This week’s CStM we primarily talk about the raid into the rift that we both were able to attend. Well Goldenstar did the whole thing, Merric came in at the end to tank the Balrog. Merric also discusses his experience with the Lone Lands revamp with his Captain. Our main topic is actually about these two areas and how some areas get attention while other pieces are mostly left as is.
Goldenstar is happy to report she’s finally getting the skirmish system and doing well. On her burglar anyway. She’s able to complete on level tier 1 skirmishes without any difficulty.
Town Crier:
- Dev Diary: Skill Upgrades
- Tell the Community Team : Radiance and Itemization
- Dev Diary: Crafting Update
- Scheduled Maintenance on Tuesday, Feb 23rd
- Bullroarer update notes for Feb 17
- Turbine Survey
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- “Battle of Ballylochian” by Fathom
- “Pigeon on the Gate” by Fathom
- “Let us Sing Together” by Lonely Mountain Band
- “Lullabye” performed by Harperella
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February 22, 2010 at 12:07 am
All Elves look like David Bowie. That is all.
February 22, 2010 at 12:44 am
Ok, that is not all. This is Mortermeer, btw. This is what happened with the Balrog fight.
The 1st attempt seen the Balrog break his chains and start smacking the elf chick before the wheels on the left and right were even turned. Rog pretends he’s Rick James and slaps the elf chick about 4 times before we even realized he’d broken his chains early. When she dies, we die.
The 2nd attempt went a bit smoother, and we made it into the Overseer room. Goldenstar and Meric are doing a fantastic job keeping the Balrog busy. The rest of us layeth the smacketh down on the Everseer. Gorandir hits the 1st, 2nd and 4th wheels in that room and… nothing. The door doesn’t open back up. The Balrog kills Merric and Goldenstar and then Rick James the elf chick again. This wipes the rest of us.
Attempt 3, we kill the Balrog, but not before random hope wipes and most of the raid gets wiped before we can get away from his jump attack. Still, he goes down but leaves a darkling to annoy us and cause all the other difficulties you described.
That being said, every time new content is added to LOTRO, something in the Rift breaks. Sometimes Carn Dum as well. When Moria came out, there was a problem with the World Eaters putting a 3k DOT on the raid.
February 22, 2010 at 1:43 am
Hi guys, just catching up with your podcasts after quite awhile away. Enjoying it as always. Heard Merric talking about fishing being really easy and figured I should warn you that it gets harder and harder to level up. Also, I believe it goes to lv200. Great way to wait for groups to form up and you would be surprised at the little puddles and murky pools that end up holding fishes.
Safe travels,
Gilpharas
February 22, 2010 at 7:09 am
First of all, i really like listening to your podcasts (i even translated the interview with skirmish dev in french for my kin^^).
About some of these bugs you encountered in the Rift, the mob-stuck-in-wall is very bothersome, but i think some of the others are not really bugs.
- the hope-wiping is working as intended i think, since the first time i went there, i’ve always known that this would happen
- similarly, the collapsing floor in the lever room before fighting the Everseer has always been like that. In fact, after activating the lever, you have a few seconds to get out before the floor collapses and the door closes, and if you’re lucky, a few of the world eaters will get stuck^^
Keep up the good work guys, i love it!
February 22, 2010 at 9:02 am
Wow you translated that entire thing!! Kudos to you for such a large effort! I’m very impressed.
We did know hope was supposed to clear but it wasn’t working as as he roared. It was picking people at random without warning. It made it difficult to coordinate using tokens.
February 22, 2010 at 9:38 am
I haven’t run the rift for a long time, but I do remember the floor in the lever room working that way as leandor mentions such that you could potentially with the floor and CC trap all the world-eaters in the room
As for the hope wipes, they’ve always been a bit tricky. At least now the cool-down for the tokens is lower so you actually have a shot at being able to re-pop as opposed to being a one-and-down thing. Depending on the phase of the fight, lots of times we would wait for more then one person to be wiped (unless it was the tank or mini) before popping a token.
Can’t wait to listen to this episode, curious to hear more about your raid!
February 22, 2010 at 9:47 am
I enjoyed the podcast but like someone earlier said your biggest complaint is about something that is one of the key mechanics of the fight and hearing you complain about it as a bug did rather annoy me!
