PvMP Update and Changes

[Fants_SSG]

Hello all, I’m Fants (aka. Fantus) and I’ve been working part time on PvMP for the past year. In the past, I was on the world building team from Moria -> Rohan and I’ve returned to work on getting PvMP in a better state.

We understand that there are a lot of issues with PvMP in general, but the goal of these changes isn’t to fix everything all at once. We are trying to slowly right the ship in terms of balance and accessibility, while addressing longstanding issues.

The main goal of this update is to level up everything to the new level cap, create viable PvMP gear for freeps that is not PvE centric, and work on quality-of-life changes. In addition to the PvMP changes, there are several statting changes we are still working on - because of this we are planning on pushing the Bullroarer PvMP preview feedback to next week, likely 10/28. All of these changes are slated to go live with the Gundabad Expansion, though the higher level gear will be gated until the equivalent PvE content releases.


Audacity Rework:
Audacity was reworked to both provide more significant bonuses and to make it a soft requirement for PvMP.
We want to move away from having players required to do high end raiding to attain PvMP viable gear.
At the other end of the spectrum, we don't want PvMP gear to be best in slot across the board for PvE, so this is where Audacity comes in.

-Legacy gear will retain its audacity, but it will be suboptimal
-25 Ranks of Audacity added (now 50, from 25)
-Damage bonus is now multiplicative instead of additive, so it will increase all damage
-Damage bonus now scales from 2% to 50% at ranks 25 to 50 (was 1% to 25%, from 1 to 25)
-Incoming Damage reduction now decreased only at rank 25+
-CC duration reduction scales to -60% by rank 31 (was rank 25)
-Monsters are able to purchase audacity up to rank 50 (was 25)

PvMP Gear:
We are introducing several new gearsets to be released in line with PvE content.
These may be purchased from the respective armor quartermasters in Glan Vraig.
Most pieces will have lower stats overall than a PvE ilevel equivalent, however the audacity damage bonus should make up for this.
The base sets are intentionally not itemized perfectly, however higher tier sets have more optimal statting.
The first set is purchasable with Gold, with the higher sets purchased with commendations.
These sets all have audacity on them, the baseline set has 25.
In addition, there is also now audacity jewelry.
PvMP Rank cloaks have been updated to level 140. If you have already purchased a rank cloak, it should automatically update.

PvMP Essences:
There is a new type of essence, called Essences of War, which are PvMP exclusive.
These may be purchased from the Coldfells Quartermaster in Glan Vraig.
These may only be slotted in PvMP gear and can be bought rather cheaply for commendations.
These will be released in waves with PvE content and will be Rank gated.

Bugfixes:
-Fixed an issue where Monster Players could sneak into Glan Vraig
-Fixed an issue where Gaergoth could be pulled into a state where he couldn't attack
-Increased most Monster Player melee skills to have a 5.2m range, to be on equal footing with Free People.
-Fixed several stuck spots, and line of sight issues around Glan Vraig and Gramsfoot

[ConsistentRager]

Hello Fantus,

Glad we finally have a pvp dev. I like the changes based on you post but I have a couple question about the beta. Will the different tiers of armor be rank gated? And will this beta address creep balance as some of the creep class far out perform others such as defiler, ba and warg being the only viable creep classes.

I am super excited to see these changes and this could be what brings me back to playing lotro regularly.

Thank you!

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

As a historically very critical and negative poster on these forums, I will say:

These changes sound fantastic!

Had these changes come half a decade sooner, the community might still be alive right now.

Unfortunately, at this point its going to take a lot more to claw people back, and the new LI changes have thrown in a whole new wrench into the system (freeps having an extra 11 meter range on all their ranged skills, etc). I hear there is more than this, so I remain positive.



A very solid first important step to making PVP playable again.

[Fants_SSG]

Will the different tiers of armor be rank gated?

The initial tiers are not, but the higher tiers will be.

And will this beta address creep balance as some of the creep class far out perform others such as defiler, ba and warg being the only viable creep classes.

