U34 - Monster Play Feedback Thread

[SSG_Orion]

Since there is a host of feedback in the where do we go thread and that thread is meant to be updated as more a roadmap. I wanted to start this thread to better organize, encapsulate and address the myriad concerns arising from the changes introduced to monster play with the Before the Shadow update.

What really changed?

We brought the achievable ratings values for monster players to slightly under cap via corruptions and blessings to put more emphasis on skill buffs and group benefits.

On Balance:

There were some changes to the baseline stats on Monster Players as part of the Before the Shadow update, most were to bring the numbers closer to where they should be across the defensive and mitigation stacking of the upper end of the achievable range. This baseline was moved, partly into the corruption/blessing yields and bonuses.

Additionally, we made adjustments to BPE, resistance, and Finesse values for monster players and players. These adjustments made the number of maddening blocks, parries, evades, and outright resists lower. It also means that opponents will hit more often so the trade is equivalent between both sides of the fight.

Players and monster players can still earn meaningful impact to these stats with temp percentage bonuses, but the variability in whether a skill lands should be much lower.

In general, damage on the monster player side went up and mitigations went down, as ever, this will require more tuning and we will be making changes to bring these numbers closer to where they need to be and we will likely have a patch on this much sooner than later. It will not be part of a hotfix, but a quick follow-on patch, if warranted.

A word of note though, we are not going to make it possible to have best offensive and best defensive base lines or caps for monster player classes. There will always be trade-offs though most of those are built into the classes themselves.

On Blessings & Corruptions:

Blessings are a new addition and the pre-cursor to something a little grander. We expected that there would be hesitance and a reticence with this addition and it is not the final iteration by any means. Blessings are another step on a longer road that we are traveling with Monster Play and will need some tweaking along the way. The final iteration will be a new corruption for your chosen Clan - more on this later in the post.
In the short term, I want to highlight the goals of the different blessings and our approach to creating them.

Ongbúrz

Bruisers, focusing on pure defence. They sacrifice hit, crit, and damage for sustainability as a base bonus. They can make up for those shortcomings by assigning their corruptions into the areas where they sacrifice but they strength and speciality should be sustain.

Blogmal

Healers, focusing on keeping their allies in the fight. They focus on surviving against burst damage and landing their skills on their targets. They are somewhat healthier than other clans, and have pretty average sustained capacity to hit. They have that added bonus of reducing their induction times.

Krahjarn

Ranged, focusin on crit and hitting their targets. The Krahjarn clan, right now, are glass cannon style warriors. Don't expect to stay in the fight long, but they should be able to dish out good sustained and burst damage. They also reduce their inductions a little.

Tarkríp
Scrappers, make their way by being the healthiest, and somewhat survivable of the clans. They are front-liners. They trade burst damage for consistent damage and make it a little easier on the healers when they get into a scrap.

Shelob's Brood
Corrupters, dealing damage consistently and over time, they should consistently make you bleed and maybe bleed even longer. They are not very sturdy as a trade off.

Scara Pack
Ambushers, use consistent burst against their foes and have some mitigation to hopefully maintain for the remainder of their team after their alpha strike.

White Hand
Balanced, as their emissary says they offer a little of everything and for the most part allow the monster player to get right back to where they were before the creation of blessings with the proper corruptions applied.

That's a quick overview on blessings. The purpose is to push the boundaries of a starting creep to be more capable in the Ettenmoors and provide monsters, longer in the tooth, with some base specialization before using corruptions to augment and really specialize what they want to be.

Is it perfect? Nope. Definitely not, and we are not saying that this is done - no more work on it, pencils down we can all go home.

Will they need some revision and modification? Yes. Already planned.

Will they be expanded? Yes and I will explain more on this further down.

Are Blessings one size fits all? Heck, no! Blessings are meant to augment class/race combos and some fit better than others.

It is iteration one on Blessings and we made sure to provide a way for monster players to "get back to even" with the addition - the Balance blessing. This will net you a little damage at the expense of a little mitigation. The values are still higher with this blessing active than releases previous to the patch previous to Before the Shadow.

Expected Changes:

First, we are likely going to make a small addition to every blessing for flat armor value initially removed from armor potions. It's a small generic step for all monster players.

Scara Pack and Krahjarn need a little boost to damage. Compared to other blessings, these are a little lower than they probably should be. So this might make the cut for the update.

From a Free People standpoint - defensive stacking is under review.

Now what?

The Before the Shadow update has been live less than 24 hours and a lot of the initial feedback here is negative. This is not surprising as there has been a lot of significant adjustment that pushed monsters over the free people in the past few patches. We took a half-step back with the inclusion of blessings and need to make some more adjustments to solidify the footing for monster players. We will make some adjustments, they will be minor, in an upcoming patch to assuage some fears and I will tease the next step below.

TLDR;

We made changes and not everyone is pleased. We are listening and already discussing some minor changes to alleviate disparities. With the Balanced Blessing overall statistical balance is equivalent with a change in higher damage output and lower mitigations as there was with the previous patch - with an additional caveat that players and monster players are successfully hitting each other more often.

