Lotro: Orchalwe's Mission, the best quest-giver ever!

Having spent the last week playing through the new content in Evendim, thought I'd jot down a few impressions. Firstly since I was playing the content on my level 38 captain who had done a lot of the quests before the update and then went back and did the new stuff it might be a bit of a fractured experience than someone with a blank slate and I avoided doing chores for hobbits.

I started at the new quest hub at the colossus, which had the highlight of a quest arc that allowed the player to access the top of the colossus for probably one of the best vantage points in the game. Most of the quests were formulaic but there was a greater use of mini-instances, including a single named mob which has an obvious advantage of avoiding players queuing for the kill.

Moving on to Tinnudir, the player is introduced to Orchalwe, the main protagonist so to speak for the rangers’ storyline. He sends the player first to the 'twilight estates', then Ost Forod, across to the Eavespires, the Way of Kings and finally he joins the player for a trek through Annuminas.

The 'twilight estates' were unused points of interest before, now they form part of a quest chain that gives a bit of insight about each one. The mechanic that leads the player around through each one is a book that automatically bestows and completes the quests as the player works through them. Also there is optional quests to find along the way, which can all be turned in at the end of the journey and don't have follow-ups. It's a nice mechanic and hope to see it more often, it is a nice feeling to be given an item and go out on a quest rather than running out and back with errands.

Ost Forod has a new storyline about a pact between the people of that town and the rangers. Except the story is not that well written. Plenty of sour notes, such as being sent out to kill brigands who used to be described as people down on their luck resorting to plundering tombs. The quest describes the task as chasing them off to protect the 'good' people’s livelihood, except in reality it is kill 10 of them. The main story is no better, it first has the player make good on the rangers promise to supply the townsfolk, and then the second half has the player help the townsfolk fulfil their responsibilities of securing the northern areas. And the player is left to think no wonder the relationship broke down if neither side can be arsed to honour their side of the bargain. In the end this arc reaches a climax on the island of Rantost with the Thief-takers Bane instance, which is now soloable.

There is a short detour to the Eavespires, which I mostly skipped, and the tomb robbers’ story is continued at the Way of Kings, having escaped the carnage the player and rangers inflicted at Rantost they row south and land at the most bountiful tombs in the land and make pacts with the Angmarims. There is a design trend that is evident in at all the quest hubs so far, that of the quest wrapper i.e. one NPC gives an overarching quest that involves the completion of several other quests. It's a nice way of organising quest content for players but it's a little boring to have quests at every hub being doled out that way. On the plus side there is some nice tidbits of lore here and the mini-instances are well used again.

On to what is probably the highlight of the new content for me at least, Orchalwe's Mission. Instead of a whole bunch of NPCs clamouring for attention, there is one quest giver of interest (we'll leave aside those other two old quests that don't lead to much and still have their outdated rewards), who gives the player the ability to call Orchalwe. Orchalwe is a essentially a mobile quest-giver than travels with the player, doling out quests at specific locations and is also a dab hand at killing mobs too, in essence he is the best quest-giver ever.

Besides two quests he gives the player when first summoned, one of which leads the player to six targets spread around Annuminas, there are also 13 optional quests that are triggered in certain areas most of which coincide with the main quest but a few are out of the way. It is a real nice way to encourage the player to explore, I found all the entrances to the 3 instances which I wouldn't have known otherwise especially now with 'instance join' and completed two exploration deeds too.

There is a few negatives, Turbine didn't pay enough attention to the difficulty, most players should be able to take on 3 signatures mobs with Orchalwe and his imba heals, with maybe a few close calls and cooldown use, but there is a few sticking points with patrolling mobs, 4 or more signatures and fast respawns that are impossible. The best solution at present for what is supposed to be soloable quest arc, is let Orchalwe and/or your pet aggro the mobs, run to the quest item, activate it and run away again. Having died a few times trying to get past one point in particular with a named signature, it was particularly galling to find the waypoint is outside the city and ensures a long run back to the action. And finding all 13 optional quests is just crying out for a hidden deed or something, a real missed opportunity.Hope there is more quest-givers like Orchalwe in the future, it does make for a refreshing change, than suffering the useless lumps at say for example Ost Forod.