All creeps are getting melee range and stat increases, but I didn't have time to take a individual look at each creep class for this update. We plan on tackling the global issues with CC, Healing, and general balance before taking a look at any individual classes.

[venyos]

News looks like beatiful.

Did you hear about Orc Camp \ Elf Camp and rez points re-position, what do you think about it? (old map before Rohan Expansion)

[Fants_SSG]

News looks like beatiful.

Did you hear about Orc Camp \ Elf Camp and rez points re-position, what do you think about it? (old map before Rohan Expansion)

We're aware that most players prefer the older locations, and it's on the list for reversion.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

An important game design philosophy question: What "style" of PVMP will you be balancing and incentivizing things around?

1v1?
6v6?
massive open world mega groups?
distributed open world small group fights?
community events?


all of the above?

I ask because the incentive and balance structure changes done during the last PVMP revamp 8 years ago dramatically shifted the type of action to a kind that almost everyone disliked.

[venyos]

We're aware that most players prefer the older locations, and it's on the list for reversion.

Thank you!

And my last question, why you can't use "Monster Play" buff Requirement for PvMP Gear to lock it in PvE zones ?

[ConsistentRager]

The initial tiers are not, but the higher tiers will be.

All creeps are getting melee range and stat increases, but I didn't have time to take a individual look at each creep class for this update. We plan on tackling the global issues with CC, Healing, and general balance before taking a look at any individual classes.

Hello,

ok thank you for responding.

Yeh i figured you would want to take an over head view before doing specific changes. Well my concern with healing is that currently defilers are a country mile ahead of warleaders in terms of healing. I can post tooltips if you would like. I was not sure if this will get addressed in this beta because it is class balance or because it is healing. There is a similar situation in terms of reavers have trash damage compared to wargs and bas.

Also my major concern is Back doors. We were told they would be removed or turned unusable in combat before but that did not happen. Personally I am in favor of the deletion of backdoors because in their current state they are a get out of jail free card and all the action revolves around them. If they were made into only useable out of combat it would just create a race to the bd to get away form any action.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.

and thank you for your responses!

[Starkorm]

H
We understand that there are a lot of issues with PvMP in general, but the goal of these changes isn’t to fix everything all at once. We are trying to slowly right the ship in terms of balance and accessibility, while addressing longstanding issues.

The main goal of this update is to level up everything to the new level cap, create viable PvMP gear for freeps that is not PvE centric, and work on quality-of-life changes. In addition to the PvMP changes, there are several statting changes we are still working on - because of this we are planning on pushing the Bullroarer PvMP preview feedback to next week, likely 10/28. All of these changes are slated to go live with the Gundabad Expansion, though the higher level gear will be gated until the equivalent PvE content releases.

Any chance you can increase the stack size for freep pots up from 20 each? Is anything going to be done with the class specific relics that can be bartered from the NPCs?

[BlitzKr1eg]

Finally! Great stuff!

What's your take on Heal tagging? I prefer the old system were healing outside of a group/raid didn't give you any renown/infamy, it made roaming much more fun and it didn't award people that were spamming heals all over the place on people that don't need it.

Also on the topic of healing, would you be in favour of a general buff (debuff) that lowered both healing and damage in the moors? I feel that the combat is just way too fast these days compared to the olden days.

Some other concerns are:

Freep consumables (they didn't get an update on the previous update way back in last year

The outnumbered buff, I think it doesn't make much change if your side is heavily outnumbered

The Troll/Ranger, they're still the same as back in lvl 50, maybe a fix here could solve the outnumbered issue?

Also the recent changes to Legendary items will most likely result in freeps being way too OP, maybe a solution to this would be to disable LIs in ettens and instead give freeeps something that can only be used in the moors? Then you won't need to bother about balance changes as the new Legendary system continues to develop over time. Also a separate Legendary system for PvMP would be unaffected by PVE. There are some traceries that might be OP in PVP but not a big deal in PVE.


And finally, remove the backdoors for the love of god...