Monster Clan Allegiances

Disclaimer up front, while the intent is to get these in as quickly as possible, there is no current timeline as to when they will arrive.

The future intent with Blessings is to make them into Allegiances much like the free players have on their side. This new addition would have advancement built in over twenty ranks and provide all monster players access to rank 1 for every clan.

Advancing through the clan allegiance would award: appearances, tribal skills, base damage modifiers against hated races, clan traits and sets that help to make up for clan base shortcomings, new quests, bonus commendations, new potion channels, and class/race based skills per clan.

[-Ben-]

In short - you've begun to realise what a disaster this update is.

Nobody asked for this, please reverse the update.

Up until yesterday PVP was more balanced than it had been in years. We are now at a point where this simply isn't sustainable, yet again. We needed tweaks, not sweeping changes.

Please listen to the players.

[UselessSmurf]

You don't get it through your head. Every feedback has told you these blessings suck, yet you will continue to push it.
People wanted 6 extra corruption slots, the corruptions worked fine for years.

And I doubt people want allegiances, save that sh%t for PvE freepside.

We want a fair playing field to PvMP, you guys are so insufferable with your need to push PvE into PvMP.

The nice buff we recently got has been shot to sh%t for your unnecessary need to tinker and play around with nothing thats broken.

As far as Creeps getting both top end dps and mits, no, thats reserved for the Freeps you covet so much.

[Tarmros]

It is going to need more than minor changes.

Creeps have been significantly nerfed and they were already the weaker side, less dps, less mits and less cc, so the logic of making them weaker whilst at the same buffing freeps escapes me.

We are dead in a handful of seconds now (again) so dps is irrelevant. We don't get to do any.

Freeps have capped mits and phenomenal dps, creeps should too.

The maps change was unreasonable and why you felt the need to increase the cost of pots is beyond me, what were you trying to fix.

Creeps need a significant boost to mitigations to give them the same survivability as freeps and we should have the same dps.

All we want is balance and it needs a hot fix, it really is that bad.

[Kate00]

The run speed boost is going in the right direction except that I still cant catch freeps on horseback or dismount them as a defiler. Even with the store run speed boost which I should not be forced to buy is not enough for me to catch freeps running away. For some reason they are still running as squishy as creeps are now. Except burgs because there are 123456789 of them out at any given time oneshotting whoever they want running in packs.


Give me 6 extra corruption slots and put maps back they way they were. Begging for a hotfix.


Just being honest here ... the amount of freeps that have appeared in creep ooc to tell us we are all bad players and being completely toxic should be enough to tell you this is a disaster.

[Amidor]

Hi,

I have take a long brake from Lotro, i think more then 8 Years.

Now i came back, and i was shocked that is so much grind to get what u want, freep and kreep side.

That cost to much, and players dont have so much time for that grind..... I have 1 house, 3 kids, and i also love lotro (pvp), and its really Impossible to make points in time.

Also the balance sucks really, i dont wanna given negativ feedback, but the older times lvl (50-85) where more balanced as now.

I dont understand the nerfs from the kreeps, and also then pushing it with this new buff?, That make no sense.....

U wonder why so less people play pvmp, huge problem is the grind, and this nonsense of (Wagemut), never need this.

And then its normal that no one playes (solo). But it give players the only play solo, and for this is really hard to get points.....

It is not lucrative for all sites.

To less players, to less points, to much grind, and i dont have refer to the incredible bad Server Performance! , Before years there was no problemes with fight from.more then 50people. Now it crashes from 2-12 players, that is crazy.

I think and i think i am not the only one, that wanna say BACK TO THE ROOTS.

listen to the players in PVMP, pve u can do what u ever meen.....

[SingularityNow]

Orion, I am very unhappy that I'm no longer able to build for a high mitigation tank build and max dps and healing at the same time, and then bring every creep on the map on top of the 12 freeps dumb enough to play in this scenario whenever I want to. Need this addressed asap.

[Hayden102]

Orion, I am outraged at map nerf, I can no longer map in on freeps that are called out and zerg them, I'm frankly absolutely disgusted. Why should I have to wait 10min to do so? Now I have to roam the map in a huge zergball because 10min map?! I am too scared to go alone. I am finding new game, thanks alot.

[Tharvendall]

[Kate00]

Orion, I am outraged at map nerf, I can no longer map in on freeps that are called out and zerg them, I'm frankly absolutely disgusted. Why should I have to wait 10min to do so? Now I have to roam the map in a huge zergball because 10min map?! I am too scared to go alone. I am finding new game, thanks alot.

thats really constructive feedback now see if you can leave gv and go to ec where the action is supposed to be in the middle of the map.

[DSBoomer]

Congrats on killing PVP.....again. Hopefully you guys unf#ck it quick cause I'm taking my money elsewhere if it stays like this.

[J-Moneyforever]

Orion, as a lifelong creep player since U33.2 I demand you revert the changes. My experience went from being in a 24man zerg camping GV and instantly mapping to every solo freep callout every 2-3 minutes. To now being forced to sit in grams with a 24man zerg waiting to map to a solo freep callout only every 10 minutes. Absolutely disgusting changes.