The hope wipes are 100% normal and it was/is part of the challenge. We were doing it when the cooldown on tokens was 30 minutes and we needed to have a strict rotation for tokens and make sure that we waited for at least 3 to need hope before we would use a token.
It was honestly not designed for people to walk it in and do it on the first attempt
When complaining about needing to go back to see vendors remember that it was designed to be somewhere that you went almost every week.
The only bug that you complained about that I remember from our regular runs was the one where you were stuck in combat at the end of the Balrog fight; and you could simply walk back out of the door or re-log your character to get out of combat.
February 22, 2010 at 10:14 am
Perhaps I didn’t understand the hope wipe mechanic or perhaps we didn’t explain ourselves well enough so let me try again.
We do understand there were supposed to be hope wipes. I had understood that there was supposed to be a warning though. The balrog was supposed to roar I believe to signal the hope wipe. This did not happen. As well as the random hope wipe just on me with (again with no roar) when the fight started. No one else was wiped (Merric in front of me still had his token active).
When the fight was explained to us we were told there will be set times when he will roar that will cause the hope wipes. Before the door dropped, I was told to put down a Song of the Hopeful Heart patch for Merric before a hope wipe to try to help him live through that before we could retoken. It’s quite possible that I was already dead by this point so that’s why I missed it. He was clearing hope often before this.
The balrog was really acting off script clearing hope at random, without the clearing mechanic to warn us and to only certain people instead of everyone. We knew we had to be organized to use our tokens in turn but he was clearing so often that it made it difficult.
This is what we are calling buggy. We understand hope was supposed to wipe and we had a plan to handle it. The balrog did not operate as advertised which caused chaos.
Perhaps I misunderstood the fight and that’s possible since it is my only time doing it. I knew the hope wipes were coming but they seemed to be extremely frequent and random.
And I wasn’t upset that we didn’t kill him on the first try. I was just proud we had done the rest of the dungeon so well.
February 22, 2010 at 11:01 am
Hmm, maybe we misunderstood what was supposed to happen, but from reading Mort’s confirmation of what we said I still tend to think that he was bugged. From my understanding there are three times at which he roars.
1. When the gates open.
2. At 115k health
3. At 85k health
He will also spam it if the elf dies to cause a party wipe.
However, in this case he was removing hope randomly to random people. It didn’t matter if you were melee, ranged, in front, back, wherever (and maybe location never makes a difference). He was doing it constantly to random people in a party to the point where there was no possibility of a rotation because he was wiping it from someone else almost immediately after someone would click on a token. I don’t remember any kind of animation or sound events occurring during any portion of the fight outside his normal “I am whacking you with my sword and chain” or his jumping attack.
Also, maybe we weren’t clear in what our thought process was, but there is a distinct difference between what is intended and what is expected. If Baleful Roar is intended to only function at certain times, but you expect it to be spammy and go off all the time, that doesn’t mean that the encounter is working as intended.
That being said, if we are wrong and Baleful Roar or another part of the Balrog’s fight is specifically designed by Turbine to occur for the duration of the fight, removing hope off of random members in the fellowship with no animation or sound script to correspond with that event then we misunderstood and we apologize. However, if this is something that players have just gotten used to and expect then I think we are justified in our annoyance with the encounter.
February 22, 2010 at 11:22 am
Yes, I am a girl. And you pronounced my name correctly!
I wouldn’t get too upset about the campfires for cooks. They can already make ones using rowan wood; the new recipes are supposed to just be giving you options for whatever tier wood you happen to have on hand. What I’ve seen seems to indicate that they’re still only good for two minutes, so you’ll go through them pretty quickly. Hunters still have the advantage because their campfire doesn’t require and materials.
February 22, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Ah, good to know! Wow, out of Rowan wood eh… Well good to know!
I wasn’t really upset about it, I just thought it was a clever coincidence. I actually think that it’s a good addition and if I were a cook who was another class I’d definitely be happy about those campfires!
February 22, 2010 at 7:11 pm
I think it’s a good addition, too. I’d just prefer there to be an advantage to a campfire made from Mallorn wood, as opposed to Rowan wood. Having it last longer would be nice, and not too unreasonable, as in real life different types of wood burn at different rates.