CoH: Hanging up the tights?

Can't believe it's been a month already, so much for MMO-playing goals. Had a busy month and didn't get to play CoH as much as I set out in the beginning, so much for getting a few characters to level 20. In the end got three characters to level 10-12, and that was only taking advantage of a big play session yesterday with double XP. Did get a little deeper understanding than my first impressions, but only just and kinda undecided if I'll be making a return trip,

One of the biggest problems I had initially was character builds, but since then it's only gotten better. I made a dominator with Earth/Fire powersets, going on recommendations on the archetype forum and had a lot of fun with that, the combination of control primary and damage secondary was a nice playstyle and those two powersets were fun. The brute I'd made without much imput was actually fun as well, though it's hard to go wrong with a high hp berserker. The defender I'd made first was actually starting to be fun when I got him a few more powers, though was having really bad endurance issues. I was just thinking of improving that by boosting stamina and reducing endurance costs of the toggle skills, by making some crafted level 15 enhancements and slotting at least two endurance reduction per toggle power. Didn't get time to test that out, but the fact that enhancements can improve a build like so is a nice feature.

Other than that, I really like the new 'Going Rogue' content and the choice between factions. Though a few of the storylines were a little hard to follow especially returning midway through an arc and trying to remember who Paulo was and why you had to 'kidnap' his father. I did read all the text and dialogue, but still ended up stumped in places, things just not making sense and some occurances were just unexpected, 'but didn't he just say...'. Most of the time it was fine, guess other games don't bother with complex scenarios and like to spell things out, so spoiled in a way. Anyways it was enough to keep me engaged even if it was just trying hard to remember who everyone and the organisations were, and if they were good or bad, or undercover or other.

A few things I didn't realise at first was how you can go undercover and do the opposing factions missions, seems it is as easy as just finding the contacts and accepting their missions, which is easier to do when you've played both sides and been shown where the contacts are located. The other thing that is really nice is that the storyline missions scale to your level when you accept them, I'm not sure how extensive this is but it is giving more options, without danger of outleveling content and being able to experience it all on one character.

So am I going back, not at the moment I think, even though I left plenty undone and mid-action, might give Champions Online a spin first, but done something completely different. On the whole I enjoyed the month playing at superheroes, even though I'm not subscribing for another month I'll be returning some other time to finish the 'Going Rogue' areas. Just in case I took pictures of my heroes, the Earth/Fire dominator is below, which I think is a really cool appropiately themed costume, though maybe a little unoriginal.

CoH: First Impressions

Having recently picked up a complete edition of City of Heroes: Going Rogue in a Steam sale, spent the last week getting to grips with it. It has not being an easy game to begin, but that's probably why I've stuck with it.

First off, character creation is vast and overwhelming and spent a good portion of playtime at the creation screens. A lot more time was spent outside of game on the forums trying to get a feel for what archetypes would be a good fit for me, and how to build them without ending up with a gimp character. The freedom is welcome but with very little in-game guidance it felt a bit daunting. I suppose the counter argument would be just going with the flow and experiencing the game with one character to make better informed choices with a subsequent character. Surprisingly I think Cryptic has the best solution for this when Champions Online goes free to play, to give non-subscribers a pre-set character that would be decent (I hope) for a particularly role and allow subscribers the full gamut of character creation. It's effectively a step by step tutorial on how to build a character for new players just trying out the game, then when they have the experience to fully understand the value of a more free-form character creation then they can subscribe.

For now my solution is to roll a selection of characters to level 20 and see how I feel about them then, it also fits in with my goal of experiencing the hero/villain/praetorian areas. Have picked a brute, defender, dominator and blaster, might add in scrapper and corrupter later if I have time or subscribe for another month, we'll see. But worryingly I already built a defender that was surprisingly squishy, will have to get a few more defensive powers on him to offset that, then again maybe a corrupter who has an inverse role (more damage than buffing) to defender might be a better fit.

