ACHIEVING MINIMUM RADIANCE IN BOOK 8

As everybody knows, the two end-game 12-man instances at the moment are gated – that is, you need a certain minimum level of radiance in order to even enter them. Personally, I think this is a poor design approach, and it’s no secret that most players feel the same way. However, we’re stuck with this situation for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, Book 8 introduced some new paths to achieving the minimum requirements, which are currently +50 radiance for the Vile Maw (the Watcher), and +70 radiance for Dar Narbugud. What follows are some suggestions as to how this can be achieved as expeditiously as possible. Keep in mind that raiding is a cooperative affair, and that in order to get anywhere you’ll need to join a Kinship, or at least find a reasonably steady group of players - solo play doesn't enter into the debate at all.

To quickest way of achieving the +50 radiance necessary for the Vile Maw is to complete the first two (and easiest) of the 6-man instances which drop a single BoA coin when completed in Hard Mode. These are the Grand Stairs (dropping a Platinum Coin of Courage, exchangeable for Boots) and Forges (Platinum Coin of Strength, for Chest). Each of these armour items gives +10 radiance, for a total of +20.

The two new 3-man instances each drop three Glistening Elf-stones every time they are completed; four of these can be exchanged for tier 1.5 radiance armour items, each of which has +15 radiance. Completing the Mirror Halls of Lumul-Nar and the Water Wheels of Nalad-Dum four times each will net you Gloves and Leggings respectively, for a total of +30 radiance. Add these to the Boots and Chest from the earlier 6-man instances, and you have the +50 radiance needed to enter the Vile Maw.

Achieving +70, however, is harder. You will need to either complete the two toughest 6-man instances of the tier 1 series, namely 16th Hall (Iron Coin of Fortitude, exchangeable for the non-set Shoulders) and Dark Delvings (Iron Coin of Knowledge, for the non-set Helm), each worth +10 radiance, or acquire either of the two tier 1 set armour items which drop from the Watcher (Helm or Shoulders, each worth +20 radiance). Note that with the exception of the Dar Narbugud bosses, Gurvand, final boss of the Dark Delvings, is reckoned to be the toughest fight in LOTRO to date.

One further short-cut is to complete the Filikul instance (Nornúan the Turtle) as often as possible, since he sometimes drops Platinum coins exchangeable for tier 1 armour pieces. Nornúan is something of a pushover, and can easily be downed by even a halfway competent PUG (pick-up group).

Finally, it must be emphasised that +50 radiance for the Watcher and +70 for Dar Narbugud are the minimum necessary to avoid cowering; you will still have dread, with the resultant reduction of morale and skills. The more radiance you have, the better; this includes the extra +10 you can buy with Destiny Points, which stacks with whatever you get from your armour.

OK, WHO STOLE THE TURTLE'S HEAD?

Quest trophies - the decorative items which drop when a particularly tough boss has been killed - are, quite rightly, Bind on Acquire (BoA) - they are meant to be proof of prowess or cunning, and shouldn't be available on demand to anybody with money or generous friends. The same applies, perhaps with rather less urgency, to decorative items only available to those who have achieved high rank with various factions.

There is, however, one very common occasion when this strict BoA rule needs be relaxed or modified. Many trophies end up gracing Kinship Houses, either because they are considered honours pertaining to the entire fellowship or raid responsible for the kill, or else because individual members choose to donate them. The problem is that because they remain bound to their original acquirer, they cannot be moved by anybody else; if anyone but the owner tries to do so, the only option given is "Return to owner", which means they immediately end up in the owner's escrow account. If the owner in question then fails to retrieve them in time, they are gone forever. Note also that there is no indication of just who the owner is, so there's no possibility of contacting them and having them move the item.

All of which means that making changes to a trophy-heavy Kinship House is virtually impossible, even for the leader. What's more, trophies and other BoA items will vanish in the wake of a departing member, even if he or she had no such intention. The obvious answer is to allow for decorative items of all kinds, including trophies, to be BoA with the sole exception of transfer to a Kinship, perhaps into a Kin Treasure Vault accessible only to the leader and nominated members by means of a new permission. Items taken out the vault and in the temporary posession of a player would immediately become BoA again unless placed in a Kinship House decorative slot. In other words: trophies would be transferable from the original owner to the Kinship, after which they could only be used in Kinship House decorative slots.