[UselessSmurf]

Orion, I am outraged at map nerf, I can no longer map in on freeps that are called out and zerg them, I'm frankly absolutely disgusted. Why should I have to wait 10min to do so? Now I have to roam the map in a huge zergball because 10min map?! I am too scared to go alone. I am finding new game, thanks alot.

You guys sit at map spawn points waiting to kill that solo creep spawning in, but when you get zerged, you come make a post like this lol. Total Donkeys.

[DickDastardly]

what was the point of BullRoarer ? What was the point of you posting here looking for suggestions as to PVP ? What is the point of this new post of yours ? You havent listened to or taken on board anything said to you . You have done precisiely what you wanted to do . You have once again nerfed creeps .

Why dont you listen to the people paying your wages ? ie us . The lag is bad enough but we have to put up with this absolute garbage as well ? Do you think we like getting 500k hits from chimps running around ? Do you think we like getting sustained dps from Minis of 300k with 450k hits and average hits of 147 K ? Seriously ? Give your head a wobble . The update is not fit for purpose unless you are a freep . Give us the means to defend ourselves properly and stop taking every opportunity to nerf creeps its just a joke .

[b4jet9597]

This update is booty. Revert please. But leave EC/OC. It was literally as balanced as it has ever been and you ruined it. You know you ruined it too that's why you feel the need to make this bs thread. SMALL CHANGES. It's not that difficult. You tossed out this major update with literally 3 beta tests, which hardly anyone plays.

How can you get a good idea of how good or bad a change is going to be when there's like 11 people in the moors on beta and they're all standing at that 1v1 arena.

[Mattgoofi]

Orion, I am very unhappy that I'm no longer able to build for a high mitigation tank build and max dps and healing at the same time, and then bring every creep on the map on top of the 12 freeps dumb enough to play in this scenario whenever I want to. Need this addressed asap.

LOL, a Freep on this post thinking the creeps are/were OK, I won't say what the obvious is. I could troll you hard, but I won't bother, the facts are facts. I went complete mits with my defiler pre-update, and he died fast to 3 or more freeps most of the time. I was "maxed mits" and couldn't out heal, say easily 10 Freeps on my back like Freep bears and RKs do consistently. Chasing a bear or an RK all the way across the map, with 4 or 5 creeps, to not kill it, is soooo fun.

No one could be full mits and full DPS, or full mits and full healing. why do you have to come in here and just make stuff up. Glass always needed heals, and now it's even worse. WLs and Filers don't have DPS if they just heal, and their "dps" stances were sad at best...now, again, they are worse. But pre-update creeps were much better off...still couldn't really kill most champs, hunters had/have too much survivability, RKs, Bears, etc., but we fought beause that update felt like the right direction, we didn't take just a half step back, we took 2 steps back. All you trolls can say is get better, doesn't work that way, sorry.

Our Mits are too low, 40%ish doesn't keep us alive, now when I could max them out previously and STILL die fast. Watching our DPS hit freeps and literally no damage being taken...yes, cry about creeps.
Our DPS is sad. Burgs come in now, ones I could literally kill two days ago, and kill in seconds.
We get our maps, which worked fine for 15 years, taken, but you still get horses? Fixing things that aren't broken.
Forcing us to group, instead of RvR, and taking our mats away from us when in RvR...just ridiculous.
Slowed, use purge, slowed instantly, use a brand, slowed instantly again, use store brand, slowed instantly again and dead. Yeah, there is no DR, no immunity.
Stuns, the same. Stunned to death is common over on creep side.
Now we have these "clans", and corruptions that are horrible. 6 corruptions don't even = 100K mits. So, in the best clan for mits, you get to add a whole 96k of the mit your using with 6 (we still only have 12 slots and they don't stack, unlike virtues). Can barely reach 1mil Mits...not so for the freeps.
DPS, can't reach 30% crit...freeps sure can.

In conclusion, this update heavily favors freeps, and once again, creeps were promised one thing and got another. Either back off the update, or fix the numbers in ALL clans and corruptions. I've played since SoA, and you can try and hide behind points and comms and blah, blah, blah, we all know this is the worst "update" ever.

[Kate00]

Forcing us to group, instead of RvR, and taking our mats away from us when in RvR...just ridiculous.

Forcing healing classes to group was the first mistake in a long list of ones.

[Canarne]

Yesterday my tribe officers called me and other my guys to enter the war after evening meal. As I know many of us denied this call.
I Strongly recommend other honest and noble creeps to support our protest. Not to feed those noise guys at Gram and etc. Better to grab your wife, spend some time with kids and etc
So, constructive feedback. There is only one really constructive feedback i guess: go and try to experience your own update. When I served in Army there were used one good saying: "It was smooth on paper but You forgot about the ravines"
I think even if you are playing a freep side and you are normal person you will not like this stuff.
One of my guys has not good geared burglar and even he is yelling like a monkey in discord voice chat "OMG 700k crit i love it". Yeah, i almost forgot. All my known monkeys asked me to thank you for update. They dont know English enough so they cant do it by themselfs.

