LoTRO: Book Ten

Book Ten – The City of Kings is here in LoTRO. I haven’t had a chance to see all the changes yet. Most appealing to me is the new reputation system. WoW has done it already, but LoTRO’s take on it seems promising. As a Hobbit, I ran out to the Shire to start getting rep quests for the Mathom House. They changed the MH itself so it’s now a building that can be entered with the right amount of rep. I remember thinking what a waste of building space it was to have a building that large in the Shire that you couldn’t enter, so I’m looking forward to getting enough rep that I can see what’s in there. Rep quests also exist for groups of rangers, Men, Elves, Dwarves and a couple groups I’m sure I’m forgetting.

There was a lot of buzz on the Burglar forums about how horrible the Burglar changes would be. Turbine implemented a change to Counter Defense making it a percent debuff instead of a total nullification of the block and parry chances and also a change to decrease the power and effectiveness of different conjunctions. The Counter Defense changes didn’t make much difference that much that I could tell. The mobs usually take the debuff in such a way that they can’t block or parry anyway. With regard to the conjunctions, my kinship also ran the last chapter in Book Five last night (fighting a very tough boss) which involved alternating YYYYYY (a very large damage over time effect) and GGGBBB (massive heal, heal over time and near-total power restore for the whole group). It was a very long fight but he conjunctions made it a lot easier and we all lived. The text from the listed changes, however, states that the nerfs would apply to “high end” conjunctions. Perhaps our simple color patterns aren’t “high end” enough? That or the outcome of the changes wasn’t that pronounced.

And, sorry burglars, the swim speed bug has been fixed. No more speedy swim for you. :) It was fun while it lasted, but right is right and it was a bug. Thank GAWD I am no longer questing in Evendim. Given the travel times with normal swimming, if Turbine proposed putting in a catapult which would fire me to the other side of the lake but kill me in the process, I'd take it as long as I could rez where I landed.

Overall, I’m excited to see more of the changes, including the new zone of Annúminas, some of the legendary play changes in the Ettenmoors and, of course, chicken play.

In other news, while I am still enjoying LoTRO, I have reopened my WoW account. LoTRO leveling is slooooow and sometimes it's just nice to fire bomb stuff ala WoW rather than the more subdued combat option LoTRO has. I'm still in LoTRO, but I'll be working on my Ally hunter (and yes, he's a nelf) to see Outlands from the Ally side of things.