Old Skills/ Traits/Stuff That You Miss

[Nimnaur]

Hello everyone,
Which skill(s) or content you miss a lot that is removed from the game?
For example:
I miss that Minstrels could use medium armor
Champion's stances. I like changing stances. Heavy shield for Champion also.
Being able to have/use all skills which not tied to traits. We use to have nearly all skills, traits were another improvement thing.
And
Rising Ire ----> Ebbing Ire upps

Plus Fellowship maneuvers. Wish they were important again in every raid.

Addition after edit:
I miss that CC was meant something not the dps race. (Idea:Maybe add another CC able secondary strong boss so off tank must pull away and make him daze And Aoe dps race must be careful to not break it)
Agro exchance in RoI raid that was so cool.
Do not fall lightning/fire/frost skills of rune keeper which was very important and cool.

[Pavlin]

My champ miss his heavy shield

[JV216]

I'd like to see some of the removed rune keeper frost skills restored...i.e. writ of cold, frozen epilogue.

[Nonde]

The fun and freedom of pre trait line classes. Evade burgs tanking, crowd control and feigned death workarounds etc. Tank-dps-heal is brain dead and BORING imo. Were multiple ways to achieve goals back then limited only by one's tolerance for dying which for many of us was only reached once we had tried every possibility the team could think of as many times as were needed to made sure the strategy could not succeed. I recall one Moria instance where standing at a door was considered an exploit which exemplifies the clash between formula and strategy to me. Formula demands that the only way to succeed is to tank/dps/heal. Strategy requires experimentation and testing and to me discovering that one could avoid damage if stood in a particular spot was just that - using our brains and having the patience to experiment and test out options. Tank-dps-heal is like the British forming lines of soldiers to charge straight in instead of hide behind cover and create alternative strategies for succeeding.

[Mithithil]

Exploit n In an MMO this is where the player(s) devise a solution to a problem that had not previously been forseen by a developer who, professional pride stung, declares this to be an exploit. See also Line of Sight, Pathing and Use of Skills

[Alcatrazz]

So many things I miss....

Synergy effects between the different classes.
E.g. Using Power restoring skills from LM, Cappy or Burg manuevers. Or group responsibility for Tank aggro such as Burg provoke or champ ebbing ire.

And the tanking system in general is absolutely boring. Just taunt to get aggro an you are done...Loved to play tanks especially warden before trait trees and the new system arrived.

Last but not least...to much self heal opportunities for almost every class and traitline. Not a thing that came just with trait trees but definetly getting worse with them.

[Morat]

I miss pre-trait tree aggro management, especially threat leaches on my put-out-to-pasture Warden tank.

[OldMadeOfLions]

Exploit n In an MMO this is where the player(s) devise a solution to a problem that had not previously been forseen by a developer who, professional pride stung, declares this to be an exploit. See also Line of Sight, Pathing and Use of Skills

Cute, but wrong.

If your solution is to stand outside an arena and trivialize a fight by firing arrows at the boss, we don't disallow it because of 'professional pride,' we disallow it because we don't want to encourage everybody to do this. This isn't the dragon on the bridge in Dark Souls.

Idea: maybe we should make a boss that you can't defeat -- he just stands outside the arena and his own archers shoot arrows at you until you die. Not gonna lie, seems pretty good!

(I should probably clarify that we wouldn't do that: part of the deal is that we need to play fair; is it too much to ask players to play fair too?)

MoL

[Harvain]

Cute, but wrong.

If your solution is to stand outside an arena and trivialize a fight by firing arrows at the boss, we don't disallow it because of 'professional pride,' we disallow it because we don't want to encourage everybody to do this. This isn't the dragon on the bridge in Dark Souls.

Idea: maybe we should make a boss that you can't defeat -- he just stands outside the arena and his own archers shoot arrows at you until you die. Not gonna lie, seems pretty good!

(I should probably clarify that we wouldn't do that: part of the deal is that we need to play fair; is it too much to ask players to play fair too?)

MoL

[Seschat]

Hello everyone,
Which skill or skills you miss a lot that is removed from the game?
For example
I miss that Mistrels can use medium armor
Champion's stances. I like changing stances. Heavy shield for Champion also.
Being able to have/use all skills which not tied to traits. Like Oathbreaker's Shame and Shield of the Dúnedain, we use to have skills traits were another thing.
And
Rising Ire ----> Ebbing Ire upps

Plus Fellowship maneuvers. Wish they were important again in every raid.