Ok, lets read your main message and give you a feedback.

On Balance:

There were some changes to the baseline stats on Monster Players as part of the Before the Shadow update, most were to bring the numbers closer to where they should be across the defensive and mitigation stacking of the upper end of the achievable range. This baseline was moved, partly into the corruption/blessing yields and bonuses.

Additionally, we made adjustments to BPE, resistance, and Finesse values for monster players and players. These adjustments made the number of maddening blocks, parries, evades, and outright resists lower. It also means that opponents will hit more often so the trade is equivalent between both sides of the fight.

Players and monster players can still earn meaningful impact to these stats with temp percentage bonuses, but the variability in whether a skill lands should be much lower.

Finesse/resistance/BPE. In my opinion f you reduce its values then it works worse than before update. As I saw in Combat Analysis I hit really more often and they hit me more often. So whats conclusion? Good for zerg, good for one shotting, bad for interesting clashes. It kills my (and I hope not only my ) interest.
Early I could have 45-55% mits and could have good sirvivety via 10-20% misses and resists on me, now i have the same mits but every hit smashes my head. What should I do to continue enjoy my class?

In general, damage on the monster player side went up and mitigations went down, as ever, this will require more tuning and we will be making changes to bring these numbers closer to where they need to be and we will likely have a patch on this much sooner than later. It will not be part of a hotfix, but a quick follow-on patch, if warranted.

A word of note though, we are not going to make it possible to have best offensive and best defensive base lines or caps for monster player classes. There will always be trade-offs though most of those are built into the classes themselves.

I dont want to be rude but You might to be ffffin kidding me.
You are changing all the meta as I see. Im not that guy who dont like every changes or new stuffs. The reasons of disappointment are in other things, please hear me. First, as I get it, You are changing the game beeing blind by darkness in a room, by feel. There were not reasons to change anything in that way except "I wish it".
Second, lets think together. If you want to give for Monster players only defensive/offensive boosts, what about "Free" peoples? How are they equipped? Do they also need to choose between mit caps or good damage/heals and others? I suppose no. It seems for me that you are creating hunting yard for them and I better will left the game than will support your moves.

Maybe it is better of it is developers will start to give feedback for us? How do they see 1 vs 1 with different classes? How do they see solo questing on Creeps? For example :/

[Sindhol]

What really changed?

We brought the achievable ratings values for monster players to slightly under cap via corruptions and blessings to put more emphasis on skill buffs and group benefits.

Let me stop you right there. That is not what really changed.

What really changed is that you added a quest that awards a 90-hour buff that grants the following:

physical and tactical mastery rating	1 050 000
critical rating	712 000
finesse rating	350 000
physical mitigation rating	304 000
critical defence rating	104 000
resistance rating	130 000
block, parry, and evade rating	259 000
maximum morale increase	+2.5%
damage over time increase	+10%
initial damage increase	+5%
movement speed	+7%

And then six more of these, plus all the adjustment to corruptions. It would have been good to have this level of detail in the patch notes, by the way.

The difference between what you posted and my example matters. I'm reporting on what the update actually did. You're reporting what your goals were, but you gloss over the question of whether you accomplished them. Given that a lot of people think you did not accomplish anything like what you say you did, it is an attempt at framing the discussion in your favour and bypassing the criticism you have received.

I mean, you did start a thread "Opening the Communication Lines", so I'm continuing my feedback on how to ask for feedback.

---

On Balance:

There were some changes to the baseline stats on Monster Players as part of the Before the Shadow update, most were to bring the numbers closer to where they should be across the defensive and mitigation stacking of the upper end of the achievable range. This baseline was moved, partly into the corruption/blessing yields and bonuses.

Additionally, we made adjustments to BPE, resistance, and Finesse values for monster players and players. These adjustments made the number of maddening blocks, parries, evades, and outright resists lower. It also means that opponents will hit more often so the trade is equivalent between both sides of the fight.

Players and monster players can still earn meaningful impact to these stats with temp percentage bonuses, but the variability in whether a skill lands should be much lower.

In general, damage on the monster player side went up and mitigations went down, as ever, this will require more tuning and we will be making changes to bring these numbers closer to where they need to be and we will likely have a patch on this much sooner than later. It will not be part of a hotfix, but a quick follow-on patch, if warranted.

A word of note though, we are not going to make it possible to have best offensive and best defensive base lines or caps for monster player classes. There will always be trade-offs though most of those are built into the classes themselves.

Why would we want less "maddening" blocks, parries, and evades? This was not a stated goal in the update, it was not mentioned in the patch notes, and it was not a popular suggestion on the feedback forums. This sounds like you made up a "purpose" to explain away the problems with the update, or something that you cooked up that--in your mind--is such a good idea that you didn't review it at all. Blocks, parries, evades, and resists are a part of the core game mechanics and you should work with them, not trivialize them.

Nobody asked for "the best offensive and best defensive base lines or caps". We simply want baseline competence, and misrepresenting our position just makes you look bad.