TURTLES, BEARS & COOKIE-CUTTER RAIDS

Responding to my earlier post about Nornúan, the great turtle of the Waterworks, "Anonymous" commented that his kinship had worked out a tactic which involved using a Lore-master's bear to tank the turtle: "A burg can provoke the turtle so it doesn't switch targets so no one gets an acid dot. The healer just keeps the bear up. Dead simple." I was intrigued enough to suggest the tactic to my own kin a couple of days later, only to discover to my astonishment that it was regarded as an exploit. Though I have not been able to find anything to that effect on the official English Codemasters forums, a kinsman tracked down and translated a Danish language post in which the tactic was condemned in no uncertain terms by a GM:

[18:22] +Forgildan: Hello Traxie, I am Game Master Forgildan. You have exploited the turtle raid. Therefore you will now receive a warning. Please do not exploit again in the future.
[18:22] +Forgildan: Next time we catch you doing this, a 7 day suspension will be the outcome.
[18:25] +Forgildan: I just checked your forums. It seems that this announcement has not yet been made on the english forums. As this is the case, I will drop the official warnings, so your accounts have not been marked as exploiters
[18:26] +Forgildan: But please do not attempt bear-tanking again. If we catch you again, they will be marked as such.

So there you have it: bear-tanking is an exploit. My first reaction was to be seriously annoyed; how could bear-tanking possibly be considered an exploit, other than because it happened to run contrary to the way the designers thought this battle should be fought? Coming on top of the forthcoming nerf of the Burglar's Enrage trick, the implication is that there can only be one way to complete an instance, graven in stone as Holy Writ - anything else is heresy. For me, and for many other players, the whole point of a difficult instance is that can be fun to work out different ways of completing it, some sneakier than others. A designer policy of turning all LOTRO instances into cookie-cutter exercises does not bode well.

In fact, it turns out that there is a reason of sorts for the pet-tanking ban, which is that in the Nornúan fight, a pet does not trigger the "snapping" attack and hence does not get landed with the acid DOT (damage over time) debuff. Using this tactic, Nornúan was actually duoed by a LM and Minstrel on the Snowborn server earlier this month (the debate on the link goes far beyond this issue, by the way). So on balance, I think one has to accept that bear-tanking the Turtle does rather make a mockery of the whole concept of raiding. At the same time, it would be nice if these things could be tidied up prior to general release.

TURTLE TROUBLE

Nornúan lives in Filikul, a rather damp and plashy chamber of the great tower of Gabil-Munz, at the centre of Moria's Waterworks. He probably doesn't mind, though, as he's a giant Snapping Turtle - a chelonian not to be trifled with lightly, since he has 688,000 morale and a habit of shedding poisonous spines in all directions when he gets upset, which is often. The spines cause stacking acid damage over time (Gushing Wound) which is incurable by any potion, salve or spell.

Filikul is LOTRO's latest 12-man raid, and a very odd one it is too. Reaching Nornúan involves a swim/trek across the Waterworks and a two-minute walk down an undefended passageway - and there you are. No adds, no minor bosses, just a quick, very brutal fight; if you don't get him down in under ten minutes, the stackable DoT will wipe the party out. Now, to my mind, the first oddity about Filikul is that it feels astonishingly arbitrary. There's effectively no plot lead-in, other than a casual mention of a missing dwarf. So why, you would be justified in asking, should I go out of my way to beard a horrible great turtle in his sanctuary, where he's been living perfectly happily and not really bothering anybody?

The answer, I guess, is loot. Nornúan is supposed to drop one guaranteed First-age weapon, plus another Second-age item and an Iron Coin (good for normal radiant armour) as well some minor stuff (I say supposed, because last time my kinship took him down, there wasn't a sniff of a First-age item). Trouble is, when it does deign to drop, the First-age item is either a Warden Spear (something like 50% of the time), or else a Captain or Guardian spear; there have been reports of Hunter and Champion spears, but they are pretty rare. So if you don't belong to the spear-carrying classes, tough luck...

I haven't been overly bothered by this, as I tend to see Filikul as the designers' response to complaints that the Vile Maw instance is way too hard, particularly the post-Book 7 Watcher II: "OK, here's an easier one, no radiant armour needed (although it does help), you can have some low-cost First-age legendaries - but you probably won't like them...". Fair enough, in an weird sort of way, but there's more. It now appears that come Book 8, the developers propose to make Nornúan immune to the Burglar trick "Enrage", which causes the affected mob to attack at random - the method adopted by most raids to deal with the turtle's stacking debuffs, which would otherwise build up mostly on the tank. Note that this is not an exploit (a cheat, in other words, exploiting a design error), but the rational use of a game skill to defeat a boss attack. This decision has caused a lot of comment, most of it negative. Again, I can't say I'm too upset; it's not as though this was an astonishingly long and complex raid, and that a strategy carefully developed over weeks of trial and error had suddenly been rendered useless.

