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Goodbye to all that: farewell to Raiding?
Well the last time I signed up for a Raid was Sunday 29th May (which also happened to be my birthday). Since then, I’ve barely logged into LOTRO either. This last will change. The next LoTRO expansion is due out in September, Rise of Isengard. This will involve a level increase, new areas to explore, new quests (personalised quest phasing) and an overhaul of class skills and traits. There will be new Crafting recipes and the virtue cap will be raised from 10 to 12.
It sounds promising, so once more I’ll be treading the lands of Middle Earth.
But, I doubt I’ll be Raiding again.
And me, so much of a Raider. As was.
It’s partly the baggage Raiding now brings for me. In our kinship there seems to have been so many misunderstandings, unpleasantness and resentments associated with Raiding (and I know that it’s not just our kinship that’s experienced this about Raiding). As such, it’s now an activity I don’t really want to involve myself with anymore.
And the Raiding itself; it’s a change in my preferred play style since starting Team Fortress 2. I now find the Raids static. You more or less know exactly what will happen when and where, which mobs will spawn and what they will do, often all following a very similar formula. And in this, every Raid member has a part to play. The skill of mastering a Raid is for everyone to work out, learn and play those parts perfectly. But it’s like being the living part of a machine, a giant puzzle game.
In Team Fortress, of course, you’re playing against other people which immediately makes it more dynamic and unpredictable. And it’s this which I find so refreshing, a new sort of challenge; you need to constantly try to outplay and out think other players. It would be the same with other non-PvE on-line multiplayers, it’s the same with the PvP, or Monster play, in LOTRO which I used to play and enjoyed but stopped because it was never developed as much as it could be within the game. Different.
So this is where I’m at. Farewell to Raiding but there will be time instead, spent exploring, role playing, questing and socialising; the kin has a number of new members who I barely know and older kinmates with whom I ‘ve not spoken for a while.
It feels good.
Ost Dunhoth: the new Raid
We have now tried out the new Raid in LOTRO and so far it gets a thumbs up from the kinship. The first weekend we tried one Wing, the following weekend the other. In the first Wing we managed to get the Boss down, easy mode and then moved on to the second Boss and had a good attempt there. The fights were good….the mechanics were interesting involving disappearing islands and acidic water; I’m deliberately not saying much to avoid spoiling it for those who haven’t tried it yet. And the Boss we didn’t defeat involved the strategic use of tree sap.
The second Wing gave us a very different challenge; another nice aspect of the Raid, variation. Again I won’t say much, just think Indiana Jones running from the boulder. All the party was fully involved, there was none of the waiting for carefully timed pulls from one or a couple of players only, that we found in BG.
And throughout, there were none of the endless trash mobs to be fought through, taking time and tiring people. It all seemed much more compact and efficient.
Finally, for the whole Raid, there was the removal of cool down for skills used during the Boss fights. Thinking about it, this was a very logical move, having to wait for Rally, for instance, to come off cool down after being used, never served much purpose. It was just a time waster. Now, as soon as everyone has retreated from a wipe, everyone was able to go straight back in again, able to use all skills. After all, Raiding should be about the fight and not constrained by skill mechanics outside.
Echoes of the Dead is here…er….are here?!
New material in LOTRO. New instances, a new raid and no radiance. We’re going to have a crack at the new Raid tonight and Sunday, previously those were our Barad Guldur evenings. As I said in my last post, we’ve got the LT down Normal mode a few times but have yet to attempt Challenge mode. I’d like to think that we will one day….may be a small group of masochists will get together at some points and have a go.
However, there is still concern over the amount of new content being released. Hopefully the Raid will keep us busy for a while but I’m not sure about the instances. Apart from that there are character changes to be explored and the changes to the Legendary Items; the relic system, and the new book but for a largely end-game kin such as ourselves, there is not a lot more. No new areas to explore and no questing.
But as an alternative kin-game Rift is keeping us busy and together, which is good. The guild there is doing well with plenty of members, it’s nice. We have our LoTRO members (including some members who had drifted away), we have members who have come to us via friends, usually through blogging, and some fresh members who have simply seen us about.
It does all mean that the flavour of this blog may change a little. I’ve largely wanted to write about LoTRO in the past, but, because things have been quiet, I’ve been writing a lot less. I hope to continue with LOTRO as of all the mmos I’ve played/am playing I’ve taken to it most, but I think I will start to write about Rift, a little about WoW and Team Fortress 2, as well as the inconsequential nonsense I’ve always written about.