---

On Blessings & Corruptions:

[snip]

That's a quick overview on blessings. The purpose is to push the boundaries of a starting creep to be more capable in the Ettenmoors and provide monsters, longer in the tooth, with some base specialization before using corruptions to augment and really specialize what they want to be.

Is it perfect? Nope. Definitely not, and we are not saying that this is done - no more work on it, pencils down we can all go home.

Will they need some revision and modification? Yes. Already planned.

Will they be expanded? Yes and I will explain more on this further down.

Are Blessings one size fits all? Heck, no! Blessings are meant to augment class/race combos and some fit better than others.

It is iteration one on Blessings and we made sure to provide a way for monster players to "get back to even" with the addition - the Balance blessing. This will net you a little damage at the expense of a little mitigation. The values are still higher with this blessing active than releases previous to the patch previous to Before the Shadow.

The descriptions of the blessings again completely gloss over the important questions.

- Do these blessings actually work for their chosen roles? (About four or five of them don't.)
- Do these roles actually exist? (Well, the "bruiser" role doesn't, that's for sure.)
- Was it a good idea to replace corruptions with blessings? (Well, it certainly wasn't worth the effort.)

You do succeed in making starting creeps more capable. That is a purpose you achieved. However, you cannot use corruptions to "specialize in what [you] want to be". They provide far too little in the way of stats to do so.

---

Expected Changes:

First, we are likely going to make a small addition to every blessing for flat armor value initially removed from armor potions. It's a small generic step for all monster players.

Scara Pack and Krahjarn need a little boost to damage. Compared to other blessings, these are a little lower than they probably should be. So this might make the cut for the update.

From a Free People standpoint - defensive stacking is under review.

No, no, and no. Those are not the problems. Creeps just need higher all-round stats. Scara Pack and Krahjarn DPS is fine, but they are far too squishy. On the other hand, Ongburz needs a mastery buff. Or, you know, just bring back corruptions.

---

Now what?

The Before the Shadow update has been live less than 24 hours and a lot of the initial feedback here is negative. This is not surprising as there has been a lot of significant adjustment that pushed monsters over the free people in the past few patches. We took a half-step back with the inclusion of blessings and need to make some more adjustments to solidify the footing for monster players. We will make some adjustments, they will be minor, in an upcoming patch to assuage some fears and I will tease the next step below.

TLDR;

We made changes and not everyone is pleased. We are listening and already discussing some minor changes to alleviate disparities. With the Balanced Blessing overall statistical balance is equivalent with a change in higher damage output and lower mitigations as there was with the previous patch - with an additional caveat that players and monster players are successfully hitting each other more often.

For the most part, this just sounds like you're trying to trivialize people's negative feedback, but then you do acknowledge that you took a "half-step back", that is, that you made the game worse, for now. I agree, and I'm glad you said so.

---

Monster Clan Allegiances

Disclaimer up front, while the intent is to get these in as quickly as possible, there is no current timeline as to when they will arrive.

The future intent with Blessings is to make them into Allegiances much like the free players have on their side. This new addition would have advancement built in over twenty ranks and provide all monster players access to rank 1 for every clan.

Advancing through the clan allegiance would award: appearances, tribal skills, base damage modifiers against hated races, clan traits and sets that help to make up for clan base shortcomings, new quests, bonus commendations, new potion channels, and class/race based skills per clan.

- Allegiances are badly done and you should stop making them. They are just reputation factions (which already aren't especially interesting), but with a down-graded interface and rank bloat.
- Adding more grind to creepside is also a bad idea. There is not that much to creepside: it's pvp, we fight freeps. Allegiances do not fit there (or anywhere, given that they suck, but okay). You have just finished reducing the grind requirement to become baseline competent (by removing high rank requirements from skills and traits), and now you want to add them right back in? Please don't.
- Adding unique skills and traits to allegiances doesn't sound great either. I could, in principle, see this working, but one of the running threads in SSG development has been to reduce the complexity of the systems to be managed, because you do not have the ability to finesse a complex system. I think this will just end up being another forgotten and unbalanced system quite quickly. I think it is likely that when the dust settles, there will be one "good" allegiance for each creep class. And because that allegiance will determine 90% of your total stats, and a significant portion of your skills and traits, you will have one build per class. Now, I'm not saying that there were many ways to run a spider (say) before, but what little build variety there is will only be reduced by this update.
- Damage modifiers against hated races sounds like a nightmare. You already have lots of trouble balancing all the various creep-freep class matchups, and now you want to throw in race matchups in the mix? See my comment for the previous point: you cannot realistically do this.

Overall, I am disappointed with your response and the direction you have chosen for future updates. This was supposed to be an easy fix, and you have repeatedly been told that it is an easy fix and we just want some baseline stat buffs and utility skills (e.g. debuff clears). After a good first update, you have now set the feedback aside and pushed your own ideas, expanding the PvmP update into something that does not address the original feedback, and on top of that looks to increase grind and reduce build variety. You could also not do all of this, and spend more time revitalizing or rebalancing other parts of the game, instead.

