So after my fun on Thursday in the Rift, I decided to really push my luck I ended up running the RIft skirmish as a Tier 3 on my Warden, and again as a Tier 2 on my Minstrel.
I’ll start with the Minstrel and pretty much admit that this may be the last time I run that skirmish as a Tier 2 on that toon I ended up getting the 2 AOE Flame Encounters that just ate my poor soldier up almost instantly – and I’m using a ranged soldier! I was able to finally kill the Dragon, but I’m pretty sure the way I did it was an exploit and will not be doing that again. I was just really frustrated and annoyed, luckily you can’t go negative on the skirmish marks The normal pulls weren’t that bad, but holy cow those 2 encounters roasted my poor Minnie’s butt.
Before that run with my Minstrel (which probably added to my frustration) was trying the Rift on Tier 3. Now I’m not sure if it is just the Rift as this was my first attempt at Tier 3, but holy crap is there a HUGE jump in difficulty between tier 2 and tier 3. I barely got past the first wave and ended up calling it a day after way too many deaths to count. – I had almost a 1 gold repair bill if that’s any indication I’m thinking part of the problem with the Warden with Tier 3 is that now with the higher mob resists, coupled with the boost to mitigations in Tier 3 make our transfers and DoTs MUCH less effective. Perhaps it is time to re-think my traits again and go back to more of a mix of traits as opposed to full shield line. I probably should parse things using CStats, but I didn’t think about it at the time. In addition to those issues, these mobs were hitting for crazy amount – LTs critting for over 2K at a time, and critting quite frequently really make it a totally different fighting experience. So I’m curious if others have tried other Tier 3’s or have experiences doing the RIft at higher difficulties.
So blogging has fallen a bit by the wayside. I went to London/Reading to visit family and haven’t really got back into a schedule yet.
Add to that a bit of a turn from LotRO – I’ve been there, done that. I have 750 Dol Guldur medallions now and no weapon or emblem decent enough to spend any of them on. I can run through Sammath Gul without standing on a bone pile with my eyes closed. Volume 3, Book 1, was a small distraction – but didn’t do what I wanted it to. We’re raiding Barad Guldur, and making good progress, but raiding has diminished for me somewhat, and I think in the future I won’t be quite so gung ho to go twice a week. Ah yes, the casual vibe has started to catch me…
…I still log onto LotRO almost daily and do some of the daily quests to level up yet another emblem. They’re all rubbish. I feel, as I do it, as if I’m wasting my life. I really hate the LI lottery these days. And then I realise I’m raiding with what I consider rubbish and no-one cares, so why should I struggle to upgrade? Why pursue the Symbol for crafted 2nd Age items, when it may just be a wasted piece of crafting that someone else craves a lot more than I do?
Since there are a few skirmish barter items I want from the Rift, I figured I’d go through a couple of test runs and capture them via Fraps and CStats to do some comparisons. I wanted to not only compare the archer to the sage to see how they rank for DPS but also see how things had changed with the new tier 2 drop rates.
A few notes first concerning my soldiers as they are a bit different, which will skew the numbers a bit unfortunately. My Archer (my Warden’s soldier) is only level 60 with mainly level 54 skills available. And my Minstrel has a 63 Sage with primarily level 56 skills.
I ran it first on my Warden and as the following 2 videos will show I really didn’t have too many issues. I was a bit rusty, but for the most part it was rather smooth.
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In the latest book update, Turbine made some changes to the levels of resistance that mobs have. They seem to think that a 10% miss chance is perfectly acceptable before resistance reduction stats and legacies are taken into account. I don’t necessarily disagree if we are able to make up the difference with gear and maybe virtues or traits. However, I’m not sure that is quite possible.
The LM community on the official NA forums are rather perturbed by the fact that Turbine really gave us no warning about this and seemed to be unaware of the “resistance bug” for ~2 months (the bug being that resistances were much lower than they had intended). I would think some very simple combat parsing would have shown this problem immediately. I truly wish the LOTRO community had more tools at their disposal for judging DPS, misses, resistances, and various other variables. If so, it would have been obvious at least to us even if the developers were out picking wildflowers.
Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!
Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.
This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.
So real-life has been a bit of a drain lately for me and I’ve been very quiet of late both here on my blog as well as in-game. It is a combination of a bunch of different things, but much of it will pass here soon.
So to re-cap on a few things, I did want to comment on some LOTRO items and also some non-LOTRO ones that were of interest too.
My in-game activities have been rather enjoyable, just limited after my fun in Volume 3. I’ve been playing much more on my Minstrel lately and have quite enjoyed not only soloing through content in war-speech but also running the various Mirkwood instances as a healer. I did notice more of my skills being resisted but really didn’t seem to be too big of a problem, but it was good to see that it has in fact been changed as commented on by CStM and confirmed by the devs on the forums as well. On a more positive note, I think I’m getting pretty close to having enough tokens for the radiance sets on him but will probably take a few more runs through SG. My legendary items still need quite a bit of work although I have a couple that are somewhat promising. I do have some of the legacies that help out on the resists, so I may actually play around with leveling them up instead of just leaving them at rank 1. Sadly, outside of the Volume 3 activity I really haven’t been on my Warden too much outside of an SG run or two. She still is 2 pieces from being eligible for BG, so a few more SG runs are in my future. And for those of you that actually do have your BG armor sets, there will be a change made to the set bonus as commented on the forums. Essentially the current bonus is broken (not that a 5% chance shield mastery will debuf your target was all that exciting) and will be changed to a 10% chance to provide a 10% melee damage bonus for the Warden. I’m glad they’re looking at those bonuses and that is a better bonus, but I would’ve loved a 10% threat bonus!
Up on the Warden boards there a pretty detailed discussion on threat. from precise blow and comparing it to damage done. Essentially numerically comparing how much threat was done to counter a certain amount of damage. The numbers worked out to about 1750 damage (or ~100DPS, which is pretty darn low) to counter the threat from a single precise blow, which does seem to indicate that you do need to work and continually apply our ToTs to keep ahead of DPS classes.
You have no doubt noticed that enemies in this game come in a variety of difficulty levels. There are seven difficulty levels, and each is identified by a different kind of coloured circle around the enemy’s portrait.
(In addition to the seven difficulty levels described below, there are also ‘rare’ enemies whose portrait circles will be green at the top blending into their normal colour at the bottom. These rare enemies drop special loot, such as shards.)
If you are fighting enemies at your level, the following information should generally be true:
I ended up running the RIft skirmish as a Tier 3 on my Warden, and again as a Tier 2 on my Minstrel.
I ended up getting the 2 AOE Flame Encounters that just ate my poor soldier up almost instantly – and I’m using a ranged soldier! I was able to finally kill the Dragon, but I’m pretty sure the way I did it was an exploit and will not be doing that again. I was just really frustrated and annoyed, luckily you can’t go negative on the skirmish marks 
I’m thinking part of the problem with the Warden with Tier 3 is that now with the higher mob resists, coupled with the boost to mitigations in Tier 3 make our transfers and DoTs MUCH less effective. Perhaps it is time to re-think my traits again and go back to more of a mix of traits as opposed to full shield line. I probably should parse things using CStats, but I didn’t think about it at the time. In addition to those issues, these mobs were hitting for crazy amount – LTs critting for over 2K at a time, and critting quite frequently really make it a totally different fighting experience. So I’m curious if others have tried other Tier 3’s or have experiences doing the RIft at higher difficulties.