I miss Rune Keepers as originally marketed: Heal Allies AND Harm Foes.
Being able to swap, mid fight, from competent DPS to worthwhile healer as needed, and back again.

I miss the pre-Ironfold Tutelage of the Brown Wizard: Pets have +3 levels over character.
When pets got enough free Finesse from that to consistently hit on-level enemies, and hurt them enough to keep aggro when you cast something wimpy like Gust of Wind.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Cute, but wrong.

If your solution is to stand outside an arena and trivialize a fight by firing arrows at the boss, we don't disallow it because of 'professional pride,' we disallow it because we don't want to encourage everybody to do this. This isn't the dragon on the bridge in Dark Souls.

Idea: maybe we should make a boss that you can't defeat -- he just stands outside the arena and his own archers shoot arrows at you until you die. Not gonna lie, seems pretty good!

(I should probably clarify that we wouldn't do that: part of the deal is that we need to play fair; is it too much to ask players to play fair too?)

MoL

Crazy idea time: create instances and content that involves problem solving using innovative positioning, skill useage, and puzzle solving instead of boring w-key snoozefest boss fights where the outcome of the fight is mostly decided by random crit luck choosing if people get 1-shot or not.


Many people exploit the game because figuring out how to cheese a boss fight and other stuff is 100x more interesting than the fight itself.

[OldMadeOfLions]

Many people exploit the game because figuring out how to cheese a boss fight and other stuff is 100x more interesting than the fight itself.

My suspicion is that if the instance team didn't have to spend so much time accounting for people trying to skip/avoid the mechanics of their boss fights, they would have more time to develop interesting mechanics. But no: nobody cheeses a boss fight to make it more interesting for themselves. I didn't ping the aforementioned dragon in Dark Souls with hundreds of arrows because it better kept my attention.

MoL

[Snowlock]

My suspicion is that if the instance team didn't have to spend so much time accounting for people trying to skip/avoid the mechanics of their boss fights, they would have more time to develop interesting mechanics. But no: nobody cheeses a boss fight to make it more interesting for themselves. I didn't ping the aforementioned dragon in Dark Souls with hundreds of arrows because it better kept my attention.

MoL

To be fair, if you're asking a six man pug to do 500,000,000 morale off a 2nd of 3 boss, you're begging for people to exploit it.

[Hallandil]

My suspicion is that if the instance team didn't have to spend so much time accounting for people trying to skip/avoid the mechanics of their boss fights, they would have more time to develop interesting mechanics. But no: nobody cheeses a boss fight to make it more interesting for themselves. I didn't ping the aforementioned dragon in Dark Souls with hundreds of arrows because it better kept my attention.

MoL

Saying this unironically meanwhile Naerband is still considered "Working at Intended" despite its god awful design and reward pay-out relative to time/cost.

Draigoch having to be completed on ON LEVEL by players avoiding doing any skill damage on the body AT ALL as Fellowship Manoeuvres pushing into Phase 3 continue to break Boss AI.

Skipping the branching pathways of Woe of the Willow because the "dispelling evil" from slaying fell-spirits does nothing.

---

There comes a point MadeOfLions where you need to stop blaming your audience in some bad design decisions.

P.S. The Skirmish Camp still has wrong level locks for level 65 stuff. The Epic - Helegrod/Annuminas sets were only available from the camp and now cannot be obtained when they're relevant for Legendary Servers.



^You remember these used to be a thing, right?

[OldMadeOfLions]

To be fair, if you're asking a six man pug to do 500,000 morale off a 2nd of 3 boss, you're begging for people to exploit it.

I think what I'm actually asking is for people to play the dungeons at an appropriate tier of difficulty for their group.

Saying this unironically meanwhile Naerband is still considered "Working at Intended" despite its god awful design and reward pay-out relative to time/cost.

I'm not the designer of Naerband, but I do know him, and it's working as he intended it to work: long and difficult. "Why would I play this one when I could play a super fast instance and get rewarded for it?" If you're asking the question then I think you've already answered it for yourself.

There comes a point MadeOfLions where you need to stop blaming your audience in some bad design decisions.

I don't blame you guys for our decisions. I just have the benefit of knowing why a lot of those decisions were made, so I can't get as upset about them as you can because you don't have that added context. It's normal. A lot of the time it comes from wrestling with our engine to get it to do new and interesting things, rather than the type of things it could do in 2005. Bringing it back to my own sphere of influence (because honestly, what business do I have talking about dungeons?), you might wonder why the first two minutes of the Dwarrowmoot chapter in Legacy of Durin has no voice acting. It's because our engine needed time to load in all the voice clips that get played over the course of that instance -- about two minutes. So I had to add in extra drama to let us basically chew up the clock, letting the engine catch up; otherwise it would play all the voice clips at whatever random time it finished, which of course wouldn't line up with the text.