---

For completeness' sake, my feedback from the "Where do we go from here?" thread is included below. I'd put it in a spoiler tag, but the forum doesn't support them.

That is such a disingenous thing to say. As if we haven't been to the tent and as if we haven't compared the blessings and corruptions we have now to the corruptions we had before. We have, and blessings suck. It feels like you assigned stats based on your idea of what fits thematically, rather than what people actually used, want, or need. In short: you did a bad job and you should own it.

There are three things that I think are really wrong.

First problem: The less-important administrative point: the interface sucks, the information you provide sucks, and the system is overall less clear than what we had. The blessing quests don't explain what you're getting out of a blessing. You have accept each of the blessings, detach their respective tooltips, and put them side-by-side on your screen to run a comparison. It's annoying to change corruptions and blessings around simultaneously. Also, freeps can see what blessing you're running and that's honestly a bit stupid. And to top it off, the duration is stupid, too.

Quick Fix: Turn blessings into corruptions. Maybe borrow an "appearance" trait slot, because I don't think all three appearance slots get used anyway.

---

Second problem: Blessings provide wrong stats, creeps stat totals are too low (still!), and blessings are boring and same-y--they don't change the way you play the game at all.

Most obviously, the blessing of the Ongburz provides no mastery! How could you ever think that running without mastery was a good idea? Likewise for all the blessings that don't provide mitigations or finesse. Those are not optional stats. Nobody is a "tank" in the Moors--everyone needs to have some damage and some defense and some healing. And finesse, because your skills need to connect to matter.

The second is the issue of theming. It's pretty obvious that you just designed one blessing per creep class, rather than designing blessings according to different ways to play. That is, in itself, not a good approach. If you wanted that, you should've added stats to the creep "attributes" (damage/health/power/armour/avoidance/resistance).

Why does the spider blessing suck for spiders? (I mean, it sucks for everyone, but notably for spiders.) You realize that spiders have a slow, strangling approach to combat, and rely on a combination of crowd control, power drain (nerfed to the point of uselessness, as well), BPE (via Catch Prey and, until this update, pmit corruptions) and mitigations (via Born of Shadow and corruptions) to survive long enough for their damage-over-time to actually work? Spiders have no KO ability (you can time Lethal Kiss and Virulent Poison to go off at the same time, but you still need to maintain CC for 10+ seconds to prevent freeps from healing back up) and need to stay in the fight for a long time to get kills. Meanwhile, the spider blessing has no BPE and virtually no mitigations! It's actually suited for a glass cannon DPS build, which is a really bad idea in the Moors! So even as a "themed" blessing, intended primarily for the spider play-style, it's a failure.

Quick Fix: Add baseline stats to creep attributes, equal to roughly 10% of the cap per pip (assuming the attribute does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each), replacing the percentage bonuses you get from those. (So five pips in "Avoidance" gets you enough rating to hit 50% of the block/parry/evade caps. It is currently about 1.7% per pip.) Replace Power with Finesse. Damage pips provides both masteries and critical rating. Morale pips also provide incoming healing rating.

Return corruptions to what they were (see below).

Buff racial traits so that they provide roughly 30% of the cap each (assuming the trait does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each). For example, the spider trait "Ancient as the Stars", which provides two stats, would provide 15% of the pmit cap (about 150k) and 20% of the crit def cap (about 250k, valued at 3/4 because critical defence is less useful), which is about 50k and 100k more respectively than it currently grants. Also, add some percentage bonuses to racial traits, because rating bonuses can't help define a character very much (you can only get as much crit def as anyone else if you're only getting +rating).

Blessings provide percentage bonuses to damage, morale, defences, and especially induction duration, attack speed, AoE targets, range, initial damage/damage over time, and so on, so they actually define your role (and they should be based on role, not class). Or just remove blessings, that's also fine.

---

Third problem: Corruptions make up less than 10% of your total stats now. That's far too little to have a significant impact. Some stats can't be obtained at all, now--block/parry/evade, for example. Corruptions are also still a bit boring, and there are a lot of bonuses that don't make sense (any of the power-boosting corruptions). Also, why does finesse grant +%maximum power as set bonus? Not only does it not make any sense, it's an outright insult to give anyone max power at this point. Power is not a stat. Just pretend it doesn't exist.

Quick fix: Return corruptions to what they were (especially the set bonus magnitudes), but with the set bonuses moved to 2 and 4 traits, instead of 3 and 6. Remove the trade-off corruptions and add morale+incoming healing corruptions in their stead. (The morale-for-stuff ones are the only ones worth using, so the trade-off corruptions are functionally morale corruptions anyway.) Slightly buff corruptions so that each corruption provides roughly 20% of a stat cap each (assuming the corruption does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each). For example, a critical rating corruption should provide about 250k critical rating, and a physical mitigation corruption should provide about 150k physical mitigation (15% of ~1m) and 150k each of BPE (10% of 1.5m, valued at about 1/2 because BPE isn't that useful).

---

To sum up: You'd end up with a system where the ~20 attribute pips you get provide about 2 full caps worth of stats, 12 corruptions provide about 2.4 full caps worth of stats, class/race traits provide about 1 full cap assuming you choose to slot them, and blessing are added on top of that.

