an end-game player I have geared her fully. Yes it was a long, grindy, difficult time to get there, but now that I am there I can sit back and relax and enjoy it, until turbine further advance the legendaries - I don't see a problem there at all?

And convincing new players to join the game. In my opinion turbine offers something for everyone. If you are only interested in PvP with little work, there is creep side, if you wish to play as a freep, in PvP commendations will buy you EVERYTHING... You can buy legendary items, you can buy empowerment scrolls, you can buy armour, essences, your jewellry is easily crafted. I again, fail to see the problem here? I would tell my friends to come and play the game, the hard-core players would stick to it and become the best, the casual players would either stop along the way or just be happy with whatever they managed to obtain along the way / at the end.

The only money turbine gets out of me is the £8.99 I pay a month as VIP, and for loads of other players, that is the same. And quite frankly I am more than happy to continue paying because I enjoy the game and find it fun. To the players who are continuously QQing and complaining about the game, and how turbine are making them "work" to be the best, I tell them - they know where the log out buttons and delete character buttons are.

If you want the best, you must work for it. If you are not prepared to work for it, you will not and cannot have the best. It is a very easy choice.

For too long, within the game it has been possible for every player, to have the very best equipment and jewellry, and legendary items, and for an MMO, this is WRONG level 85 to the first year or so of level 100, everyone could easily have the best stuff. Not every player should have the best stuff, only those players who spend a lot of time playing the game, who are very good at the game, or who have spent ALOT of money on the game should have it. This was the case at level 50 with rift, where by only those players who raided rift had the best stuff - and the same was true all the way up to now. Instead of giving us a raid to GRIND they gave us dailies, and quests to GRIND. There is no difference, except perhaps people do not find dailies, quests as enjoyable as raids... But I say again - no one is forcing you to do them..

Lets go to specifics.
So ppl are fooeld to buy multiple character slots in past, as of now they just cant play em to fullest potential, and thats ok with you?
Well, its not for me. One have bough the slots, put work into em, and now they are taken away for second time. The first time was trait trees, remember?

The last trait point
This is what i am talking about. The minas tirith quest line and after that theres the slayer deed, that is about what i am talking about.
Thats a 450 trolls to grind in pelennor. No fun in my honest oppinion. Great skill needed? Nope. Grind is all it takes. And thats advancing you as a player to play your class how exactly?

Essences.
Easyly obtainable? Not one useful dropped in 4 weeks, do you understand what i am writing here? Its THE RNG all over the place. For some, its easy, not so for others. Thats the main failure here. Stuff that is needed to play effectivly your class is ... decided to handed to you or not to be handed to you by-- RNG. Where here is anythyng related to skill in faintest of ways?
And please, tell m, where i can get crystals for comms, is there remeberance in skirm camp? NO there is not.

The main issue for me is that this sentence "you want the best, you must work for it" is not correct.

The correct sentence goes more or less like this: "if you want the best you have to grind hard and maybe you get something, if RNG lets you".
No matter how many hours i put in, some items are not dropping. Nada, none not one. Back in 85 i saw hunters running around in yellow class items, wearing will jewellry.. much work put in there?
No, lucky rng.

Players choise to play the class should not be imho gated by rng and grind, to get the stuff needed for that class. That is the issue for me. That is why i see ppl returning, and leaving soon again.

[Urwendil]

Turbine officially come out and post a "we hear you" but some people are trying to teach us that there is actually no grind, that we're making it up in our mind because we want everything now!! Brilliant (not). Just base trolling. Ignored.

[Witch0King]

I don't mind the grind however if they toned down earlier content so you could do it for nostalgy's sake I'd be happy. Like aquiring the entire Draigoch set or better yet Orthanc, without the deeds or special medallions. I know I would love this with Moria as I'll never get one of those Watcher tokens which you need for some of the best cosmetic sets in the game.

