Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Lotro: Legendary Trash

Having just dashed through a few levels towards 60 during the bonus XP weekend, I ended up with bags full to bursting, and one type of item in particular stuck out: legendary items. Over 30 of the damn things I have to flog. There is a few problems with that, I'm premium and only have limited AH slots (5 to begin), but did make a purchase of 5 additional ones to see could I move some of this excess stock faster. When I levelled my warden through Moria a year ago, LIs seemed to sell a lot better, but now it's hard to even get 80s for them. Sure there was a surge in prices with update 2, while LIs above 60 still sell for reasonable amounts, before 60 I couldn't give them away quickly enough. My captain alt is running out of vault space with the damn things. I don’t think I'd have it in me to deconstruct them for a measly 1 relic, if it was 4 or 5 tier 1s, I wouldn’t be complaining at all about it.

I wrote previously on the inventory minigame in Lotro and some improvements have been made, plenty of stuff stacks higher (including hope tokens in the next update, finally!), racial armour recipes have become multi-output. Legendary trash remains the biggest annoyance. I would replace all LI drops, dwarf-tools and khuzdul tablets with a single item, say legendary shards/fragments (stack to a 100 of course), and then all the player has to do is bring the right amount to the forge-master and get a level appropriate LI. Crafters could still make LIs but the recipes would have cheaper shard requirements, as they are adding their skills and materials to the pot.

One other point of contention needs to be rectified, just the whole notion that to make the perfect LI, dozens of other need destroying. No really, vendor 20 SMs for dwarf-tools, get lvl 55 LIs, kill one or two lvl 65 mobs, deconstruct, repeat dozens of times and see how many extraordinary relics you end up with, 1 if you are lucky. Sure there is probably better ways to get relics (tier 4 fused relics, as long as you deconstruct and get 2). Then think of the new addition of levelling a LI to 30 then destroying it for a legacy scroll. It's a wonder that any LI remain in Moria at all, by this stage players have stripped it halls clean of anything valuable like a plague of locusts that they typically mimic.

I'll just wait patiently for the LI update that works like the skirmish soldier setup, i.e. you pick the item type, then it's appearance, damage type, damage bonus, legacies, relics, hit construct and out pops a perfect weapon, no need to be levelled (no ranks/tiers). I would have it so the player only needs to acquire the legacy/damage/bonus scroll once, click on the scroll to permanently learn it (not needing to fill storage with a bunch of scrolls). Bye bye scrolls of empowerment. Not holding out hope because the biggest concern the devs seem to have lately is how to occupy players’ time more than any other. I recently thought about putting together a javelin that had mainly minor legacies, thought a moment longer, then shrugged and went to do something more fun.

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