Was it a bad design decision to not have voice acting for half of the drama in the instance? Maybe... but it was also unavoidable: not only was it discovered long after the recording sessions were done, but it's not like a new session would have solved the problem; the new VO clips wouldn't have loaded either. So we made the decision to do it this way. Decisions like this get made every day, dozens of them. Sometimes they're the right one, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes we have new people on the team that are learning new things, and sometimes we have old hands moving on to new opportunities and we need to figure out how they set up the first half of a big and complicated work-in-progress. We do the best we can!

And sometimes we do make bad decisions. Witness me wading in here to complain about people exploiting the boss fights my coworkers make, for example.

MoL

[WeirdJedi]

If your solution is to stand outside an arena and trivialize a fight by firing arrows at the boss, we don't disallow it because of 'professional pride,' we disallow it because we don't want to encourage everybody to do this. This isn't the dragon on the bridge in Dark Souls.

Our kinship understands that boss fights are meant to be challenging. The problem occurs when the mechanics go contrary to what we expect. When do we not remove a debuff or interrupt an encounter? How do you distinguish between a puddle you should avoid and one that you should stand on? How do you know which person a boss is chasing after when their target doesn't change? Raiders may enjoy trying to figure out how to beat an encounter. Casuals do not.

The complexities of the situation are compounded when a fight requires certain classes and gear. If the players have the best gear they can obtain and still cannot withstand the damage dealt to them, then it is only natural for players to try and discover a method outside the usual gaming mechanics. When they find one, then they assume "this is the way to beat the boss." Sometimes these methods don't even reach the ears of the casuals before developers patch up the holes. That's why we applauded the new Raid T1 Story Mode format. For once in our lifetime, we can actually complete a raid when it first comes out.

Sadly, most of the time the boss mechanics just don't work too well when an instance is first released. Sometimes the mechanics get worse when you try to factor in other levels. Reminds me of the story of the Pandemonium Warden from Final Fantasy XI where a team of players spent 18 hours trying to defeat it. The developers had to go back and made it a 2-hour fight at maximum. I know of another story where the boss wouldn't reset after everyone got stuck in the cells during the final fight in Naerband. They found out that a captain could damage the boss by throwing down their banner on the edge of the cell, slowly but surely killing him.

[Hallandil]

I think what I'm actually asking is for people to play the dungeons at an appropriate tier of difficulty for their group.

I'm not the designer of Naerband, but I do know him, and it's working as he intended it to work: long and difficult. "Why would I play this one when I could play a super fast instance and get rewarded for it?" If you're asking the question then I think you've already answered it for yourself.

MoL

Players aren't the ones that gave Naerband and Seregost the exact same loot table despite massively different lengths and involved complexity.

Refusing to take into account Risk vs Reward, especially in an MMORPG is kinda bad gameplay experience design MoL. Sorry but calling it what it is.

For example: Dark Delvings and 16th Hall are the longer and more difficult six-man encounters for Mines of Moria as an Instance Cluster (At the ones at level 60). They also drop the the best Incomparable Rings for that level cap.

[Hallandil]

I think what I'm actually asking is for people to play the dungeons at an appropriate tier of difficulty for their group.



I'm not the designer of Naerband, but I do know him, and it's working as he intended it to work: long and difficult. "Why would I play this one when I could play a super fast instance and get rewarded for it?" If you're asking the question then I think you've already answered it for yourself.



I don't blame you guys for our decisions. I just have the benefit of knowing why a lot of those decisions were made, so I can't get as upset about them as you can because you don't have that added context. It's normal. A lot of the time it comes from wrestling with our engine to get it to do new and interesting things, rather than the type of things it could do in 2005. Bringing it back to my own sphere of influence (because honestly, what business do I have talking about dungeons?), you might wonder why the first two minutes of the Dwarrowmoot chapter in Legacy of Durin has no voice acting. It's because our engine needed time to load in all the voice clips that get played over the course of that instance -- about two minutes. So I had to add in extra drama to let us basically chew up the clock, letting the engine catch up; otherwise it would play all the voice clips at whatever random time it finished, which of course wouldn't line up with the text.