[Humbabumba]

And lets count now how many bbs one mus trun to barter the crystals, so its a was it 12 crystals per item, 24 as minimum per toon god forbid multiple sets of legendarys then its 48. each is 500 so we end up with 12 000 to 24 000 merits per toon. you get what 100 plus per run. Erm.. id do more gladly 12 skirmishes in 12 mans. all the 3 mans and 6 mans, but they just aint dropping nothing. I saw one rememberance in close 200 thorogs i runned. So thats one toon....

You know what. Do not tell me, turbine, when you are closing servers that unfortunately market conditions bla bla bla segment changed bla bla bla. You are killing it. Slowly.Greatest story in MMO-s Greatest lore. And then you got this.

[Ethrildar]

As much as I agree it shouldn't be roflmode E-Z to uber perfectly gear 7 characters or however many you decide to play. I really strongly disagree with the "it should be a nightmare and it's your fault if you want do it" - so what, we should all just main one character unless we have thousands (literally) of hours to spend gearing them?

Legendary Scrolls:

Thorog run: Including time spend forming the group between each run, getting inside, and allowing a little time since usually it's 20 scrubs and 2-3 decent people:

8 minutes per run.

It takes 2.5 Thorogs per Empowerment scroll.

Each legacy tiers up to 44, which runs to 14 Tiers x 7 Legacies x 2 LIs (per trait line for some classes) x 2.5 Thorogs per scroll = 490 Thorog Runs JUST for the Anfalas scrolls of empowerment. +5 runs onto that for two Delving scrolls. And +X number of runs (maybe 20-30?) for LI experience to stack (very slowly and laboriously) onto this unless you can afford a small fortune on IXP through DA daily silver tokens.

So at 490 Thorogs per character assuming they only use two LIs and not say, 3, 4, 5 or even 6 + how does this work out time-wise? 66.6 hours per character JUST for legendary items.

Faramir's 5slot gear:

If you want to gear that character with supreme essences, for which there are 6 (Faramir pieces) x 5 Slots = 30 supreme essences @100-300g a pop depending on setup. JUST for your armour, if you're one of the 50% of classes with terrible Big Battle jewels, you're in luck, because you can trade some grind for some pure gold spending. If so, you have 2 Bracelets + 2 Rings + 2 Earrings + 1 Neck x 3 + 2 Pocket item slots = 23 essence slots. So between full 5slot and a full set of jewels (which is the easy route lol) you've got 53 + 1 Cloak essence slots. 54 slots.

To earn a full 6-set of Faramirs gear, you're looking at ~6 runs of Ruined City per piece. It's quite simply not possible to properly work out just how long 6 x 6 runs of RC will take, I have done the run in 8 minutes before, and also done the run in an hour before with a scrub group. Not factoring in potentially hours spent actually trying to even find a group for this. You can use 4-slot but we're discussing people who are trying to maximum gear their characters here, not people using lvl 95 skirmish camp Greaters. So lets say an average RC run for someone who doesn't main an OP Warden is 20 minutes including LFF time (I'm being generous here to those saying this isn't a grind) you're looking at 36 x 20 minutes = 12 hours of in-game grind assuming no annoying setbacks, groups unable to complete the run, people leaving/going afk, and that you can actually even find an RC group. You can double the 12 hour figure if you intend to do Sunken Labyrinth and then add another 6-8 hours ish if you chose to do Dome of Stars (+18 hours of LFF).

Current running total: 66.6 + 12 hours bare minimum = 78.6 hours of grind - so far.

Essences:

Essences are a tough one, you might get lucky in doing the immense grind of BBs and get one or maybe two supremes you need, or like me, you'll get supreme parry/fate/power essences 99 times out of 100 drops, which are what, 1 in 3 BBs at best? Outside of this, your options for all but morales are crafting them, at IMMENSE expense, and cost of time as well as the fact that you'll need someone of each craft you need to actually make them for you, so unless you have every crafter (which god forbid anyone should have alts, right? As you said...) you're looking at a heavy cost even to have them made for you + the risk of sending thousands of gold of crafting materials to someone you may not even know.

