Success!

After a fair few nights, lining up for a lot of tries at Shadow Challenge Mode,

many times purposefully wiping in order to preserve the challenge,
Innocent finally prevailed and conquered the challenge mode with a few seconds to spare!

For the first time I actually remembered to get a screenshot of the deed completion popping up on my screen. :P  We don't have a video unfortunately due to our camera man not raiding with us that night.  It was such a relief to finally get this done.  I was starting to feel like we were banging our heads on the wall.  It's quite the stressful fight for an LM as well.  Also your pet won't stay on the boss even when you take it off assist.  It makes me feel dumb when I notice my bear is sat in the middle of the room doing nothing!  The last thing I want to be paying attention to is if my pet is attacking the boss or not!  Anyway, Innocent is now 3/5 for the challenge modes, which is basically all that is possible until Turbine fixes the Fire and Frost and Saruman fights.

I also received my 3rd(!) first ager.  It's sorta weird to have what feels like so many to me as never before have I been lucky enough to receive a 1st age token while it's still currently the best in the game.  I decided to make my rk a new fire stone.  I lucked out with my legacies, but the base stats were a fair bit of a let down.  I don't get why the devs do this.  You can see the difference between my new stone and my 2nd ager.  It's going to be hard to give those passives up, but on the whole, the 1st ager is definitely better.  But seriously:  what rk wants agility or parry rating?  or how about might on an LM staff?  Why even bother having these useless things ingame, especially when it deflates players a bit after the elation of getting a new weapon?  Ah well, I'm certainly enjoying the higher dps and menacing tanks even more. ;)

10 comments:

Ravanel 9 May 2012 at 00:05  

Grats, Lothirieth, that's super cool! Also grats on your symbol and indeed, what a shame on those passives! It will still be much better though, you know as well as I that you can't make up for that DPS increase. ;) I guess I can only try to cheer you up by saying that the stats have a low amount and do not actually influence that much (especially will, as we have so much of that).

I really wish they would have a system like in SWTOR instead. There you can just keep your old weapon forever (if you'd choose to do so) and upgrade it with stuff. No "relic removal scrolls", passives you cannot choose and such nonsense. You can just make the weapon exactly as you want it. The grind in LOTRO really takes the fun out of it.

Lothirieth 9 May 2012 at 03:56  

Yeah, it's really only a passing moment of mehness regarding the passives. I won't really pay attention to it so much. :)

I would love to have a weapon that grows with us as well and I REALLY resent having to buy relic removal scrolls. They've not made the system any more easy. Sure you can get the relics you want, but it's awfully expensive and time consuming to do so. The new crystals they're introducing are going to make the system even worse. :/

LIs are the one big thing that keep people from having very many endgame alts or at least people like me who like their toons to be well geared. Skirmish drops for jewelry is also another difficult aspect.

xhii 9 May 2012 at 07:39  

Grats on the achievements and LIs!

I agree with the LI/Legacy/relic hate, it's practically what's keeping me from returning to LotRO. I can't help thinking of the 10 levels of crap LIs I'd have to micromanage while leveling up, and then the 3rd-2nd-1st ager grind I'd have to go through at 75. One day I'll get at least one char through Isengard... I promise!

I'm just loving SWTOR's modding system, it's just so easy to grasp and fun to use - and I can really customise all my armour and weapons to look exactly the way I want and with the stats I want.

What's this about crystals, btw? Some update... 7 (is that the next one?) thing?

Lothirieth 9 May 2012 at 12:13  

The LI grind wouldn't be too horrible for you at the moment. You could use whatever you have now until 70, use the best piece of junk you can find with t1/2 relics, then go straight for the 2nd ager when you hit 75 as the symbols are pretty cheap at the skirmish legendary vendor. I highly doubt anyone in EV has a 1st ager unless they bought it off the AH considering the kin hasn't downed anything on t2 as far as I know. So you'd not have to worry about that anytime soon. :P

From the little I saw of the SWTOR system in beta, yeah, it looked a lot better. *sigh*

Crystals.. well they're supposedly rare drops you get from skirmishes, raids and instances (though from accounts on bullroarer, they don't seem horribly rare). You can use 3 per weapon and they upgrade it. It seems to be a general upgrade to dps and other things and not something you'd micromanage. According to some stats posted you could make your 3rd ager as good as a 2nd, and your 2nd as good as a 1st but the returns are more minimal on a 1st.

I really don't get them. Very few people want them. And of course there's the strong possibility Turbine will put them in the store, so yeah. Just seems like it's gonna eventually be a moneymaker for them in the long run.

I tell you, I'm starting to look wistfully at GW2, but I know hardly anyone who plans on playing, wouldn't want to be alone and would have no idea what server to go on. meh!

Lothirieth 9 May 2012 at 12:14  
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lothirieth 9 May 2012 at 12:15  

oops yes, crystals are in the next update, that being 7.

aaand well, 2 people in EV have 1st agers, because they raid with Innocent as well. :P

xhii 10 May 2012 at 00:44  

Oh you really should get GW2, it's looking GREAT! I'm definitely going to play it and so are many from EV, at least.

And btw it shouldn't even matter which server you pick for yourself, since you can play PvE with anyone from any server - the "home" server matters only for world-vs-world pvp. And you can also join several guilds on the same character :)

Lothirieth 10 May 2012 at 07:41  

Playing with EV people is potentially problematic. It's fine for 99% of the people aside from 2 officers and the leader... obviously I couldn't be in the guild and that cuts you off quite a bit. :(

But good to hear that servers have nothing to do with PvE and joining multiple guilds sounds awesome! :)

xhii 10 May 2012 at 11:48  

Thought I'd mention EV just so you know there's people you know :)

There's even been talk of making a bloggers' guild in GW2 over at the Newbie Blogger Initiative forums.

Lothirieth 10 May 2012 at 17:28  

Oooh, that sounds interesting! :)