[Spilo]

Looks awesome, thank you! Couple of questions:

-Incoming Damage reduction now decreased only at rank 25+

Incoming damage is INFAMOUS for being absolutely busted with how it drastically increases in efficacy the higher it goes, along with Tome of Defense/Population Buff/Gift of the Carock, etc.. Will incoming damage across the board be buffed for Freeps, or will it be nerfed and then brought back to normal at the 50 rank?

-Monsters are able to purchase audacity up to rank 50 (was 25)

What does this mean? Additional damage/inc damage reduction? As I mentioned before, additional -inc damage reduction is tricky subject in the moors, and Creeps are already at -40% PLUS they have access to -4% inc damage food (although the Freep usually have that obnoxious Pop Buff).

There is a new type of essence, called Essences of War, which are PvMP exclusive.

Can you share what these will do?


---

I'm working on compiling something of a list of priorities from PvMPers- how likely are these to make the cut anytime in the future? For example, general map design and lag issues seem to be MAJOR issues that aren't addressed in this list.


Thank you again!

[Snowlock]

WB Fantus, I remember you from back in the day.

Question on comms. Will it still be the same 6k cost for higher level items/audacity ranks with the 10k commendation cap?

[Spilo]

WB Fantus, I remember you from back in the day.

Question on comms. Will it still be the same 6k cost for higher level items/audacity ranks with the 10k audacity cap?

Another important question- the comm cost is BRUTAL, especially for Creeps as it's essentially a requirement to run -inc damage food, all three delving pots, Fury Pots, 25% morale pots, etc.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Looks awesome, thank you! Couple of questions:

Incoming damage is INFAMOUS for being absolutely busted with how it drastically increases in efficacy the higher it goes, along with Tome of Defense/Population Buff/Gift of the Carock, etc.. Will incoming damage across the board be buffed for Freeps, or will it be nerfed and then brought back to normal at the 50 rank?

I second this opinion....I would rather see all other numbers adjusted up or down accordingly than rely on the incoming damage reduction crutch that has been holding up PVMP for this many years.

There are so many broken ways to abuse the incoming damage mechanic to get to -100% incoming damage or something close to it, to the point where some freeps can fight 30 creeps and not die:

[Snowlock]

I second this opinion....I would rather see all other numbers adjusted up or down accordingly than rely on the incoming damage reduction crutch that has been holding up PVMP for this many years.

If audacity is the tool to make a blanket adjustment I'm fine with it. Compiling 50 ranks of it doesn't sound very enticing. It seems to me that trying to balance both sides to a middle is much harder than trying to balance one side to the other. I'd rather creeps just got audacity for free with increased ranks added when baseline freep dps is increased whenever meta gear tracks are added. Even if pvp gear is the meta gear track.

[BlitzKr1eg]

a few very quick "fixes! that I think most PVMP players on both sides would agree upon

Remove heal tagging
Remove Back doors
Re-locate EC/OC/Rez points back to their old positions
Remove Auto-flips
Make taking a keep much more difficult and rewarding

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

If audacity is the tool to make a blanket adjustment I'm fine with it. Compiling 50 ranks of it doesn't sound very enticing. It seems to me that trying to balance both sides to a middle is much harder than trying to balance one side to the other. I'd rather creeps just got audacity for free with increased ranks added when baseline freep dps is increased whenever meta gear tracks are added. Even if pvp gear is the meta gear track.

Freep PVP gear must exist as the best option in PVP to allow PVP-focused individuals to play freep.


Without mandatory or semi-mandatory PVP gear, most players are locked out of playing freepside, because they don't have the time to spend a billion hours grinding out the BIS on freepside, especially with how massive the power difference is now in freep endgame raid gear, with some top-end raid sets having more than double the stat density of the next best option.

[Fants_SSG]

Lots of questions, for my own sake I am going to limit responses to what is changing now.