Because the crafting route is both highly costly and also completely random with regards to time consumption, we'll base the time-cost of a full set of supreme essences on time spent earning marks/meds to buy Empowerment scrolls & sell them for gold to then buy essences with ** I'll note here that I have no idea at current what the best way to properly make gold is, I'm not interested in it really, I'm not very rich and I just want to pvp, so maybe there's some way better way to make gold? If so enlighten me as to how it makes this entire process somehow not an insane grind.**

So, lets say each essence is on average 200g, masteries are usually 280g each on my server, morales are 240-270, so 200g per essence is relatively generous.

54 x 200g = 10,800 gold. My server sells Empowerment scrolls at 60 gold a pop, and it takes 2.5 Thorog runs per scroll as we know:

10,800/60 = 180 Scrolls x 2.5 Thorogs = 450 Thorogs @ 8 minutes per run = 60 more hours.

Current total: 66.6 + 12 + 60 = 136.6 hours of grind.

Virtues:

19 Tiers x 5 Virtues x 1.5 (Tier 1 + Advanced slayers and discoveries) = 142 deeds (Average, accounting for the fact that some of those, at least a quarter, will not be slayers with two or more tiers). Lets say discovery deeds to run around may take 15minutes and slayer deeds take 30 minutes per tier so an hour for each. So 1/4 of the 142 is 35.5 deeds, which we'll assume (generously) are discovery deeds @ 15minutes a pop. Just under 9 hours (8.875) for those. Now lets add slayer deeds @ 1 hour each for both tiers combined. 106 Deeds x 60 Mins = 106 hours of deed grinding. This seems insane, but having done this... I can honestly say I'm not even sure it was this quick. Some deeds were nice and easy like ~20 mins of waiting for respawns in the shire for 90 slugs. Others took far, far longer like the troll deed in Minas Tirith...

So in total our 5 x 19 virtues took us at an educated-guess scenario: 115 hours.

Current total: 66.6 + 12 + 60 + 115 = 251.6 hours in-game /played time.

Alright, so we've covered:

• Essences & gear to slot them in (I've negated to mention the cost for actually buying essence jewels because they're cheap for the most part at like ~100-150g for a full set.
• Virtues
• LI scrolls

What's left to cover:

• Stat tomes
• LI Relics
• LI Star-lits
• Minas Tirith & trait point grind - whilst I do agree if you level up your character properly, i.e. the slow-as-hell way, you'll get *most* of these done whilst levelling, you'll very easily be 100 before you even hit the new Gondor area, let alone Minas Tirith, at which point you're just grinding again at level 100 for trait points, none of these regions are necessary outside of Trait Points. This doesn't even mention the horrendous Big Battle grind to get 200/200.
• Big Battle Jewellery grind if you're one of the 50% of classes that does need them.

Stat tomes:

Lets say most classes only need their main stat + vit stat + fate (everyone needs fate if they intend to fully max their char).

3 x 14 tiers @ an average of ~200g per tier. (Again, average. Some are cheaper and the final 2-3 tiers of every tome cost up to 1k gold each on my server). = 8400 Gold. (lol) - This one here isn't even an estimate, this is quite literally what it's cost me on Warden to cap out Agility, Might, Vit and I'm 1/3 of the way through Fate.

8400/60 Gold per scroll = 140 Scrolls sold. Earning 140 scrolls = 350 Thorogs @ 8 mins/Thorog: 46.6 hours more grind.

Lets add this to the tally:

66.6 + 12 + 60 + 115 + 46.6 = 298.2 hours of played time in game.

This is to max out ONE CHARACTER - This does NOT include trait points, levelling time, Big Battles grind, Big Battles jewel grind, Minas Tirth area, LI relics. All of which I dread to think how long they take, frankly.

So this is 12 solid days of played time in game, at around ~4 hours per day for the most devoted of players that have a life/job, 74.5 days is how long it will take you to max out (neglecting the 3-4 things above) a single character.

In what way is this even remotely reasonable? In what way is this an acceptable level of grind? I play 2-3 and I play more than 4 hours a day, and it's still an absolute nightmare, as someone who likes to play every class, keeping more than 1 character perfectly geared is quite literally impossible for me.

My maths is largely based on best-guess scenarios, my server's average costs for specific items, and also rough expected times for instances. I've been in 2:30 minute Thorogs, and also 20 minute Thorogs, which make up most of the time here.

