Agreed, the 3-man instances in Book 8 are well-designed, fun and repeatable, as well as offering another path to achieving the +50 radiance necessary for squaring up to the Watcher or the +70 essential for the new 12-man raid in Dar Nargubud.
However, one thing puzzles me: these instances drop Elf-stones exchangeable for three tier 1.5 purple armour items with +15 radiance each, a +5 radiance increase on equivalent items from the earlier set. So far, so good; acquire all three and you have a total of +45 radiance. Problem is... radiance rounds downwards, not up, so that +5 is essentially wasted, and +45 in practice becomes +40. In which case, it doesn't take long to work out that it's a waste of effort acquiring all three items, and that if you're only going for two, the ones to choose are the leggings and gloves (at a cost of 4 stones each), rather than the chest-piece (at a cost of 7 stones).
In practice, this means that the best way to exploit the 3-man instances as far as building up your radiance is concerned is to replace the original leggings and gloves (+10 rad each) with the new ones (+15 rad each), giving you an overall increase of +10, and leave it at that. Which makes me wonder whether the developers got their sums wrong in the first place. Why go to all the trouble of creating a three-part tier 1.5 set of radiance armour when only two thirds of it will ever be useful? Indeed, why bother rounding radiance up (or down) at all in the first place? Mysteries, mysteries...
LOTRO Reporter 321 – Chance Thomas Interview
7 years ago
Posts
3 comments:
Maybe they wanted to have radiance piece from the 6-man as an option - I'm sure at least many melee classes will want to grind it seven times or more in hopes of the pretty pocket item.
I remember one of the devs saying something along the lines of "If you get 3 pieces thus 45 radiance, you will have +4 hope. But if we introduce another +15 item in a future update, you will have all 60 from 4 items!"
//Ertana
The idea I believe is to give you more options for getting into the gated 12 man instances.
Now you can have the required radiance for the Watcher without having to get the DD or 16th pieces (the hardest ones to get). 3 +15 pieces plus the +10 boots gives you the 50 you need for the Watcher.
Also you can run DN (the new 12-man) without having any Watcher pieces. If you get all 3 +15 pieces and have 3 old +10 pieces, you have 70 radiance. Or 3 +15 pieces, one +10 piece, and one +20 Watcher piece.
Post a Comment