ONLY IN IT FOR THE LOOT?

Back on the Stateside forums, a vicious little argument erupted on 17 November over the top-end raid loot in Siege of Mirkwood, namely the armour set dropping from the Dol Guldur instance, and raged for two days until the thread was closed. The title given to the thread by the original poster says it all: “If you value raid loot, Mirkwood is NOT for you...”. Well, we already knew (see previous post!) that DG armour will be a visual disaster, but it seems that it’s going to be distinctly poor in terms of stats as well – some posters felt it will be barely better than the full Watcher set. And to add insult to injury, it turns out to be (oh, the shame!) purple rather than teal.

At the same time – and I’m definitely confused as to the thinking behind this - it seems the new SoM legendary weapons will only come in Second-Age flavours. No First-Agers at all. So will a l.60 First-Ager be better or worse than a l.65 Second-Ager? I would guess worse, but who knows?

However, yesterday’s DevChat included a couple of interesting comments about both these issues. In response to a question about the purple DG armour set, dev ZombieColumbus (no, really) responded: “In the past, we have gotten burned by giving out the best possible gear our game could generate with the initial release. This immediately makes itemizing further instances impossible. The advantage of holding back like this, is that the jump between our subsequent raid sets will be more noticeable”.

Dev Jalessa comes in for some very bitter criticism in the forum thread; according to the original poster, “the fault lies not with the instance designers, but with the LOTRO Systems Team, led by Jalessa, which intentionally made the loot weak, ignoring all of the mountains of player feedback begging for desirable raid loot throughout beta”. However, when asked whether “we are to see Teal Armour sets and First-Age weapons in the next book update?”, Jalessa responds with “… level 65 First-Age legendaries will not be available immediately with launch of Siege of Mirkwood. We plan on introducing them in a future update”.

The obvious implication of these two comments seems to be that top-end armour sets and First-Age LIs will both come available later, though still before the next volume – in other words, as part of a Mirkwood expansion. Whether this implies that there will be yet another 12-man raid in the region remains unclear. I rather doubt it, though, given that the one currently implemented ends with the death of the resident Nazgul; I mean to say, how could you top that? On the other hand, will a second (teal) armour set start dropping from the same raid? That sounds equally unlikely. Baffling…

WHITHER LEGENDARIES? WHO KNOWS...

Well, as anyone who was in the least bit interested will have realised by now, Turbine lied - I mean, was economical with the vérité - both implicitly and explicitly when they implied, or even in one notorious case claimed outright, that our legendary items would be with us forever, increasing in potency as we increased in level. So by next month, or a bit later, it's bye-bye l.60 First-Age Bow...

Despite the great number of leaks, official releases, forum posts and dev diaries, there is still much that is unclear or obscure about the future of Legendary Items post-Siege of Mirkwood. One question (or possibly hot potato) which as far as I know nobody has yet addressed, is what will happen to our hard-earned Bright Emblems of Nimrodel, otherwise known as First-Age tokens. It is just conceivably possible that come next month, it will prove possible to trade them in for the new SoM LIs, or perhaps exchange them for whatever barter currency will replace them - but if you believe that, you probably also believe in the Easter Bunny. Turbine has never, in the past, provided an upgrade system for outdated barter currencies, and I don't think they're about to; I mean, how many of us still have chests cluttered up with now thoroughly useless Vile Coins, Rift-iron Coins, Marks of Triumph and the like?

No. If you want my advice, take those Emblems of Nimrodel and run, don't walk, to your nearest class trader and hand them in for whatever level of First-Age LI you can afford, then waste no time shoving it into the Auction House for whatever insane price you can think of. Even though l.59 and 60 First-Agers now have a well-defined sell-by date, there will always be somebody who will pay good gold for them. You'd be surprised. And when you enter Mirkwood with a rapidly ageing First-Age weapon, you'll at least take comfort in also carrying a well-filled purse.

WARNING: The management take no responsibility for the consequences of following financial advice made public in this blog. Gondor's Financial Watchdog says: "The value of your investments can go down as well as up".

A DEARTH OF FIRST AGE LEGENDARIES?

Just before Book 7 arrived, the forums were buzzing with rumours that the much sought-after First Age Legendaries would suddenly become relatively more common, what with drops from the new 12-man raid and from Lothlórien elven gift boxes as well as from the Watcher.

Well, in practice the opposite seems to have happened, at least on the European servers. How can one tell? Simply by the fact that for the last seven days, not a single First Age legendary has been on offer on the Laurelin Auction House - not even those relatively unpopular, or at least not much in demand, Runecaster and Warden items which had been most in evidence earlier.

This confirms the widely remarked fact that the (very expensive) gift boxes usually, if not nearly always, prove a disappointment. They do, however, sometimes come across; I recently witnessed the jubilant discovery of a l.60 Captain's greatsword by one lucky player. But a poor drop rate from the new gift boxes doesn't explain why fewer items overall should be turning up compared to pre-Book 7 days. The answer, I think, must lie in the fact that the Watcher raid has been modified and made considerably harder - the result being that Watcher (Mark II) kills are still extremely rare, resulting in few if any First Age legendaries from that source.

