DocHoliday posted this on August 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Free to Play, Minstral, Minstrel, Traits, Virtues, Warden, alts, blog, champion, champions, legacy, legendary items, lotro, podcast, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/a-couple-other-place-to-find-me/
Just a quick update this Monday morning, but I should have another post out today with some new goodies on the Skirmish vendors over on Bullroarer.
I posted a new version of my traits discussion over on the LOTRO Reporter which took a slightly different approach from the post I did here a while back. The one over on LOTRO Reporter is a bit more high-level while the post on this blog is more detail oriented.
I also joined @Theobor on his latest episode of the Gondor Awaits Podcast chatting about Minstrels, so if you’re interested in my take on that class head on over there.
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DocHoliday posted this on August 10th, 2010.
Categorized as Enedwaith, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, beta, captain, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/captain-healing-present-and-future/
With the big changes coming down the pipes for Captains I decided to do a little number crunching to see how the different lines stacked up. Part of my motivation was to see just how good the Hands of Healing line is and if there are ways to compensate for the trait line. I also don’t like having to play a captain as a “heal-bot” so I wanted to see if it was possible to use different traits but still be effective as a healer. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to see how the various captain legacies varied these results to see if my assumptions about good and bad legacies were correct, and I must say I was pretty surprised.
Really what I wanted to look at was how the tweaks to the Leader of Men line stack up against the Hands of Healing line. For those of you who haven’t heard, with the upcoming F2P changes the various Shield Brother skills apply to the entire fellowship albeit with a reduced effectiveness if you trait fully down the Leader of Men line with the Capstone Legendary. For Inspire the fellowship gets HoT ticks of 25-40 morale and a flat healing boost of 4% for Strength of Will that’s not boosted by legacies. To get a feel for the changes you can look at my previous post as well as the side-by-side visual comparisons over on LOTRO Weekly.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 30th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Warden, gambits, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/tell-the-community-team-wardens/
No surprise here, I have some thoughts on this one 
And I strongly recommend all you Wardens to post your thoughts as well. I’m going to just copy/paste what I have here into the thread on the live forums.
Question 1
Give three examples of changes or improvements you would make to improve the Warden class (e.g. skills and abilities). Please limit your responses to 3 brief examples. Wardens only please!
1. Lower the power costs of the gambit builders themselves, we have lots of ways to drop the gambit costs but they don’t apply to the builders which are the big problems.
2. Another ranged attack would really help us fulfill a secondary ranged DPS role.
3. Some way to recover threat after a death. Something on a long cool-down that pops us back to our pre-death level, or even pre-death level minus some percentage.
Question 2
If you could create one new legacy to add to the Warden’s Legendary Item pool, what would it be? Please specify whether you feel it should be a Pool A or Pool B legacy.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 28th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, expansion, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lotro, radiance.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/developer-diary-instances-2-0-part-2/
The next portion of JWBarry’s Developer Diaries is up, this one focusing on the rewards and quality of the instances. You also might want to check out Part 1 of this 5 part series as that covers some of the high level concepts like travel, scaling, and quests.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 27th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Raid, beta, expansion, festival, isengard, legendary items, lore, lotro, moors, radiance, rohan, screenshots.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/filefront-hands-on-with-lotro-f2p/
There’s been a number of write-ups from people (Massively Part 1,Massively Part 2) who have had hands on experience with the new content and business model but Ron Whitaker’s (@ffronw) from FileFront did have some new tidbits that I figured I’d touch on. I’m not going to focus on the portions that are common from the other previews, just the things I haven’t seen before.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 24th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, epic line, expansion, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lore, lotro, screenshots, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/the-news-pours-in-about-beta-and-enedwaith/
This past week has been quite busy on the news front for LOTRO and I will admit I’ve been quite behind. This has just been a pretty long week for me with my job and as such I’ve barely been able to keep up on the news, let alone comment on it. However, I wanted to touch on a few of the releases as there’s some good (and not so good) updates of late.