Incoming damage cap is not changing, it was always -30%, but now it will only begin to take effect at audacity 25+
CC Reduction is still limited to -60%, but it caps out at 32 Audacity instead of 25. This is the equivalent of a T2 pvp set.
The new essences function just like the old ones, except these can only be slotted in PvP armor.
Example Subject to Change

With the LI Changes, Cap level changes, and a host of other statting changes, the state of PvMP is going to be a little chaotic for a bit. This is one of the reasons why we want to do a preview on Bullroarer before it goes live, as this is impossible to test locally / internally.

[Snowlock]

Freep PVP gear must exist as the best option in PVP to allow PVP-focused individuals to play freep.

Personally I think it's a mistake. But that ship has sailed. No sense debating whether or not we need the rain if it's already in the forecast.

[Nanganark]

Hello all, I’m Fants (aka. Fantus) and I’ve been working part time on PvMP for the past year. In the past, I was on the world building team from Moria -> Rohan and I’ve returned to work on getting PvMP in a better state.

We understand that there are a lot of issues with PvMP in general, but the goal of these changes isn’t to fix everything all at once. We are trying to slowly right the ship in terms of balance and accessibility, while addressing longstanding issues.

The main goal of this update is to level up everything to the new level cap, create viable PvMP gear for freeps that is not PvE centric, and work on quality-of-life changes. In addition to the PvMP changes, there are several statting changes we are still working on - because of this we are planning on pushing the Bullroarer PvMP preview feedback to next week, likely 10/28. All of these changes are slated to go live with the Gundabad Expansion, though the higher level gear will be gated until the equivalent PvE content releases.


Audacity Rework:
Audacity was reworked to both provide more significant bonuses and to make it a soft requirement for PvMP.
We want to move away from having players required to do high end raiding to attain PvMP viable gear.
At the other end of the spectrum, we don't want PvMP gear to be best in slot across the board for PvE, so this is where Audacity comes in.

-Legacy gear will retain its audacity, but it will be suboptimal
-25 Ranks of Audacity added (now 50, from 25)
-Damage bonus is now multiplicative instead of additive, so it will increase all damage
-Damage bonus now scales from 2% to 50% at ranks 25 to 50 (was 1% to 25%, from 1 to 25)
-Incoming Damage reduction now decreased only at rank 25+
-CC duration reduction scales to -60% by rank 31 (was rank 25)
-Monsters are able to purchase audacity up to rank 50 (was 25)

PvMP Gear:
We are introducing several new gearsets to be released in line with PvE content.
These may be purchased from the respective armor quartermasters in Glan Vraig.
Most pieces will have lower stats overall than a PvE ilevel equivalent, however the audacity damage bonus should make up for this.
The base sets are intentionally not itemized perfectly, however higher tier sets have more optimal statting.
The first set is purchasable with Gold, with the higher sets purchased with commendations.
These sets all have audacity on them, the baseline set has 25.
In addition, there is also now audacity jewelry.
PvMP Rank cloaks have been updated to level 140. If you have already purchased a rank cloak, it should automatically update.

PvMP Essences:
There is a new type of essence, called Essences of War, which are PvMP exclusive.
These may be purchased from the Coldfells Quartermaster in Glan Vraig.
These may only be slotted in PvMP gear and can be bought rather cheaply for commendations.
These will be released in waves with PvE content and will be Rank gated.

Bugfixes:
-Fixed an issue where Monster Players could sneak into Glan Vraig
-Fixed an issue where Gaergoth could be pulled into a state where he couldn't attack
-Increased most Monster Player melee skills to have a 5.2m range, to be on equal footing with Free People.
-Fixed several stuck spots, and line of sight issues around Glan Vraig and Gramsfoot

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ettenmoors Feedback:

First of all, I want to say that these changes sound all well and good, but....

• I think if you can get an armor/jewelry via ''commendations'' it should be just as good as in 75 times, because you can also go on raids with these sets!
  
• Remove or Increase the ''commendations'' cap.
  
• Move the elf and orc camps to their old positions: Elf camp to the south bridge of Hoardale and the Orc camp to the west bridge of Hoardale, I'd rather have a bridge camp than a GV or Gramsfoot camp and wait until you finally get away from the front door.
  