February 23, 2010 at 1:02 pm
I like your level of detail. I wonder if the upper-level tier campfires burn at different rates or if they’re all the same. If they’re all the same though, I wonder if there’s a reason.
February 22, 2010 at 11:50 am
Well I can’t say if it was actually intended, but from my experience (and my recollection may be flawed on account of my advancing years) he has always wiped hope intermittently and not just on on the Baleful Roars (although he would there too). We used to have both Minstrels alternating Hopeful Heart then strict control on when we would use hope.
Not a big deal though and hope I didn’t sound too grumpy about it; but it was one area where I felt you were being a bit hard on Turbine and the Devs
February 22, 2010 at 12:52 pm
I agree. Calling it a broken piece of crap was a bit too severe and I do take that back. I was very annoyed though.
Remember it wasn’t just the hope clearing. The other two failed attempts failed not through player error or lack of understanding but from glitches that made it impossible to continue. The entire balrog experience for us was in fact very buggy.
You’re not too grumpy and we don’t mind someone calling us out when they feel its deserved!
February 22, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Yeah, we were pretty hard on the Dev’s. And from feedback it has been pointed out that sometimes when the game is updated something completely unrelated can break for unknown or unforeseen reason. I have no doubt that there are Dev’s out there who would love to go back in there and fix all that stuff up because they love their work and don’t want it to come off as “broken”. But unless there is a business case for them to do so, they can’t. I think that I am definitely at fault for assuming that this was/has been broken for a while instead of considering that maybe a recent update has caused these issues and we were the first to discover them. So we definitely dropped the ball there.
February 22, 2010 at 11:58 am
You two are cute when you bicker over telling a story.
February 22, 2010 at 2:04 pm
LOL, sometimes when I go through and listen to the podcast it’s tough to determine what’s going to come off as fun to listen to vs. what’s going to bother people. In this case I took a chance and figured that it would be something people would enjoy and I’m glad I was correct! Thanks Rharan.
February 22, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Clarification from my limited experience:
1st bug, when the two groups went to the left & right wheel room to turn the wheels, the right wheel was turned, 9 people suddenly died.
**This was not the elf chick dying then Balrog roars and kills us all. You can see that in the combat log.**
2nd bug, raid returned without reforming (likely a bad idea on my part) the Everseer room was open, despite not turning the wheels again, doors to wheels were closed. We went to kill the Everseer which went great, but the levers in the room wouldn’t open the door back up. 1,2,4
Our excellent Guardian & Minstrel duo fought valiantly while we kept hitting the combo to no avail. They die, elf chick dies, we die **with combat log noting Balrog killing us**
3rd Attempt, re-form raid, try again. Other than chaotic hope striping fight went as expected.
I don’t have a hundred runs experience on this fight , but i will say that the hope striping mechanic was on rapid fire this last time. It’s possible this was a change made because we can use hope tokens more often.
IMO, the Balrog has always been buggy, you just get use to the bugs.
**We didn’t have the disappearing balrog who disappears then reappears but he actually jumped… that was always fun.
**We didn’t have the rapid fire Balrog roar occur, where he spams his roar. He was stripping hope, but not by roars w/shadow damage
All that said. I still love the instance, and i love the fight and i will be returning. It’s just too great a dungeon to leave gathering dust.
February 22, 2010 at 2:22 pm
The hope wiping mechanic has always been part of the fight, but it was occurring more frequently than in the past.
Realizing with the DPS of 12 level 65 toons we still had hope wiping faster than we could account for it.
That said, any and all misunderstandings of the mechanics or gameplay in the rift should be blamed on me. I was the one attempting to explain/led the raid. But i think Merric/Goldenstar summation of what was buggy was accurate.
February 22, 2010 at 5:40 pm
^ Agreed.
February 22, 2010 at 7:10 pm
The hope wipe speed is pretty darn random and it can also be resisted with a fear check (captain muster courage FTW).
And I can’t help but ask – did anyone bug these? At least items 1&2 in Gorandir’s post above.
February 22, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Yes, Merric did submit a bug report on our adventures with the balrog.
February 22, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I figured you guys would or Patience & Co would beat you up at PAX
But you wouldn’t believe how many don’t submit bugs…
February 23, 2010 at 12:02 am
Merric I’m not sure if it wasthis most recent podcast or theo ne before but you were talking about doing book one of volume one and Tom Bumbadil not coming to the rescue.