If you have some better mathematics and are better at it than I am, please go ahead and do your own post clearly making points that show how gearing in endgame lotro to any level of not being a scrub, is actually possible/doable over multiple (2-3-4-5) characters.

Thanks.

TL;DR: If you want to gear 1 character (with only two LIs maxed out on said character and no trait points done) you're looking at nearly 2 months, 2 weeks of work at ~4 hours per day.

Edit: Colours for ease of viewing.

[Rakanor]

The amount of grind introduced with the imbuement and essence systems is way too much.

Before imbuement you'd only need 3 star-lits and around 20 empowerments depending on legacy luck per LI, now we need 4-5x as much. Along with completely losing the ~3.6M ixp we put into a FA LI before imbuing, we then have to get a ton more ixp to reach where our legacies were at before imbuement. While we now get to keep our LIs rather than ditching them and making new ones, we will no doubt have to put at least the same amount of empowerments and star-lits into them as we would into brand new LIs.

With essences you have to grind to get the armour as you would have done at other level caps. Only now you have to grind an additional 3+ essences per piece of gear. Which are from either from BBs with a ton of RNG and usually don't give you an essence you need for your build, or from getting a recipe every other day and there aren't even recipes for every type of essence. Then if you also want to pvp on that character you need another 18 essences.



The grind at level 100 is at least 3x the amount we would have done at previous level caps. This discourages a lot of players from gearing as they would have done previously.


Along with reducing empowerment and star-lit costs as others have mentioned. Essences should have much more sources, especially t2 chests. Should be essences recipes for every type, barter costs for them should also be cut from 50 to 25.

[siipperi]

Okay, so... In my honest opinion, 2 months and 2 weeks of work? Lets look at it this way...

Back in the old days, in which you couldn't barter your armour for marks/medallions and you had to rely solely on the armour coins that dropped from raids for the best armour. With the introduction of weekly locks, depending on your class, you could be looking at a Maximum of 3 months before you could officially get a full set of armour? 12 people being in a raid group, lets say you ran the instance "hopefully" with the same 12 people each week, and each week 1 more person got a full set of armour.

But 3 months Vs 2 months 2 weeks?? The only thing different about this grind is that you are just required to do more to get everything that you need, rather than waiting for the raid locks to be off. AND along side that, we have been at lv100 for a "Very Long" time now, even before the imbuement system was introduced, we had about 10 months or so of being at level 100, in which you should have taken this time to get those trait points on your alts, to max out those Legendary Items that you had. Also can I just point out for some classes it is completely IRRELEVANT to imbue certain weps? For example, a hunters sword? or a guardians tanking sword? There is "little" improvement, if not the weapon actually gets worse as it is with the guardians tanking sword.

There are also a lot easier ways to make gold in the game than selling empowerment scrolls, so if you don't want to farm thorog, there are other options.

Bottom line, as someone who used to play 9 characters back at level 95, yes.. It was hard admitting the fact that some of these classes I was probably never going to get the option to play again because there was such a difficult grind involved, but the satisfaction after completing the grind is wonderful. Being able to look at a full geared character, and go - job well done. If necessary then, start on a different character as I have now done.

I have never said that there is no grind, but I am offering a different view - and in my opinion I do not think it is that bad. As if you see my prior statement; 3 months to acquire just "ARMOUR" under the old raiding system with armour coins, and that itself doesn't include jewellry, or legendary items.

Whats your point? You cant barter armor with marks and medallions now either. Also it's clearly not as big of grind that takes 15-20 repetitions instead of 300. Not every player can play every day and scheduling few days a week to get armor in few months is better than grinding for weeks every day for hundreds of instances. Also how the hell you afford buying empo scrolls for 4 or more characters? 4x3x80x70G is a lot of money...

[infinitewhimsy]

The current level of grind has rendered the idea of geared alts ####ing ludicrous. Which is quite sad, there was a time I was proud to have 1 of just about everything, raid ready and respectable.

Absolutely unthinkable now. And there's no way this is healthy for the games longevity.

