And so it is done

With today's update, Tyria has changed significantly.
Many features that have been vocally requested by GW Community have finally been introduced, most - if not all of them - positive, although I can't stop thinking they are at least 2 years late...

Hero parties

One of the most advertised changes to come is the ability to fill up your party with your own Heroes, rising the limit of Heroes a single player can add to a group from 3 to 7.

This feature has been requested by players since Heroes were introduced. While highly disputable (it's hard for me to name an objective that can not be completed by a single player alone now) for making the game a single player online game with co-op mode now, in the end I guess it's a good decision. The population of Guild Wars has declined and it became harder and harder to find a group for some activities, this will ultimately help players.

Mercenary Heroes

An unexpected addition is one to create your own Heroes, based on your existing characters' profession, name and armor look.
While this option requires a purchase of "Mercenary Hero Slots", it caters for other Community requests concerning Heroes - there's always been a need for more Heroes of certain professions, ones that had a better AI/Build combos. Especially now that a player is able to form a party out of their own Heroes, many would desire to have more than 3 Necromancers or more than two Mesmers (Me! Me! Me!).

While I see the mechanicts itself and the linked (one-time) fees reasonable, one characteristics of the new system is hard for me to accept. Namely, the "original" character who was used to create a Mercenary can not use it's own clone to prevent "Clone Wars". While I understand the reasoning behind the decision, the lose and complication involved is bigger than the immerion gain it provides.

Lets say I want to make my Mesmer character a Mercenary Hero because I like to run around with Mesmer Heroes and until now I could only use two.
With how the things are right now, every other char on my account can have 3 Mesmer Heroes except for my Mes herself.
Unless I make 2 Mesmer Mercenaries or use a phony character to create one in the first place...
Same for every other class that I'd find useful.

The problem of Clone Wars is, in my opinion, negligible - we already can have more than one same Hero in our parties (think of 1 Gwen and 5 Vanguard Mesmers in the Deep or in Urgoz) and players ale not really bothered with it - it's a price you pay to use the system. If it breaks your immersion and it's more important for a player to retain it, he will simply not take duplicates.
What's more, the name of a Mercenary Hero can be changed if the original is present much like default heroes' names are already, for example to "[Personality] [Profession]" ("Arrogant Mesmer", "Born Leader Paragon" etc) to further limit the problem.

Also, players can protect themselves from having exact clones if it bothers them - they can change their armor.

I simply find it hard to accept that if I want to be able to use a 3rd Me Hero on every of my characters, I can't register my Main, or I have to register two...

Legendary Defender of Ascalon title change

This is one I am undecided about at the moment.
The main change is that it is no longer required to employ use of an exploid (so-called Death Leveling) to achieve the title (to level a character to 20 in Pre-Searing Ascalon), making the achievement less grindy and - I think - faster and easier to achieve.
Also, a Legendary Defender of Ascalon doesn't have to leave the Pre-Searing anymore to immortalise their achievement (to put it to Hall of Monuments in preparation for Guild Wars 2), they can record it with a Historian in Ascalon.

While I find the second change simply put awesome (the fact that one had to leave Pre to get a monument ultimately ereased the whole effort of leveling a character to level 20 in a starter zone), the change of the title is more difficult to judge for me.

LDoA was always a special title, it did not come out from the developers, it was a reward for the ingenious players that devised a method to do something devs thought impossible. With lots of hard work involved. Thus, it was unique, not to say elite. Hence I see it as sad that this characteristics of the title was removed... I understand however that it made it unobtainable for many players and was widely requested to be changed... A pity the legacy of it will suffer, but ultimately it brings more life to the Pre-Searing community.

My only regret is that I did not finish my LDoA before the update (for boast-reasons ^^) - I am currently 3k short. With the new quests, I should be done in 3 days!

Assorted thoughts

This big update leaves me worried about the release date of Guild Wars 2 as it gives the current game new life, simply put. I can't help but think that all the features - a few years late in their nature - were brought in to artificially prolong the wait time (Survivor, LDoA and Drunkard titles being made obtainable for players who disregarded them for their problematic nature before, for example).
This, the halt of new GW2 features and remaining profession released to the public and the fact that year 2012 is the year of the Dragon in Chinese calendar (with GW2 focusing on mighty dragons' reawaking) in the light of so many epic releases GW2 would have to combat for players this year, I think 2012 is ultimately the best bet for release right now. Regretably.

