Thursday 4 June 2009

LEGENDARY ITEMS LATEST

In the course of the 3 June developer chat, developers were by and large as wary as ever of making definite statements. However, sorting through the whole transcript, I found that a number of answers addressed the vexed question of Legendary Items, a frequent source of complaints and grumbles. Pulling these together, it seems as though we can expect some positive developments in the near future.

Perhaps most importantly, the devs acknowledged that there are indeed problems with the LI system as it stands today: “Are there any plans for redesigning the Legendary Item system? Completely redesigning it, no. It took a lot of work to get the various systems in place to create the LI system. However, we’re definitely monitoring the complaints and seeing where we fell short with our goals. So in that regard, we’re going to be making some solid changes. The details haven’t been completely solidified yet, but our main goal is to make it feel less grindy, to better maintain the feeling of advancement and progression”.

Other specific promises include a method of resetting the legacy points on a maxed out Legendary Item, to come “very soon”, and the ability to exchange legacies on LIs; the latter is probably more of a mid-term project, since they apparently haven’t decided exactly how to implement it.

On the question of crafted Legendaries, the response was “We definitely want to bring crafters into the LI system more than we have… this is a very large complaint we’ve heard and we fully intend to remedy it” - but no details were provided.

Finally, a crucial detail concerning the upcoming 12-man instance in Book 8 was dropped: “Some very special mobs (please see certain mobs in Dar Narbagud) are completely immune to Common damage”. This is very far from a minor point; if we are to come up against monsters immune to common damage, the implication is that either special weapons or else special titles for weapons will have to be acquired before these mobs can be attempted. So will this in practice turn out to be a weapons equivalent to the radiance armour – i.e., the instance will prove to be impossible without specific items? It certainly sounds like it…

The complete transcript can be consulted on Kill Ten Rats.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

If monsters are immune to common damage, that doesn't really gate anything. Minstrels, Loremasters, Runekeepers can all use tactical/fire/etc damage, and melee classes can all run the Dolven View instances for titles to change weapon damage to Ancient Dwarf-Make.

seanas said...

does this mean that there are ppl running around with legendaries that do *common* damage? surely i'm not the only person who runs dolven-view instances for every leg i want to equip?

i've been bugged that MoM didn't make much use of weapon damage types - far more mobs in SOA were immune or resistant to damage - so i'm very pleased that common is now off the menu for at least a few mobs in Book 8. the Dovlen View instances take 15 mins max, and you can get a Beleriad *and* +dam to orcs from the Galadhrim.

but then hey, my main is a LM, and i want a reason to be using Knowledge of the Lore-Master :).

tl;dr: this isn't a gate, this is an overdue implementation of a forgotten game-mechanic.

Kairos said...

Agreed, this isn't really a gate in the strict sense. However, the scrolls you get from Dolven-view instances aren't that great; the Caras Ghaladon Beleriand scroll is probably the best currently available.

Nalorin said...

This article revisted after the announcement of SoM: I am quite curious about how Turbine will make the LI-system "feel less grindy" and "better maintain the feeling of advancement and progression" with a LI-level cap raise to 60.