Okay, so... In my honest opinion, 2 months and 2 weeks of work? Lets look at it this way...

Back in the old days, in which you couldn't barter your armour for marks/medallions and you had to rely solely on the armour coins that dropped from raids for the best armour. With the introduction of weekly locks, depending on your class, you could be looking at a Maximum of 3 months before you could officially get a full set of armour? 12 people being in a raid group, lets say you ran the instance "hopefully" with the same 12 people each week, and each week 1 more person got a full set of armour.

But 3 months Vs 2 months 2 weeks?? The only thing different about this grind is that you are just required to do more to get everything that you need, rather than waiting for the raid locks to be off. AND along side that, we have been at lv100 for a "Very Long" time now, even before the imbuement system was introduced, we had about 10 months or so of being at level 100, in which you should have taken this time to get those trait points on your alts, to max out those Legendary Items that you had. Also can I just point out for some classes it is completely IRRELEVANT to imbue certain weps? For example, a hunters sword? or a guardians tanking sword? There is "little" improvement, if not the weapon actually gets worse as it is with the guardians tanking sword.

There are also a lot easier ways to make gold in the game than selling empowerment scrolls, so if you don't want to farm thorog, there are other options.

Bottom line, as someone who used to play 9 characters back at level 95, yes.. It was hard admitting the fact that some of these classes I was probably never going to get the option to play again because there was such a difficult grind involved, but the satisfaction after completing the grind is wonderful. Being able to look at a full geared character, and go - job well done. If necessary then, start on a different character as I have now done.

I have never said that there is no grind, but I am offering a different view - and in my opinion I do not think it is that bad. As if you see my prior statement; 3 months to acquire just "ARMOUR" under the old raiding system with armour coins, and that itself doesn't include jewellry, or legendary items.

When did it ever take 3 months to get armor under the old system? That's totally untrue, raid locks weren't that much of an obstacle precisely because of alts, and even without them it didn't take 3 months unless your group used some masochistic loot policy. You could have gotten your ToO armor in 1 day if you wanted. The OD system...hmmm, I'd say a month max if a lot of people need it -- and under the old system the more people who had armor the more likely you were to get it if you don't -- with this new system, you pretty much always need/want resources.

The LI grind, the trait point grind, the Essence grind...you'd have to be insane to seriously play anything other than 1 MAYBE 2 mains now.

[infinitewhimsy]

I was referring to Rift > OD.

If we estimate that your group was extremely unlucky, and was awarded only 1 armour coin per boss, in OD alone, thats only 6 pieces of armour. Generally on the way the DKP system used to work, or if you're kin had another looting policy (I know for our kin it was done on, for which class would it be most beneficial to have? Generally Tank > Healers > CC/Debuff > DPS). With one week raid locks, at 6 armour coins a week... You have 12 raiders? This would take a maximum time of 3 months for every person in that raiding group to get all of their armour pieces. Providing a minimum of 1 armour coin dropped after completing each boss. 12 players, at one week raid locks is 12 weeks... 12 weeks is 3 months? The only difference here is that, you could gear your alts at the same time, where one of your chars had raid locks you could then take an alt if you went again before the locks were up.

And yes, I understand your point... If you want to properly gear/play all of your alts its unthinkable. In my honest opinion I think its better to have players, with 2-3 characters, extremely well geared, and who have a very good knowledge of the class because they've been forced to play it so much to gear it up. Rather than having 8,9,10 well-ish geared alts and not really knowing what you're doing on any of them.

You're listing the absolute worst case scenario, what usually happened was people coordinated what characters they brought based on what people needed, thanks to the viability of alts, and it was not bad at all. That was very typical in my experience.

I honestly prefer the old system because there was less RNG (you aren't guaranteed an essence drop), and the RNG that was in place was also more fun, with rare drops that were instantly usable instead of accumulating pseudo currency in the form of essences and stat tomes. Of course a middle ground would be even more preferable still...as these rare drops became the primary reason for geared players to continue...and sometimes didn't drop after months of raiding.