• It should not be possible to go with a PvE raid armor in the Ettenmoors! the other way around it is namely ok to be able to play with an Ettenmoors armor in PvE, because it is at the same time a PvE armor! So finally put an end to this PvE raid equipment in the Ettenmoors!
  
• Ettenmoors equipment rank needs to be lowered, because there are servers where it's hard to get to rank 10 fast! Ettenmoors equipment/essence should be available from rank 1, 6 and 8, but not rank 10 at last time....
  
• Freep's normal melee skills have a maximum range of 3.5m and not 5.2m; AoE skills have a range of 5.2m!

[Thorandril]

I'll post a couple suggestions of my own since you're active here.

Any discussion on ever removing the renown/infamy cap? There's no sensible reason for it to be a hard cap when there isn't an attainable goal after it. I'm not speaking of adding ranks, just removing a cap that doesn't make sense to begin with.

Only combat/dynamic change I'd like to see is skill interupts like clobber/gut-punch/eye-rake, et al all work effectively as interrupts should in a PvP zone. Interrupted skills *should* be put on cooldown, or receive a 3-5 second grace window where you're unable to use said skill again, at least not immediately. Interrupts in this game have functioned as DPS and animation cutting skills almost exclusively since the inception of skill type classifications eons ago.

For quality of life I'd like to see crafting stations in either GV or Ost Ringdyr, since many classes and vocations craft consumables they use in PvMP it makes no sense to have to map out to Bree to make something just to map back. You can buy these stations for your housing instances now, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to craft at a major hub.

[maiki1978]

I see many changes for freeps which given the current circumstances are already too powerful in ettens. Creeps need urgently a boost if they are to keep up with the incoming changes.
Furthermore :

1. Fix the sprint and disappear skill on warg which is often bugged and not working properly.
2. Nerf the healing beorns, we are tired of seeing them running half of the map on full health with 20 creeps behind impossible to kill them.
3. Nerf the coward s fate duration of champs (apply a max 7 sec duration in combat) as the debuff duration is way too long. Oh and assign a pot for it.
4. Cancel the permanent cc of rks. There is no other class or equivalent in the game where u approach a toon and u get stunned 3times/sec
5. Nerf the champs. Nerf their dps outcome, Nerf the sprint duration. Nerf everything about them.
6. Delete osgiliath map. Noone uses the map anymore. Except for you know what purpose ( stay at the borders of the map or on top and check what people actually do, if u r curious to find out)
7. Consider removing the long duration for the drake appearance in DoF.
8. All three bosses in DoF need a considerable boost on morale and damage.
9. Bring back the old gys for lug and tr and the old places for oc and ec.
10. Apply additional buffs for R14 and R15 players.
11. Apply harsh punishments for clubbing players. Perma ban should be the only option.

That s all atm.

Monstreous
Evernight

[Urundus]

These look like some very promising changes, thank you. I hope this will somewhat stabilize the core of PvMP as a (scalable) system.
There's already been plenty of discussion on balance, landscape changes (EC/OC) and general moors mechanics (backdoors, auto flips, zone buffs, etc.), so I'll be skipping this for now. I also do assume these are already on the radar of the team.

A different point I'd like to bring up is renown/infamy gains and distribution over large groups. There used to be a time where point distribution was based on your contribution to a fight and then distributed over all group members involved. Players that were too far away from fights would not gain any points at all, the 80m rule so to say.
This all has been thrown out of the window many years ago with the Rohan update. Now everyone who even tagged the opponent, and to extend anyone within the group of that player (regardless of participating in the fight), will get a base 10% of however many points this opponent was worth.
This means when scaling to large groups (10+) you're essentially printing points out of thin air as anyone involved in the kill, or anyone in a group with a person involved, will gain 10% of the opponents worth, no matter the total amount of players that participated.
This has IMO been a huge contribution to the zerg culture we see today and have seen for years already. There is essentially no downside to scaling groups beyond 10 players as far as point gains go while at the same time overwhelming numbers guarantee you a victory.
It also hurts smaller groups as they are taking more risk, yet gaining about the same amount of point per kill whilst having a lower amount kills per fight. For solo players it's even worse as if a single player with a group tags your kill you see all of your points evaporate and flow to that group.
With the current point distribution system you end up rewarding and actually encouraging the zerg mentality whilst punishing most other group sizes.