Was it a bad design decision to not have voice acting for half of the drama in the instance? Maybe... but it was also unavoidable: not only was it discovered long after the recording sessions were done, but it's not like a new session would have solved the problem; the new VO clips wouldn't have loaded either. So we made the decision to do it this way. Decisions like this get made every day, dozens of them. Sometimes they're the right one, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes we have new people on the team that are learning new things, and sometimes we have old hands moving on to new opportunities and we need to figure out how they set up the first half of a big and complicated work-in-progress. We do the best we can!

And sometimes we do make bad decisions. Witness me wading in here to complain about people exploiting the boss fights my coworkers make, for example.

MoL

My grip is not with Drama, however I understand the issues some players have with it. My Gripes are with Itemization, which no doubt seems to be a recurring theme with my posts/rants here.

[tanlis]

I'm not the designer of Naerband, but I do know him, and it's working as he intended it to work: long and difficult. "Why would I play this one when I could play a super fast instance and get rewarded for it?" If you're asking the question then I think you've already answered it for yourself.

That's definitely fair. Clearly SSG does review data and makes adjustment to instances when things are out of whack(Eg, HoR boss 2 damage). But then there are times where we see things that don't get adjusted and I think we are confused if that it is intentionally supposed to be behaving that way or SSG doesn't know or doesn't care. Such as HoR boss 3 or the crawler room in Pughlak. I really find the honesty about Naerband refreshing, but it does make me wonder why SSG would want something that is so long and hard and the reward not match the time spent.

Was it a bad design decision to not have voice acting for half of the drama in the instance? Maybe... but it was also unavoidable: not only was it discovered long after the recording sessions were done, but it's not like a new session would have solved the problem; the new VO clips wouldn't have loaded either. So we made the decision to do it this way. Decisions like this get made every day, dozens of them. Sometimes they're the right one, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes we have new people on the team that are learning new things, and sometimes we have old hands moving on to new opportunities and we need to figure out how they set up the first half of a big and complicated work-in-progress. We do the best we can!

Interesting. Is that why there are some weird VO behavior in Shakalush, the Stair Battle's last boss fight with the two headed troll? (Btw, I love this guy and the one in Assault on Dhúrstrok and their interactions)

And sometimes we do make bad decisions. Witness me wading in here to complain about people exploiting the boss fights my coworkers make, for example.

MoL

The majority of us aren't looking to exploit fights, but we are looking for the fights to be fair and to be worth our time.


MoL, on a slightly different note, why do some quests rely on an item that you must have names on in order to know it's there? Instead of using the normal behavior of being able to target a nearby actionable item?

[OldMadeOfLions]

MoL, on a slightly different note, why do some quests rely on an item that you must have names on in order to know it's there? Instead of using the normal behavior of being able to target a nearby actionable item?

It might secretly be an NPC! Sometimes (especially when we want to display a dialogue box or do a slightly more complicated drama behavior of some kind) we use NPCs masquerading as items. There might be another reason that causes this too (maybe the item is really small or has a non-standard physics shape), but my guess is it might be a secret NPC.

MoL

[tanlis]

It might secretly be an NPC! Sometimes (especially when we want to display a dialogue box or do a slightly more complicated drama behavior of some kind) we use NPCs masquerading as items. There might be another reason that causes this too (maybe the item is really small or has a non-standard physics shape), but my guess is it might be a secret NPC.

MoL

Interesting. The most recent ones I'm thinking of is the book in Clovengap and the samples in Asbaj-khîrfin. Are those secret NPCs?

[OldMadeOfLions]

Interesting. The most recent ones I'm thinking of is the book in Clovengap and the samples in Asbaj-khîrfin. Are those secret NPCs?

Yep. The giveaway there is that the target of an emote wants to be an NPC.

MoL

[tanlis]

Yep. The giveaway there is that the target of an emote wants to be an NPC.

MoL

Good to know. Thanks for the insight. Drives me batty when I went looking for the book, but makes sense.

Thanks!

[Hallandil]

Yep. The giveaway there is that the target of an emote wants to be an NPC.

MoL

To push back to thread topic, any comment on the rewards vs length of certain fights?

At least from discussing across the board with other players it has to do with how/when players choose to engage with exploits/strategies in boss encounters.

[Joedangod]

It might secretly be an NPC! Sometimes (especially when we want to display a dialogue box or do a slightly more complicated drama behavior of some kind) we use NPCs masquerading as items. There might be another reason that causes this too (maybe the item is really small or has a non-standard physics shape), but my guess is it might be a secret NPC.

MoL

Great, now I have to be wary of mimics in LOTRO.