I've known people who play every single class well. And I've known people who can't play their 1 character. The current system doesn't encourage proficiency, it encourages grind. And there's no need for it to do the former either, when every class in the game has become super linear and generic with the trait tree revamp. How does one learn their class rolling their face in the same BBs or Thorog over and over again? And it should be up to the players to choose what they want to play, competent or not, not the game fundamentally limiting the possibilities.


If there's any argument for the current system, it's that it's very possible to obtain some acceptable amount of stats from armor/jewelry. If you're not bothered by running minors and majors, you can very easily gear a toon with bad essences. But there's no such silver lining for the LI grind, which is plain hideous.

[Frelorn]

Over the past several months we have been reading the feedback from players that in some aspects of the game, the “grind” can be a little daunting, especially for those players who have multiple alternate characters they want to use. Based on that feedback we have decided to make some adjustments to the cost for Scrolls of Empowerment. The changes listed below will be in Update 17.2 which will go live later this month.

New Scroll of Empowerment Costs
Marks: 2541
Medallions: 293
Stars of Merit: 90
Morgul Crests: 3
Dol Amroth Silver Pieces: 20
Gold and Silver DA Tokens: 7G - 20S
East Gondor Silver Pieces: 15
Gift-giver's Brands: 10
Smith's Tokens: 4
Commendations: 1000

This is just one of the things the team has in store for Update 17.2 and beyond. This change along with many others we are looking into, should help alleviate that feeling that some players have about the “grindy” feel to certain aspects of the game.

[grenifk]

I would just like to first start off by stating that, I can completely understand where the majority of the community is coming from in wanting a massive overhaul in what is needed for us to acquire in order to "finish" / "complete" our characters. However in my opinion I don't think there is anything wrong with the current game/system.




In the past, it has been very easy for players to have multiple characters and for all of these characters to be very well geared, in legendary items, gear and jewelry. At level 75, there was the Tower of Orthanc, anyone could get the armour just by Pugging a Tier1 run which was relatively easy, and the jewellry was rather easy to get especially after the introduction of the Great River region. At level 85, a simialr occurance, for the first week or so, First Age symbols mistakenly dropped in T1 version of the Erebor raids, and after completing all the raids on T1, also relatively easy, you could barter for the "lesser" version of the armour, which really held no difference against the "greater" versions. Some people even continued to use the Hytbold set (Yes, do you remember Hytbold? - You remember how long of a grind that took? There was less QQ about that than there has been since we have been at Level 100..). At level 95, you could easily craft everything for the best end-gear equipment, and then just farm BB's for your potential gold jewellry.


However, at lv100 - for which we have now been at for well over a year, turbine has reshaped the game we know. It is no longer easy/possible to have, I'd say more than 3-4 "Well" geared characters, and even less possible to have more than 2-3 completely geared characters. Honestly, I think this is Turbines aim - it means people have to focus more on a single, or two characters, properly, rather than every player being able to pick up and play every class. People should be recognised for how good they are at one-class, not how many geared up alts they have and "can" play. And this applies directly to myself, at lv95 I used to have a well-geared character of each class. I now only play 2 of those 9 characters, because it is too difficult to play the others and have them all "complete", but there is "Nothing" wrong with that at all. For too long, we as a community, have played the game under the "Now" factor. The only difficult part about the game generally used to be waiting for a certain jewellry piece to drop in a raid, or waiting for a First Age Symbol once they had been released; and once you had your symbol, it was relatively easy to, within under an hour complete your Legendary Item, providing you had saved up before the update, which is what most end-game players had done. The game wasn't difficult, everything was relatively easy to obtain, jewellry and armour, once you had the tactics for the raids down, Legendary items if you had just done a bit of pre-planning.


However, the majority of the player base are now in an absolute uproar, because they can't complete their Legendary Items overnight. Oh, boo-hoo. You actually have to work for something? The idea of the Legendary Item system is that, these are weapons that "grow" in power as you do... The more you play, the more they will grow, because you have the option to upgrade them as you can until at last they reach the maximum. The satisfaction of finally reaching the max imbued level on a legendary item is wonderful and feels like a job well done. (The majority of you could take the easy route you know, a lot of legacies don't need to be upgraded past lv35, if you are going to complain this much about it).