But anyway, with luck I can report back on the new raid after tonight. I just hope the stair count will be less.
LoTRO and odds and bobs
Life in LoTRO is still a little slow. We managed to get a Raid group together (23 of us) and killed Thorog. We did it on the second run through and it was pretty straightforward, but most of us really just wanted the title and the chance for a lot of the kin to raid together. We also returned to Barad Guldur for the first time since before Christmas. Numbers have been an issue with this Raid recently, both due to the nature of the Raid and a bit of kin/raid politics unfortunately.
We have had a lot of that recently which has included some lengthy and sometimes heated forum discussions. But hopefully people have now reminded themselves that, whatever their individual preferences, helping fellow kinmates is good. And it’s not to say that these sorts of intra-kin debates are bad. I think it is always good to challenge and review whether it is about the election of officers, a new kinleader; much of the discussion was relating to how the election, nor non-election of kin officials, or just about general transparency and involvement of the membership.
Anyhow, it was Barad Guldur on Friday and we managed to get our rusty and creaking selves through the first two bosses so it is back to the LT on Sunday. It was nice to be raiding again.
Apart from that, a fair few of the kin have been entertaining themselves outside of LoTRO. As I said, life in LoTRO is pretty slow. We need our next injection of new content. There has been a slight fear that we might find ourselves splintering off into other games. We have an Away team in WoW at the moment and many people have been exploring Rift (the new mmo still in Beta but due out in March). However, in these games, people are sticking together and there is a desire to explore these games with other kinmates so I think we are holding together. And there is the advantage that most of us are lifetime members of LoTRO, so whatever happens, at some point or other, people will return.
And what have I been doing, well the bits of Raiding that we’ve managed and WoW. WoW is impressive in it’s scale, the quests are amusing and manage to be different and the instances plentiful but somehow I haven’t fallen for it. I play weekly, a group of us are levelling up through the instances and that’s really enough for me though I will try PvP. I’m not quite sure what hasn’t grabbed me, I’m not big on the cartoon graphics, I don’t need the humour (I hate comedy and laughing), I find the user interface a bit clumsy; is it just that it is not LOTRO? One of the reasons perhaps why I want to try Rift.
And still Team Fortress 2 which I love. At the moment:
Day no play Team Fortress = Bad day
Day play Team Fortress = Good Day
Life is really as simple as that.
In spitting distance of the LT – Not!!!!!
Ouch!
We wiped on Durchest Easy Mode this evening. Yes, after downing him more or less weekly on Hard Mode for a while. The damage he seemed to be doing seemed to have increased massively. Is this something since F2P? We are not sure. Reading the forums, other kins have reported a similar experience. But others have been fine. We managed to clear him last week but of course didn’t check the combat logs to see what damage he was doing.
We are now thinking of having another go on Sunday; see if we get a repeat and revise our tactics. Feelings are mixed. We could just go and have fun in Helegrod. An attractive thought. But I would also like to try and find out what went on tonight. Have we actually got a problem that could keep us from the LT or were we just very unlucky.
We’ll see what everyone thinks.
Us after Durchest tonight
Oh my; a disconcerting gap
Oh my, I haven’t posted for all of October! What have I been up to? Well stopping organising Raids for a start. My out-of-game life is pretty stressful the moment and I’m spending much of my evenings exhausted and slumped so giving it a break is one less thing to think about; exhaustion and in front-of-telly-slumping is also a reason for my blogging less.
I haven’t been doing much in game really either. I’m Raiding still, but now I’ve stopped organising I’m contemplating giving it a break once we’ve got the Lieutenant down and just join in to help when needed. It’s odd, Raiding does seem to bring the worst out in people; resentments, rivalries and mistrust. I feel it would be good if I spent a bit of time just away from all that clearing my mind, poddling about on my lower level alts. Or I could roll an alt on the new server once F2P goes live and see what that’s like. I’ve also got loads of single-player games that are demanding to be played at some point. So I might give LOTRO itself a break.
Who knows. As I said, I haven’t fully decided what I want to do yet. Or what I feel is best for me.
Anyhow, I have some time off next week so I hope to be able to write a few posts then; we have a new poem from our honoured and official poet-in-residence, there are the mixed and frustrating experiences various members of the kin have had with the EU F2P Preview, the advent of F2P itself and of course the promised exploration of my dice collection. Good times eh!
Berath's Brain Burps 