First up is the HUGE Developer Diary covering the new region Enedwaith which covers pretty well the new zones, their history and influences, their general storylines, and some of the kinds of enemies you’ll face. I’m looking forward to not only exploring all of the new spaces, but I really like the idea of pulling from Medieval Welsh and Briton influences. I’m also very impressed by the size (bigger and more quests then the North Downs) and all the new artwork as I will admit I’m getting a little tired of not only the darkness of Mirkwood but goblins and orcs There are lots of new screenshots in the diary, but these were 2 of my favorites:
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DocHoliday posted this on July 20th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Minstral, Minstrel, gear, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/tell-the-community-team-thread-minstrels/
This weeks TtCTT is up and the class of focus is the Minstrel, which is another of my mains so I wanted to not only suggest that folks submit their responses but I also wanted to share mine.
I could only come up with 2 suggestions for things to change:
- I’d like to see some more melee options for the Minstrel in War-speech. This becomes a real problem with all the silences and such and I’d love to see something else other then Herald’s Strike and our auto-attacks.
- Probably a bigger problem for Minstrels is that our heals don’t scale with the changes in the morale pools for characters up to level 65. I will admit I’m not sure what the right solution here is but some tweak would be very nice to scale those heals better now that we have many characters quite easily eclipsing 10K morale.
As for a new legacy, I would like to see a power return addition to Herald’s Strike. Nothing over the top but a little something to help with the ridiculous power drain of being in War-speech.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, captain, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, pvp, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/captain-roundtable/
If you missed it live (or want to listen to it again), a Casual Stroll to Mordor’s Captain Roundtable is now posted both on their site and on iTunes. I participated but definitely Elb and Geiri really do know their stuff and they do play their captains slightly different. If you have a captain or want to learn more about the class, it is certainly well worth the listen. It is a little long (a shade over 2 hours) but we do also cover a bunch of other group related topics as well. The build-up and recording of it certainly has gotten me more fired up about the class and I’m actually working on my captain again as well as working on his radiance. I did finally hit 65 and realized that I really do miss the class I’m not saying he’s going to become my main again, but certainly not banished to the Thorin’s Hall Homestead either.
DocHoliday posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, captain, crafting, epic line, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/captains-roundtable-live-tonight/
In case you missed the post from a Casual Stroll to Mordor I will be participating in another roundtable tonight, this time focusing on Captains. If you can join us live at 9pm Eastern (-5GMT) there will be a live chat room where you can participate. The link for the chat room information is either on CStM’s live page or on the LOTRO Network. Or you can feel free to post questions here or on their thread, or email one of us if you have specific questions or topics you’d like us to cover. It will be a similar format to the Warden roundtable.
And if you can’t make it live, we’ll both be posting when it it released.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Enedwaith, Equipment, Free to Play, General, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, beta, epic line, expansion, legendary items, lore, lotro, radiance, runes, volume 3.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/enedwaith-beta-and-subscription-news/
Well in some cases it does help to be a bit delayed in getting news out as sometimes numbers do change and fluctuate especially when subscription numbers are mentioned. Yesterday, Mordor or Bust posted an article from the PatriotLedger which originally stated 200K new LOTRO subscribers since the F2P announcement – but that has since been clarified to be 100K-200K beta applicants, via Turbine. Now, while not quite as impressive as new subs, when you consider that subscribers were automatically signed-up (and hopefully not counted in this number) that’s still a pretty good sign of new blood to the game. So my thoughts are this will be a pretty substantial influx of new folks to the game and some portion of those will certainly transfer over to subscriptions, or buy things through the cash shop, which will bring new revenue and resources to Turbine. Most people peg the current subscription base around 250K to 500K for LOTRO (still hard to figure out) this will most likely mean about a community twice the size it currently is. Which yes, will bring some annoyances but will all the tools we have to get around those, I’m more excited for all the cool people who will be joining us!
The other piece of news lately that has stirred some commotion was the article over on Massively where they get to sit and chat with the Turbine folks about the new toys and such coming with Enedwaith. If you haven’t read the article, I highly suggest it but I figured I’d share my thoughts on what we’ve learned so far.
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