Calming the Turtle

Some more random thoughts that hit me recently concerning the upcoming changes to Filikul instance, namely the Nornuan becoming immune to Burglar's Enrage.

To those now familiar with the subject, Filikul is an instance with just one encounter, which is basically a DPS race against time: as you are fighting the giant turtle, a DoT builds up on all members of the raid that deals increasing amounts of (HUGE!) damage. To make matters worse, turtle is quite a flesh-hungry beast and he will snap on your tank's flesh, applying another building-up DoT; the two together are so huge that there is no way for any Healer to outheal them, and to keep everyone else alive.

Burglar's Enrage skill is, on the other hand, a completely legitimate way to make a monster... well... enraged, randomly switching between characters in sight, much like those annoying Grims . I'm putting an emphasis on 'completely legitimate' because that's exactly how devs designed this skill years (two years almost?) ago.

As you can imagine, the skill works almost perfectly in Filikul, as Turtle rarely stays on one character long enough to apply more than one lvl on DoT. It does also have it's drawback, Tier I DoTs apply quite commonly on all players, also those squishies that are not made to take it.

My point here is, I completely don't understand why Devs are determined to grant Nornuan this immunity. That's how they designed the skill and that's how designed the encounter (a very very poor encounter imho, too) - blocking one skill because it's too good? It just seems.. lame... and silly. Totally lazy, totally the easiest way. What's next? In-combat rez works too well in raids, let's disable it? Forced taunts work too well for tanks, let's disable them too?

Seriously...
If you don't like the way the elements you've put into the game first interact - without any exploit on player's part! - change your design, and not use an exploit yourself, because it's your fault in first place that you have came up with a design that doesn't match those elements. In short, you screwed up and if you acknowledge it by trying to fix it, do it properly or don't do it at all.

Actually, same goes to Shield Wall. Please be more aware of your own game's mechanics in future...

Loosing heart

I must confess that I'm slowly but surely loosing heart for this game.
For me, the downfall started with Mines of Moria and the unsettling changes that the Devs decided to make to what seems the fundamentals of the game for me.
I have a hard time accepting the amount of grind that sneaked into Middle-Earth Online; in some cases grind with very non-optimistic odds...

The Journey, as leveling is often described in LotRO, is still worth playing, but I personally am all but an alter, so once I've finished mine, what's left out there?

Raiding has been compromised by instancing and the enforcement of radiance gathering. You can not anymore simply gather with friends and go have some high-end gameplay time, first you have to farm the instances to death to equip all those friends and only than you can have a go at boring and badly designed fights - or encounters - that Devs try to make pass as raids. I simply can't imagine why they keep on rejecting the fact that this approach is far too limiting for most players as too time-consuming and in the end simply boring.

Lets do some math to picture the situation better assuming that we have a dedicated static group of 12 people. This means 6 instance runs per player providing that they are all great players that never suffer from fkups and thus each and every run is succesful. This will give us:
Grand Stair: 6x30min = 3h
Skumfil: 6x20min = 2h + 1h to get the key
Forges: 6x40min = 4h
Fil Gashan: 6x1.5h = 9h
16th Hall: 6x1.5h = 9h
Dark Delvings: 6x1h = 6h
This gives 34 hours of initial instance grind per raid member to even get close to Sushi!!!

Turtle Encounter, promised as an encounter that's supposed to help people get geared up for Watcher, fails miserably as such. In this stupid damage race against time and huge acid dot, players that are already geared up have an insane advantage with their better weapons and radiance set offering big acid defense bonus along with all the other bonus stats. Those players don't need the Turtle anymore in the promised sense, they will just farm him for LIs.

And now, with b8 patch we will get more raids where we must counter more dread, which means we have to farm radiance gear anew. I'm thrilled.

I've played many games, starting with asian grindcore and slowly mowing to something more player-friendly. I'm an experienced MMO games, I even graduated and recieved my Master of Arts title for a work on ethics in MMOs. I've always read about declining numbers of players after some unfortunate nerfs, but truth be told I've never seen anything to support that observation: people on forums would write about how their kins are turning into ghost-kins. But in LotRO for the first time I've seen it with my own eyes: forget even my Kin (two actually). But our Raiding Alliance (RrU) used to have 30+ members on channel in the evenings! For few days already, I don't see much more than 10. Same for globallff which I remember scoring around 500 members in the evenings - it's around 200 recently as well.