I currently have (using the White Hand blessing, which offers the most stats) about 2/3 mastery + 1/3 crit + 1/2 resist + 1/2 finesse + 1 pmit + 1 tmit + 1/4 BPE = 4.25 stat caps worth of stats, with three spider stat traits slotted (Ancient as the Stars, Enemies of the First Children, Increased Armour + improved hatchlings). With the system outlined above, I'd get about another stat cap's worth of stats (1-1.5m points of rating extra, plus additional BPE and resist because those would be treated as less valuable), plus the percentage bonuses from blessings and racial traits on top. That'd be a neat buff, but not an outrageous one.


P.S. The troll session play is perfect, but it needs a bit more health regeneration. An extra ~3m in-combat morale regen would be good (morale regen is per minute, so 3m regen is only about 50k healing per second, which basically any freep can out-damage).

[FairySoul]

Monster Player base is massivelly calling a revert of this update, we do not want more feedbacks, we do not want more broken promises, just bring the game as it was three days ago, and stop toying with us.
We do not want this, a thing being said by lots of customers who've been playing here since game release.
Otherwise, our promise is to leave this game, a promise many of us already started.
Orion, your work in this update is far from serious, we can put a more accurate name... comedy, perhaps.
I wanted to ignore the freeps coming here to troll, just a quick reminder to them, creep playerbase is always the one who asks and demands a balanced and fair gameplay, not the bunch of rankfarmers, hugggers or sideswitchers,
is that people, to say it more clear, your own freep partners, those who camped at gv, because you are not able to put some balls and instead of stay at elites line with your hunters or minstrels, make groups or raids. Again saying this clear, those who camps at both, GV & Grams, are the same people for both sides, opportunists who just switch to the winning side (aka. Sideswitchers - Sarcastic Note: all of them are freep players)
Being camped is your choice, there's many ways to leave GV, don't speak to us as we are stupid, you are the stupid here.
Since my very beginnings in this game I loved to roam solo, find few challenging encounters, but, ignoring maps (Another thing who needs a revert), I was called out on freeps OOC by the typical coward who does not want a fight, just farming renown, and in many cases lagging and watching how 10-20... My memory can count to 50 freeps who arrives quick on horses to just beat a simple spider, take your ethics away, freep toxicity is well known along all servers.
Conclussions, you are not the only who tries to play solo, you are not the only who can't fight a duel without being interrupted, and the wheel keeps rolling.
We defended your situation when it was recquired, now you are coming here speaking something like you are the best players. Sorry friends, you are only the greatest mistake ever made by developers, inflated characters, who plays with zero or little effort, and thinks "Hey dude, I'm really good, I'm a pro", no, sorry, you are a bag of ridiculous inflated and OP stats who has been terribly managed and developed along many years, with the only purpose, selling you all another update. That kind got extinct not sure when, but between SoA and Mirkwood times, so far, the remains now are kids who never had a real challenge and took all benefits given to them by uncompetant developers, my last question is... Will Orion address on uncompetant developers list? We are going to watch the results according to what he chooses, 1) Listen to the players. 2) Listen to his ego.
That's all.

[olimaxnik]

So to make it short:

- Combination of blessings and corruptions just don´t work. Much to unbalanced, to weak and also not fixable with some "minor" improvements. Blessings like Skara and Kharjan need hughe improvements. You wrote you don´t want us creeps to be able to cap everything? Tell the Champions, Tell the Beorns which are as overpowered as a class in PvP can be.

- If I slot 6 corruptions of the same type like for e.g Tact mit I don´t wanna get a stupid proc bonus with 5 % Chance to have an increase of my mits for 30%. Why the hell would somebody in PvP which should be purely skill based wants something like this?. It takes the HALF of my Corruptions spots, has low basic stats and as a bonus I get something with a Chance to proc?!?! Isn´t it alraedy enough that I have to gamble for some crits with one of my abilities (which also has a cd) in order to be able to get a chance to activate a heal? Which other freep class has to rely on probabilities in order to be able to activate their heal skills? If i wanna gamble with Probabilities I go to the casino and unfortunately I guess I would spend my money better there than in Lotro.

- Please explain to me the intention of decreasing the amount of Potions which you get for your commodation. Didn´t you say that you want PvMP more accesable to New Players? Guess It is a great idea than to increase the prices of Consumables which are fundamental in order to survive at least a bit longer against the freeps. It already costs an incredible high amount of commodation to get to audacity rank 36, and now you think It´s smart to increase the costs of consumeables?

- The cd change to the maps. Either remove the maps completley and make our speed equal to the freeps or return it to the old cd. The way it is now is a really bad compromise.

- "Monster Clan Allegiances" I´m not sure what your plan for this is, could be nice as long as it is not an endless grind, like we already have to max our audacity. However as far as I made experience with this game, many new Systems are introduced and after a while nobody cares about them...