I think the biggest difficulty initially was with questing, quest givers? Started in the villain area, worked through first contact (quest-giver), he introduced me to the next contact, when I was done with him I was at a bit of a loss. Maybe I missed something but it took a while to find the area to go next, found another slightly higher area first via the flying transports but what I needed to have done was to get on a boat to the next island. Then when I got there it was a while before I figured out the connection between the broker and the newspaper, I should pay more attention. The hero area I got dropped in after the tutorial had even less pointers, I had to work out the symbol for a contact to know where to go. On the other hand the newer praetorian area is much improved.

Despite these initial hiccups, I think I'm warming to this style of questing, where some contacts need to be found or you need to complete achievements before they will talk to you, oh and the mobile phone to call contacts and hand in quests is a nice idea.

The thing I've most liked about what I've played so far is the new area and the choices that must be made, either to favour the Resistance of the Loyalist faction, it is very nicely done and is definitely tempting to see both sides of the story. Already there has been a very tough decision, whether to take part in a summary execution or to stop it, took a moment of thought to go through with it and remain on the Loyalist side. And seeing as GW2 comes from the same stable I'm expecting similar moral choices, hopefully as good as this one, and better than the hospital versus orphanage choice that seems a bit simple in comparison.

Buying Virtues and Stat Tomes in Lotro

This whole issue has been annoying me for a while, so I'm going to have a rant about it but in a fair and considered way I hope. I don't mind paying for content, but the virtue system is more a barrier to play than meaningful character progression, and here's the kicker a free/premium without benefits is effectively paying twice for such a useless system. First they pay to open the trait slots and then they have to buy the content to earn those traits, double-dipping into the players pocket so to speak. All well and good from a business perspective, but it does take away choice from players if they want to for example tank at high level and the trait Innocence is essential, and most other melee characters would do well to have this one too. To get full ranks of Innocence then a player must do 75 quests in the Shire and buy the Trollshaws and Misty Mountains questpacks to ever have a chance of reaching rank 10. Acceptable for one character but for alts it becomes a chore, I'm starting to see this game as more and more alt-unfriendly for example every alt requires to be kindred with iron garrison guards and complete vol2 books 1-6 too, still no easy feats nowadays.

Despite these misgivings especially now the Store is in effect, I still like the idea of virtues just not the way they are implemented currently. When Turbine released skirmishes and allowed deeds to be completed during them, that was a step in the right direction, the player is doing relevant, rewarding and challenging content and choosing to so over going out in the landscape to kill grey difficulty mobs. I'm a fan of skirmishes and as a premium player own all of them but not all the quest packs, so you can tell which I favour. With content split up now, the design should change to provide multiple ways to earn the same virtues.

I'm all for simplifying the virtues too so that each one just affects a single stat or resistance, so Innocence would be melee defence, Empathy would be armour rating, Loyalty would be vitality etc. At present a tank would take all 3 melee defence virtues and 2 of the armour ratings and maybe some variability depending on encounters. To simplify virtues to affect just one stat, only 2 slots are filled by tanking virtues and then the rest are up to the player to choose depending on the mobs or boss the player is going to be facing, whether wound, poison, tactical, ranged, shadow...

Looking at these now simplified virtues there is 5 that affect the primary stats: Discipline, Determination, Loyalty, Idealism and Wisdom. Each of these increase the particular stat for 30 points, but including the now defunct lesser bonuses on other virtues, it's 50 points more or less for rank 10. That's the same as the adding all 5 stat tomes of one type to your character. But the distinction here is crucial, I see the stat tomes as a no-brainer, you buy them and add them to your character forever more, whereas if the proposed virtue system was implemented there is greater restrictions, it's unlikely that all of them will be slotted and maybe only one or two to shore up weaknesses or as a stopgap until primary stats are maxed. If being able to make those decisions when maximising your character is at the heart of many MMORPGs gear progression, then the stat tomes are nothing more than a money-grab without adding anything to play around with.