I did that very quest tonight on my 19 warden and was sure he was finished my pot was on cool and and my gambits weren’t healing enough. I just backed off trying to buy time figure he’d come after me and press the attack but he didn’t! Then I saw tom rescue me in the nick of time i had like no morale left at all . Can’t wait to check out the revamped lone lands sounds cool My poor main is so neglected
February 23, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Whoops! I should have clarified this more.
No, it wasn’t that he didn’t spawn it was that I couldn’t live long enough to get to that point, lol! I died, soooo much on the boss it was crazy. I think my Captain and my Champ were the two that I didn’t have a problem on, and I’m sure that it’s just that I’m more inclined to play a character that can take a punch more than one who must rely on evasion! However, I’ll be sure to let everyone know how it goes as my Captain is done and I think my Warden is going to be the next one in line. I’m still not sure though.
February 23, 2010 at 11:56 am
I went to the Lonelands recently on my hunter, first character there. I did not start book two in the Prancy Pony. I went to the Forsaken inn after getting a couple of quests from the grocery NPC near west bree and an npc right outside the vault in Bree, requesting I travel to the inn. I then received several quests at the inn. I discovered the ranger on the west of Weather Top, while doing quests from the inn, at which point I started Book II, after talking to him. Also he gave me several quests that Merric mentioned in the podcast. So, basically, you do not have to start book II with Gandalf. However, my hunter was 24 upon walking into the Lonelands, i don’t know if that had anything to do with it.
February 23, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Hmm, that’s a good point, it could have been level based; I’m not sure. I’ll test that out on my next character. Thanks Kappo!
February 23, 2010 at 2:15 pm
After you turn in the last quest for Book I to Gandalf, he tells you to go see Candaith by Weathertop. If you finish Book I you can’t miss him telling you to go there. I just ran it a few days ago on my lil’ RK. And yes Sambrog was a PITA!
February 23, 2010 at 5:04 pm
sorry to hear about you experience in the Rift. It’s tough to really appreciate when the bugs come out to play. Hopefully your next time in there things will go a bit more smoothly, and Merric, we’ve all been “that guy” at one point or another
I get a kick out of your bantering back and forth, keep up the good work guys!
February 24, 2010 at 8:08 am
Another entertaining and informative show.
Reminded me why I don’t raid anymore. The whole hassle versus reward thing is such a turn off.
I just wandered into that new camp you mentioned while doing a hobbit wolf deed, so a very timely review of lone lands content for me. Thanks for that.
Also, just as a by the by, i think the only guy on the planet who can pronounce all that stuff is Christopher Lee.
February 24, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Dang it, Merric. Now I’m all interested in checking out the Lonelands revamp. Alts-away!
February 25, 2010 at 6:37 am
Thanks for these podcasts guys, they keep me sane at work!
The names of the two rangers in book 2 are Saerdan (near Thornleys where gandalf sends you) who will pop you on a horse to his mate Candaith of skirmish fame. Candaiths book 2 quests were always there before, they just were not part of the book, but have added for a new streamlined progression, becasuse lorewise Ganfdalf himself knowing where Radagast is at that time is incorrect.
Remember their names, I’m sure we’ll be chatting to them in Volume 3!
February 26, 2010 at 10:26 am
Goldenstar, I find Lay of the Hammerhand is very useful for getting through areas with a lot of enemies when you just don’t feel like fighting. Yes, it kills your power but all damage is cut in half so you can go a long ways with a lot of enemies on your tail without taking any morale damage.
Handy!
February 26, 2010 at 10:44 am
Heh so your plan is sort of the reverse of my “running the heck away” plan. But yes I can see that working! Pile driving your way through a thick area.
February 26, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Re the question of whether you’d know to go to Candaith if you hadn’t finished Book I . . . on my first toon in 2007, I got to about level 45 before I even knew Candaith existed. I was always confused whenever I was in the Lone-lands and saw people spamming the LFF for Retaking Weathertop!
So at least with the revamp of the LL, something points you to Candaith around level 20ish.
February 26, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Yeah we had other replies that said even if you go to the forsaken inn first you will eventually end up under weathertop. I think I was like you and if a friend hadn’t taken me there, I wouldn’t even known those orcs or that ranger were around!