Really tried to be not sarcastic or offensive (really did) but I just couldn´t hold on it´s a a freaking deasaster. Yes I went to the tent tried the blessings, as I already did in beta, and I tried several of them also in combination with different corruptions and the result is always the same. It´s worse compared to before the patch.

To summarize as some others players already mentioned during the last beta (inlcuding me) this build shouldn´t have gone live but here we are and what a surprise nobody likes it....
After the last patch I was really confident that you are heading into the right direction, and that we finally after YEARS get improvement, but this patch ruined everything. And also based on the numbers of creeps which where online last evening (at least as i percieved it) was much lower than before the patch.
The only thing I´m really Happy about is the Fact, that this time I decided to not prepurchase the expansion, and certainly will not buy it (or anything else) in the near future.

[KurysFlame]

I’m relatively new to pvmp. Got 4 creeps I bounce around between, ranks 4-6. Been fairly involved with the creep community at Crickhollow, which isn’t massive but every now and then has good action. Here’s my experience:

Map/march: I’m actually happy with most of this. The map cd shortens the gap between newer and older characters by making crude maps a lot more usable. Extremely happy Grams isn’t tied to the same cd. Though tying everything else to the same CD is a bit harsh. Perhaps a separate cd starting at poor or good? Or maybe split cd by location, preventing repeated travel to the same general area? March speed was much needed, and it’s understandable that freeps are somewhat faster due to lack of maps. Though War Leader move speed buff is now relatively nerfed. Perhaps this could be changed to freep mount speed?

Blessings: Far too polarizing. I can either do damage with paper defense or hit like a noodle and still have worse defense than before. I believe the direction you seem to be aiming for is good, allowing creeps more versatility in builds to mirror that of freeps. If new creeps can become competitive faster and end progression is horizontal rather than lateral, that would be ideal. As is, new creeps face the daunting task of being extremely weak with the less than motivating goal of still never catching up to the enemy. The blessings are too tilted. They also shouldn’t be visible to others and should be changeable without returning to Grams, either freely or through minstrel item.

Prospected future: As mentioned, I believe it’s good to give more flexibility. I know others have expressed no interest in non-PvP related creep content, but to me it sounds like a cool idea. However, f this is a massive grind for necessary competitive boosts, it’s going to be hell. At least don’t make this into another comm sink. Also, at the moment, blessings feel less flexible. This is partly due to the ability to have decent defense feeling non-existent.

I main weaver. I tested Ongburz w/ offensive corrs and Shelob w/ defensive. I’m paper both ways, taking about 2% more damage on Shelob. Shelob gives about 62% more DoT damage. (Tested tainted kiss ticks on light armor dummy and getting whacked by a slug.) I haven’t yet test other blessings and builds, but considering Shelob is the only blessing w/ a major DoT focus I suspect this falls fast. Unfortunately, I “need” bulk. I need to be mid range to do anything. Before, I was still “squishy,” but I had time to react. Now I can go from full to dying before I can burrow.

Overall, I can see the reason for the complaints. I do like some of the goals you’ve stated, but in the moment it seems like you’ve nerfed the side that really needed a buff. (Also, don’t know if this was changed, but 46 mil health outpost boss? Freeps only have to deal w/ 26 mil health? Did you flip freep and creep side outpost balancing? If this was an accident, it really seems to highlight the difference in capabilities between creep and freep.

[KurysFlame]

- If I slot 6 corruptions of the same type like for e.g Tact mit I don´t wanna get a stupid proc bonus with 5 % Chance to have an increase of my mits for 30%. Why the hell would somebody in PvP which should be purely skill based wants something like this?. It takes the HALF of my Corruptions spots, has low basic stats and as a bonus I get something with a Chance to proc?!?! Isn´t it alraedy enough that I have to gamble for some crits with one of my abilities (which also has a cd) in order to be able to get a chance to activate a heal? Which other freep class has to rely on probabilities in order to be able to activate their heal skills? If i wanna gamble with Probabilities I go to the casino and unfortunately I guess I would spend my money better there than in Lotro.

The proc works a bit differently. it's actually a fear debuff applied to enemies. So in a way, kind of worse, since if you're getting focused it's only reducing one freep's damage. It also can be resisted. Probably can be removed too, but it's just 5 seconds anyways.

[kiriakos009]

i returned to the game after 7 year cause after your effords the pvp was playable, champs and bears could easily gank 2 even 3 creeps ,all freeps have strong selfheal thats hard to outheal (exept warden) but still me and some of my old kinnies returned to the game, cause the game was playable not balanced (playable) big difference . Now its like you either go dmg and get melted in second (hunters in stealth can kill you in miliseconds without even realizing it) or you go with full defences and do #### dmg and with the insane survivability of the freeps you just die slowly without even scratching them.I mean we were still the weak side (rvr was strong) but u34 made us even weaker.Its really sad, i mean we returned to the pvp after such a long time just to quit it in 1.5 month? i Dont know what can be done , buff the corruption ,more slots or remake the blessings. Logging a creep now can easily cause a headache.

[DeadRydd]

Up until yesterday PVP was more balanced than it had been in years.

Again, what he said! (10xover)