BEGINNING OF THE END FOR LEGENDARIES?

The five new Bounty quests available in Esteldin can be repeated daily; between them, they give a total of 465,000 item experience points each and every day. That’s a hell of a lot of of ixp - enough to take a legendary item to l.60 in under a week…

Three of the quests are easily soloable by any competent l.60 player, and the other two represent a mild challenge to any combination of no more than two l.60s; undertaken in any group of three or more, including a Hunter to provide transport, all five can be completed in just over thirty minutes. In other words, you can take two legendary items from zero to sixty within a grand total of six hours playing time.

The bounty quest ixp represents the equivalent of flooding a real-world economy with bad money by printing shoals of banknotes, and results in rampant inflation. All other forms of gaining ixp, including in-combat ixp and the extra quests for the Moria instances have suddenly been rendered utterly irrelevant – at this point, who will care a fig for the measly 180 ixp awarded for killing a l.60 orc?

I admit to being baffled by this development; at a single stroke, the devs have effectively killed off one third of their legendary item strategy. This used to have three prongs: acquiring a LI, levelling it up, and gambling for legacies and settings. The second prong of that strategy has now had its heart ripped out. How much longer before the other two go as well? Is this the beginning of the end for LIs – and would that be a bad thing?

ACCESS FORBIDDEN

By the great wheel in the north-east corner of the Waterworks, just off the passage running northwards from the Rotting Cellar to the Deep-way, a bridge leads to a great building with a colonnaded portico. In the centre of the portico is a massive door; unlike the doors in the Rotting Cellar, this one appears "usable", suggesting that it can be opened to gain access to the building!


Alas, clicking on it, even if you are at the maximum level of 60, produces the message "Your level is too low". Now this is intriguing. Other locations or sites may at times be placed in the game with a view to activation at some point in the future, but they do not normally respond in any way at all - certainly not by appearing usable at the present time. So we may assume that this location is due to be activated in the near future; probably as part of the "back to Moria" quest thread which is supposed to be part of the forthcoming Mirkwood expansion.

However, I will pass on, will all due reservations, the following entirely unsubstantiated rumour. A kinsman who happened recently to ask a GM when this door would become accessible claims to have received the answer "At level 80". If true, this is truly astonishing. We have all been assuming that the level cap would be raised to 70 with the release of the third volume, presumably entitled Riders of Rohan, towards the end of 2009. Finding that level 80 has suddenly appeared on the event horizon is, to put it mildly, disconcerting.

LEVELED OUT?

A recent posting in that pleasantly discursive blog, The Middle-Earth Adventurer, was entitled "Post 60 Slump", and I believe it definitely touched on a sore point for many players: "I think that there's a natural incentive to seeing the blue xp go up and up and up as you level. It hits a part of the human psyche that drives us to keep going on whatever path we've set out on. Once that stops... well, you lose something, even if there's everything else in the game still pushing you forward."

I couldn't agree more, even though in my case it hasn't yet stopped me carrying on with the last batch of Moria quests... but it's true that the salt hath lost somewhat of its savour. What's the problem? Basically, that when Turbine released Mines of Moria, they raised the level cap from 50 to 60. In other words, you could now earn experience points and level up as far as the new upper limit of sixty. This was a fine and necessary change, as far it went; unfortunately, in practice it proved all too easy to reach the new upper limit. Dedicated players went from 50 to 60 in a month or less; for the average player, I would guess a time period of around three months is probably about right. That is way too damn fast, given that it probably took an average of nine months or so to go from level 1 to level 50 in Shadows of Angmar. And as the Middle-Earth Adventurer points out, once you reach the cap level, things somehow seem a lot tamer. Particularly if the game as a whole seems to have slightly run out of steam (which is a subject I shall be getting back to very soon).

Now, normally you can't just say, "OK, we'll simply increase the leveling requirements - let's double them", because to do that, you have to build in the extra quests and activities by a similar factor. But in the case of Moria, that wasn't a problem. How do I know? Simply, because when I hit l.60, there still remained at least 45%-50% of total new quests still uncompleted. And though I obviously can't say how many EPs their completion would have given, it should have been substantial, given that many of them, like "Enemies of Lothlorien", are multi-strand quests calling for the completion of several strands of very difficult quests. It would have made more sense to extend leveling from l.50 to l.60 by a factor which have ensured reaching the cap after completion of, say, 80% of the new quests. Let's hope that when Turbine next raise the cap, as they will surely do sooner or later, they will have learned their lesson.

http://middleearthadventurer.blogspot.com/2009/02/post-60-slump.html