From the Rohan patch notes:



In light of the many changes that are going to require commendations I'm afraid that the whole zerg mentality is going to be exacerbated as it will be the fastest and most efficient route to gaining commendations and thus the new gear/essences and audacity ranks.
I'd like to propose to revert the changes made with the Rohan update to the point system. This would promote more small scale action and (with the right landscape changes) across the map for strategic points and objectives such as keeps and outposts.

[Strider5548]

Hello all, I’m Fants (aka. Fantus) and I’ve been working part time on PvMP for the past year. In the past, I was on the world building team from Moria -> Rohan and I’ve returned to work on getting PvMP in a better state.

We understand that there are a lot of issues with PvMP in general, but the goal of these changes isn’t to fix everything all at once. We are trying to slowly right the ship in terms of balance and accessibility, while addressing longstanding issues.

The main goal of this update is to level up everything to the new level cap, create viable PvMP gear for freeps that is not PvE centric, and work on quality-of-life changes. In addition to the PvMP changes, there are several statting changes we are still working on - because of this we are planning on pushing the Bullroarer PvMP preview feedback to next week, likely 10/28. All of these changes are slated to go live with the Gundabad Expansion, though the higher level gear will be gated until the equivalent PvE content releases.


Audacity Rework:
Audacity was reworked to both provide more significant bonuses and to make it a soft requirement for PvMP.
We want to move away from having players required to do high end raiding to attain PvMP viable gear.
At the other end of the spectrum, we don't want PvMP gear to be best in slot across the board for PvE, so this is where Audacity comes in.

-Legacy gear will retain its audacity, but it will be suboptimal
-25 Ranks of Audacity added (now 50, from 25)
-Damage bonus is now multiplicative instead of additive, so it will increase all damage
-Damage bonus now scales from 2% to 50% at ranks 25 to 50 (was 1% to 25%, from 1 to 25)
-Incoming Damage reduction now decreased only at rank 25+
-CC duration reduction scales to -60% by rank 31 (was rank 25)
-Monsters are able to purchase audacity up to rank 50 (was 25)

PvMP Gear:
We are introducing several new gearsets to be released in line with PvE content.
These may be purchased from the respective armor quartermasters in Glan Vraig.
Most pieces will have lower stats overall than a PvE ilevel equivalent, however the audacity damage bonus should make up for this.
The base sets are intentionally not itemized perfectly, however higher tier sets have more optimal statting.
The first set is purchasable with Gold, with the higher sets purchased with commendations.
These sets all have audacity on them, the baseline set has 25.
In addition, there is also now audacity jewelry.
PvMP Rank cloaks have been updated to level 140. If you have already purchased a rank cloak, it should automatically update.

PvMP Essences:
There is a new type of essence, called Essences of War, which are PvMP exclusive.
These may be purchased from the Coldfells Quartermaster in Glan Vraig.
These may only be slotted in PvMP gear and can be bought rather cheaply for commendations.
These will be released in waves with PvE content and will be Rank gated.

Bugfixes:
-Fixed an issue where Monster Players could sneak into Glan Vraig
-Fixed an issue where Gaergoth could be pulled into a state where he couldn't attack
-Increased most Monster Player melee skills to have a 5.2m range, to be on equal footing with Free People.
-Fixed several stuck spots, and line of sight issues around Glan Vraig and Gramsfoot

Welcome and thank you for the post! Glad to have you working on PvMP. My question for you is, as part of your work cleaning up the current PvMP system, can we also please consider bringing PvMP to the legendary servers (Treebeard, Shadowfax, Anor)? Balance certainly doesn't need to be perfect, but as we revamp current PvMP and actually have a resource focused on it, a lot of us would GREATLY appreciate if we can at least have the opportunity to partake in PvMP on the legendary servers. Thank you!