PRICING LEGENDARIES

The price of top l.60 Second and First-Age legendaries is a matter of consuming interest to most advanced players, but the market is still extremely unsettled; sellers tend to be wildly optimistic, but buyers remain cautious. Apart from anything else, we still don't know enough about drop rates. The first image in this post, taken from the Laurelin AH, shows prices for three typical Second-Age legendaries (I am considering l.60s only; anything else is a stop-gap). The cheapest item is an identified Rune-Keeper' stone with five legacies, offered at an opening price of 15G with no offers as yet. In my opinion, this is far too expensive in view of the very limited demand for top-end RK and Warden equipment - after all, how many of these classes have reached l.60? Next is an unidentified Loremaster's staff, opening price 45G, buyout 70G - ridiculous on the face of it for an unidentified item, but a rich LM might just possibly take a flutter with a first bid. Finally, an unidentified Hunter's Bow, with no buyout and a current bid of 74.5G. This is the highest price I have yet seen offered for a Hunter Bow, and merely confirms the widely held belief that top-end Hunter gear continues to fetch the highest possible prices. I would argue that just under 75G is way over the top for an unidentified item (remember I acquired mine for 30G), but at least two Hunters disagree with me, and the market is king.

Turning now to Firs- Age items, which are beginning to appear on the AH with greater frequency, the first thing to strike one is the apparent preponderance of RK and Warden items. There could be two reasons for this: one is that the drop tables really are badly skewed in their favour, which would be bad news. The other, and more likely, is that if rolling for a First-Age item after a Watcher defeat is limited to players of the same class as the dropped item, then the great majority are hanging on to their prize. Whatever the reason, this does not make RK and Warden items with a 150G buyout very likely to move before hell freezes over; on the other hand, a first bid of 25G on the Warden's club, despite its poor legacies, is a distinct possibility. Finally, there is that Loremaster's Book offered for a first bid of 150G and a buyout of 180G, and once again no bids. This is a marginally more likely sale, but I somehow doubt it. My gut feeling, based on posts here and there on various forums, is that the small percentage of seriously wealthy players have savings which average around 100G, and that at least for some time to come, this sum will represent both an actual and a psychological price ceiling.

LEGENDARY WEAPONS & ITEMS

Legendary warriors in fact and fiction have often wielded unique weapons, usually swords, which sometimes become as famous as their owners: El Cid’s Tizona, Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, King Arthur’s Excalibur, Roland’s Durendal, Beowulf’s Naegling, Elric’s Stormbringer… and of course, Orcrist, Anduril and Sting. So Turbine’s announcement that legendary weapons would play a major role in the Mines of Moria LOTRO expansion was greeted with justifiable enthusiasm; according to the official release, "Players will be able to forge weapons and class-related equipment and evolve them to build a legacy the likes of Bilbo's Sting and Gandalf's Glamdring. These legendary weapons will level-up along with the player, allowing customization by advancing the item's virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying its titles and forming fables".

The reality proved somewhat different. What we have now is interesting, but a legendary weapon system it ain’t. What we have is several hundred different legendary items of three different kinds; in order of increasing rarity (and value), these are Third Age, Second Age and First Age legendary items, all of them class-specific and of several different types. Furthermore, Third Age legendaries can be of user levels 51-60, Second Age legendaries can be of user levels 53-60, and First Age legendaries span user levels 59-60. For each player class, age and level there is a sword, dagger, club, spear, hammer, bow and crossbow, plus all the class special items such as burglar’s tools. You do the math.

Third Age items drop like flies, and are virtually given away with cereal boxes – not very legendary. On the other hand, Second Age items are extremely rare, while you can virtually forget First Age stuff. Another factor which players have come to realise is that user level is critical, almost more so than age; a user l.60 Third Age weapon is virtually as good as a Second Age weapon of user l.58 with roughly equivalent legacies. What this means in practice is that a very rare l.55 item may turn out to be little more than vendor trash.

As now implemented in LOTRO, legendary items (LIs) are essentially a running crap shoot, an exercise in gambling. You gamble on winning a roll and getting a good drop (imagine winning a 1:12 Vile Maw roll and receiving a l.59 First Age club!), you gamble on your LI having half-decent legacies, you gamble every time you reforge, you gamble on improving your runics… Somebody on the forums has worked out exactly how many Third Age LIs you would have to deconstruct in order to end up with six tier 8 runics, three for each of the two LIs you can equip; believe me, you don’t want to know the numbers. And you will carry on gambling, because by its very nature the system always sets a new goal: get a higher user level item, get a Second Age item, get a First Age item, then get a better yet First Age weapon.

Turbine’s developers have devoted a lot of ingenuity to devising a very complex, reasonably effective (in its own way) system of grinding in order to constantly upgrade your LIs – and yes, it can be fun, and it gives you something to strive towards after hitting the level cap of 60. Unfortunately, in the process they seem to have lost sight of what a legendary weapon actually means. A legendary weapon becomes part of you, remains identified with you for better or for worse; you would no more throw it away than cut off your hand. Can you imagine Aragorn casually chucking away Anduril because, uh, that dwarf arms dealer seems to be selling a cooler sword?

I currently carry a reasonably nice l.58 Second-Age bow with about 865,000 experience points on it. It’s called Preacher, we’ve been together for a long time now, I’ve managed to put some decent sixth-tier runics on it… and first chance I get of finding, buying or stealing a l.60 Second-Age bow with a half-decent set or legacies, out it goes, deconstructed and as much of its experience as possible re-routed into the new bow. Not very legendary, I know, but there it is.

It’s too late now to tinker with the system, so we’re stuck with it. But it would be nice if, perhaps with the next volume, the developers came up with an another crack at the problem. Here’s what I suggest: make the player’s choice of a new legendary weapon the reward for a long, hard quest or even quest chain. There should be no different ages or levels: just starter legendaries, all of the same level, and the player could pick whatever he or she fancies – sword, dagger, bow or whatever – as well as the starter legacies. Then use the existing system of weapon experience points to build up weapon experience, exchangeable for different improvements at various levels, leaving as much of it as possible to the player’s discretion. That’s it: that’s your new, truly legendary weapon, yours forever, growing along with you. No second choices, no exchanges. How about it?