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.