I hoped to see LotRO as last step in my MMO journey, or at least one of the last. And I always rejected WoW as an ugly, 'jelly' game. But the insanely stupid movements Turbine are doing finally got me to try some WoWing, because I simply can't make myself log into lotRO anymore. What for? Doing 16th Hall for the 50th time? Or reading a book while grinding Fil Gashan for 30th time?

The numbers behind LIs - or how Turbine made our life hell.

There are many threads about the tediuos grind for T8 relics, but virtually none about the actual chance for decent legacies on legendary items (LIs). It has been shown that one T8 relic on average equals the deconstruction of less then 100 lvl2 items, and thus can be earned within a few days.

However, I've come to the conclusion that for some classes, the chance for getting a really good LI within a lifetime approaches zero. The LI system, promoted as character customization, is in essence a lottery with the delusion of customization, and with similar low chances like you favorite RL national lottery.

(Sidenote: Other classes automatically get their dream legacy (DPS), and don't need to care that much about other stuff. I guess for them it's at least 100-10k times easier to find a satisfying weapon...)

First, the basic numbers, taken from experience:
On identification of a LI, 2-4 legacies are completely randomly chosen from 15 possible legacies and 6 qualities (bronze-gold), giving a total of 90 possibilities. When reaching lvl 10, 30, and 50 you can "choose" one additional out of 2 random legacies. (I won't discuss upgrading one of two random legacies on lvl 20 and 40 by 2 tiers here; it doesn't matter much compared to other aspects.)

So what's up with this "customization" upon reforging? If you've been very, very lucky (see below) and got your nearly perfect LI with 4 initial legacies, you probably only need one special, additional legacy. The chances to get this are
up to lvl 10: 1-(10/11)*(9/10) = 2/11 = 18%
up to lvl 30: 4/11 = 36%
up to lvl 50: 6/11 = 54%.

However, we forgot quality. If you intend to max out this legacy and thus want it golden (5 or 6), chances are only
lvl 10: 1-(32/33)*(29/30) = approx. 2/33 = 6%
lvl 30: approx 13%
lvl 50: approx 22% (...and some 12% when heading for pure t6-gold)

Anyone having fun with spending 3 million xp on a blue or yellow item for a 20% chance of NOT being forced to throw it away in the end? I did it twice, failed twice, and lost 50 gold and 2 million xp twice.

That's why we need all of the crucial legacies right from the start. Let's calculate the chances of finding one (the maths are identical to a lottery):

3 legacies of random quality out of 15: 3!/(15*14*13) = 1/455 = 0.2% chance
(That's 500 tablets on average already; but of course we don't want bronze quality!)

3 T4/5/6 = 3 out of 30: 1/4060 = 0.02%
3 golden = 3 out of 45: 1/14190 = 0.007%
3 T6 = 3 out of 90....: 1/117480 = 8.5e-6

4 T4/5/6: 1/27405 = 0.004%
4 golden: 1/148,995 = 6.7e-6
4 T6....: 1/2,555,190 = 3.9e-7

Now for the Jackpot: On the US forum there's a screenie of a 2nd age runestone with exactly those 6 legacies everyone wants for dps, 5 of which are T6. Probability for this is approx.
3.9e-7 * 6% * 9% = 2e-9 = 1 to 475 million.
That's worse than the chance for the jackpot in most lotteries.

How many blue or yellow runestones are found each day per server? 10? 100?
If it's 100 per day, chances are 50% that no other one of similar quality will be found within the next 13000 years :P

Keep in mind that that jackpot-stone *could* have been better. And keep in mind that runekeepers also need a different stone for healing, and at least 2 different satchels.

Good luck people!

Notes:
1. Chances are somewhat better due to upgrading legacies, maybe by a factor 5.
2. On lvl50 one of the proposed legacies is always T6.
3. First age items tend to have primarily golden legacies.
4. I'm no pro, so correct me if I'm wrong somewhere...

Article by cthun
posted on LotRO Europe forums

I must say I was afraid to do the math alone, and - as it comes out - on good grounds. The numbers are horrendous.
Now, adding to all that depressing number, please keep in mind that the Devs are planning to give us a lvl cap rise this year already!
This means that even if you win the 1/145 million lottery now, your dream item will be less that useless within half a year (as their plan goes).
Muahaha. No, not funny. Makes me want to quit.

Someone on the forums suggested that maybe this insane grind is aimed to attract grinder asian gamer community... Even though a joke, it might hold a seed of truth... Why would Turbine care if they lost couple of thousands of Western players, if they could attract million of Asians?