However, it is very poor design. If the developers really didn't want players to use Enrage, they should have seen it coming and done something about it beforehand. In the final analysis, Filikul looks and feels like a rather slapdash, not very well considered quick fix. On the European forums, Sanxo put the matter accurately if a little harshly: "The devs are fighting a losing battle against the law of unintended consequences, but rather than let the dust settle and think for second, they create a ragged patchwork of fixes held together with ill-considered nerfs". Ouch.

THE RAIDS IN LOTRO

Though raids do not play as massive a role in LOTRO as they do in some other online games, they are nevertheless very much the core element of most players' gaming experience; two years on, it seems a good idea to take a look at how LOTRO's raids have stacked up. First of all, what exactly is the definition of a raid? A raid is an example of an instance - namely, a copy of a building, a dungeon, or other location activated by passing through a portal, which allows an individual or group to take part in a private adventure, segregated from the main game and undisturbed by other players. A combat-based instance designed to be experienced by between one and four fellowships is called a raid.

So far, and ignoring the PvP raids in the Ettenmoors, LOTRO has included five proper raids; a sixth, Filikul, was to have been packaged with Vol.II/Book 7 but proved buggy when released in the States. The first to be released, Helegrod in the Misty Mountains, was a 24-man raid (four full fellowships). A vast, sprawling affair, it included nine bosses culminating in the undead dragon Thorog. Players could choose in what order to attempt some of the encounters, and even experienced groups needed at least two evenings to complete the raid. While the raid was visually impressive and offered a good variety of combat experience, it was never as popular as it deserved because of the extreme difficulty of getting together as many as 24 determined players. It also suffered from an odd system of rewards, including titles for defeating bosses which were effectively limited to just one of the 24 participants, and above all armour set drops which were class-specific; this made it virtually impossible for anybody to put together a full set of Helegrod armour, which until the advent of MoM was probably the game's second best after the Rift set.

The other two 24-man raids to date have been Bogbereth and Ferndur, both in Angmar. The first is a quick and easy single-boss attack on the spider queen of Torech-i-Bogbereth, near Garth Fornir. With unimpressive rewards, this raid ended up being farmed for its decorative trophy by 12 or fewer experienced players. The second targets Ferndúr the Virulent, Master of Imlad Balchorth, and is a fair bit harder, but it too could be completed with 12 players; again, it offers no particular rewards beyond a trophy, and it seems likely that many players have never tried it. There have been no more 24-man raids since these two, nor does it seem likely that there will be.

The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu, the most extensive and, as many believe, the best-designed raid to date, came in with Volume I/Book 11 at the end of 2007. A 12-man raid, it included eight separate bosses leading up to Thaurlach the Balrog. Killing Thaurlach was a long and complex operation for most kinships, with a steep learning curve, but it was a fascinating experience and the rewards, the best set of armour and the best weapons in Volume I, were well worth the effort. Even more than was the case in Helegrod, teams had to learn the different tactics necessary for each boss and the usually very specific actions required, and raid leaders found themselves stretched to the maximum keeping all the balls in the air. One of the great virtues of the Rift was that it managed to balance the different classes, all of whom were needed at different times. It also kept many players happily busy for at least six months, if not more.

The fifth official raid is the 12-man Vile Maw in Moria, which it's probably fair to say is the least-loved and most badly designed to date. Many players have hated the grind of assembling the six-piece set of Radiant armour without which the raid cannot be attempted, the location is minimal and unimpressive (a single room full of water), the fight with the Watcher seems, once you work out the tactics, rather tedious and mechanical, and it can only be completed once a week. Finally, compared to the splendid Thaurlach, the Watcher seems cartooney and lumpish. Not, on balance, a success. Also located in the Waterworks of Moria is the new Filikul raid, which involves killing the turtle Nornúan. Since it's not yet accessible in Europe, I can't comment on it, but - a turtle?

Though it is not officially considered a raid, I would certainly include among them Barad Gularan, a combat instance fully as complex and demanding as any raid. Six bosses must be killed, of whom the last, Udúnion the Rogmul, offers what I believe to be one of the hardest fights in the game, largely because of the split-second coordination called for. Finally, the Delvings of Fror in the Ettenmoors are home to one of the nastiest and probably least visited bosses in the whole game, Gaergoth the Unbound. Gaergoth is another Rogmul, only this one is at l.63 and has over 500,000 morale points; considering that he drops nothing better than four Luminous Stones (though this may have changed recently), it's hardly surprising he's not the most popular holiday destination in the game...