We have had no "end-game" content for a while, no substantial raids, and until recently no good PvP action. So, they gave us a grindy system to play with, that seperated the actual players from the casual ones. A casual player can still be good, however they should never be as good as a player who has spent a lot more time and effort on the game. The only way a casual player can now do this, is if they pay for it. And we all know how much that costs.. However turbine are finally listening to their player base, they have revamped PvP and things are a "bit" more balanced, and we are finally getting a new raid!


So, if after reading this post - you still want to QQ about the grind, then go ahead. But in my honest opinion, there is nothing wrong with it.

May i just ask you if you if the only reason you like this grind is to stand "above" others (casual players)? I mean you need to run 1 instance over and over and over again just to equipt 1 character properly (for 2 LIs only, not at least 4 as most classes need to fulill it's role + DPS LI), and all this with the same character same skill, no diversity in runs.

Back then I liked the idea of running a raid while playing a different roles, 1 time healer, next time DPS or tank. It was 1 raid as it is now, but at least I had much more diversity.

As for standing above others we got a world first titles, so in case you like to do that use your brain and finish new raids first. Much better than this mindless grind IMO.

And yes, I understand your point... If you want to properly gear/play all of your alts its unthinkable. In my honest opinion I think its better to have players, with 2-3 characters, extremely well geared, and who have a very good knowledge of the class because they've been forced to play it so much to gear it up. Rather than having 8,9,10 well-ish geared alts and not really knowing what you're doing on any of them.

I don't think the current system encourages people to play their class well, since if you by any chance didn't notice a usefulness of a skill (or misread the tooltip in traits tree) you'll be punished, because it will most probably take another 40 Scrolls of empowerment to change a LI so you'd start using new skill. This happened to me and I didn't even bother changing it, thus still not playing 1 char well.

Over the past several months we have been reading the feedback from players that in some aspects of the game, the “grind” can be a little daunting, especially for those players who have multiple alternate characters they want to use. Based on that feedback we have decided to make some adjustments to the cost for Scrolls of Empowerment. The changes listed below will be in Update 17.2 which will go live later this month.

New Scroll of Empowerment Costs
Marks: 2541
Medallions: 293
Stars of Merit: 90
Morgul Crests: 3
Dol Amroth Silver Pieces: 20
Gold and Silver DA Tokens: 7G - 20S
East Gondor Silver Pieces: 15
Gift-giver's Brands: 10
Builder's Tokens: 4
Commendations: 1000

This is just one of the things the team has in store for Update 17.2 and beyond. This change along with many others we are looking into, should help alleviate that feeling that some players have about the “grindy” feel to certain aspects of the game.

Thanks for the heads up, looking foreward for new datacenter and U17.2 after

[infinitewhimsy]

Over the past several months we have been reading the feedback from players that in some aspects of the game, the “grind” can be a little daunting, especially for those players who have multiple alternate characters they want to use. Based on that feedback we have decided to make some adjustments to the cost for Scrolls of Empowerment. The changes listed below will be in Update 17.2 which will go live later this month.

New Scroll of Empowerment Costs
Marks: 2541
Medallions: 293
Stars of Merit: 90
Morgul Crests: 3
Dol Amroth Silver Pieces: 20
Gold and Silver DA Tokens: 7G - 20S
East Gondor Silver Pieces: 15
Gift-giver's Brands: 10
Builder's Tokens: 4
Commendations: 1000

This is just one of the things the team has in store for Update 17.2 and beyond. This change along with many others we are looking into, should help alleviate that feeling that some players have about the “grindy” feel to certain aspects of the game.

That...is actually really good. Some of them maybe even too good.

Since you're reading this thread Frelorn, can I whine about Gift Giver Brands? They should really be Account wide currency imo, since the First Ages you barter with them are Bind on Acquire...if you can do the Roving Threats required to obtain the Brands, chances are overwhelming that you already have and don't need an FA. I know I'd run them more for alts if this was the case.