Settling in

Ok so the Lonelands quest pack is going to be free with next update, which I found out just after I bought it for 50 points. I won't rail against the bad timing, because for most people paying 50 points now is better than waiting about a fortnight. Although, I don't see the point of giving it away for free, except to assume it is a calculated gambit to get more people invested in their characters and the game, levelling to 20 is too quick and trivial, conversely having to pay (getting in the habit) 50 points sooner is more honest I feel. I absolve Codemasters of any blame, they were only playing catch-up on this price-point which US players had available for much longer, and I'd assume they don't have a 'pricing' department involved in the monitoring of prices and player uptake of items in the store.

In other news Codemasters just gave (all?) former subscribers a free month of VIP because they couldn't find another solution to errors in allotting the appropriate benefits. This probably explains the 2 days extra after launch I'd gotten previously, well if it was intentional, and then when I finally was bumped down to premium I got all the right bonuses, unlike others who just went straight to premium (free) without any benefits. Putting on my cynics hat, this may point to the next update being 2 maybe 3 weeks away, because the benefit of swift travel will be included and to solve the problems once and for all, they need to give this free time til then.

Ah well, always nice to get something free, just goes to show that the settling in period can have ups and downs, now to just avoid the trap of rolling some more alts.

No, no, no... stop with the free points already.

It has happened not once but twice more, but hopefully that's the last of it because it's inflicting a sense of guilt, no guilt is not the right word it's annoyance if all these extra points are taken back. At this stage, I reckon I'll just have to try not to think 'what I'd really like is another skirmish... oh look another 500 points, damn'.

I did actually buy something from the store with my own points, the Evendim questpack for 149 points, even though my alts will only get a few levels out of it, but the 3 scalable instances should be worth it. Except that amount of points is coincidentally very close to those I got by rolling a dwarf on every server and doing the store introduction quest 14 times. Oh well I plan to buy the Lonelands questpack for 50 TP this week, which I can honestly say hand on heart I earned through deeds since the changeover, but is it really worth it? Don't have plans to level up any new characters but I'm hoping the GA instances will be scalable soon and actually permanently owning more of the game is certainly enticing. Still haven't spent any cash that I feel I should really be spending.

Giving away plenty of stuff and guilting players into paying some money in lieu of the time they've spent in game is a great strategy, it works on me anyways, just not in Lotro F2P yet. I've justified plenty of purchases in the past by that train of thought, and about to do the same with cosmetic changes for characters in Guild Wars in a figurative sense of dusting them off and starting to play them again, but funnily enough can't use that same line to justify buying the wedding costumes or any of the other costumes for that matter.

Lotro: F2P and me

Yeah finally was the first thing to say but now having spent a few days as a VIP then premium, still trying to make up my mind on the change. For a start in a case of perfect prescience my sub ended the day F2P went live, except it didn't. For two days I was wondering why I was still a VIP, until finally the weekly maintenance bumped me back down while others who had been erroneously labelled Free went in the other direction.

And there is still the mystery of why I ended up with 2000 points. I know now that I was entitled to 1000 points because I'd managed to get in 2 birthdays (was it really that long; well only been subscribed for 3 months over that period so wouldn't exactly call myself a veteran), 500 pts maybe from being almost VIP when the change happened and after that I'm at a loss. What did I do with these points that I may or may not be entitled, spend them as quickly as possible before they could be taken back. Bought the Siege of Mirkwood expansion, regret it slightly now that there is the possibility that I was entitled to at least some of those points.

Was SoM a good impulse purchase? Well my warden just hit 60 and just headed there for the first time this weekend. I get fed up with questing especially after the drudgery the dwarfs subjected me to for the last month or so, and I see the extra 6 skirmishes as more desirable than the 'quest pack', and well the epic story is going free, and not a big fan of instances myself, so it should be good value for money just taking the skirmishes. On the other hand my list of things I need now that I'm premium would have been covered easily by those 2000 pts: an extra 5 slots in AH, Thievery and Mischief, Ford of Bruinen skirmishes and that's about it, could play happily without anything else right now. Although, I'd probably not be so happy if I'd not been a previous subscriber, but yeah getting free travel back soon.

And finally, I may have found a solution for altitis, having settled on 3 characters now, I deleted all lowbies less than level 20, and with the thought of rolling a new character and to buy them bags, traits, removal of gold cap, content etc being deterrent enough.