So, as well as the online spreadsheet / document (which is here), I’ve included a summary image below, which shows the twenty LOTRO Virtues, and which character stats they now provide.
1 / gold indicates the Virtue’s primary stat.
2 / green indicates the secondary stat and,
3 / blue indicates the tertiary or least valuable stat.
Click the image for the full version.
With the release of Rise of Isengard, Turbine have changed the character attributes within Lord of the Rings Online. For example, they have consolidated all the different resists such as poison, disease, wounds etc. into a single Resist Rating.
As a result, the Virtues have had to completely change to map against the new statistics. I have put together a Google Docs Spreadsheet showing the new Virtue values since the release of Rise of Isengard.
You can view the spreadsheet here.
Leave a comment against this post if I’ve made any mistakes or if you can fill in any of the gaps.
The Rise of Isengard is a full expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. It’s not free content, you have to pay for it, and it brings new levels (10 to be precise). That’s the same number of new levels that we got with Moria. Along with the levels, ROI brings three new areas, hundreds of quests, some new skills but more importantly, a complete revamp of character attributes and itemisation.
In the weeks and months up to the release of Isengard, classes underwent several changes, mostly to tweak unused skills or providing missing functionality. Isengard has built on that for most classes and in some cases, such as the Minstrel, has fundamentally changed their skill line-up. The overall intent appears to be to make the classes more balanced, and provide all players with a role in groups. I won’t cover the changes to all the classes here, there’s too much to go through, instead I’ll just describe my experience with Isengard and my overall enjoyment. The article got a bit long – sorry about that.
It’s traditional in LOTRO to move you between one area and the next using the Epic quest line. You don’t have to do it that way usually (Moria was an exception) but it’s clearly the intended or preferred method. Rise of Isengard is no different, you receive a letter, asking you to report to one of the Rangers in Enedwaith, eventually leading you into Dunland, which is the entry point to the Isengard expansion. A nice little unique element is that the Epic provides two routes via two different quest lines. Following one doesn’t exclude the other, since you can go back and retrace your steps, but it’s clearly designed to offer choice and prevent massive overcrowding. Dunland itself is south of Enedwaith, and the quests take you either directly south, or south-west and into the new land.
ROI is not as big as Moria. Let’s face it, Moria was just huge. It achieved that size through a combination of vertical movement, forced routes (making you track back and forward in a location to generate more distance within the same volume) and lots of distinct locations with their own look and feel. ROI doesn’t have that luxury, there are only 3 different major locations (described below), but the developers have tried hard to make them feel distinct.
Dunland is a vast open area that you reach south of Enedwaith. It is populated very much like Enedwaith. There are a series of encampments with native men, who may be allies or enemies, spread throughout a mixture of terrains. Dunland is probably larger than Enedwaith overall, but not by a huge amount. The level of creatures and enemies increases from 65 to the high-70’s as you progress across the landscape. In order to make the area feel larger than it is, Turbine have employed the ‘having to run around large pieces of scenery like mountains’ so you need to cover more ground to get from A to B than it would take as the eagle flies. I understand the intent, but it can be frustrating to be standing right next to a quest ring or NPC only to find out you’re another 5 minutes away and have to circle back. Once again, almost every camp has a stable master, and Galtrev in the centre acts as the major hub for this region.
The Gap of Rohan looks very much like Dunland, but is significantly smaller. There are two or three major quest hubs with smaller quest NPC’s scattered throughout. The Gap is a really narrow strip of land, and is where you finally begin to engage full time with the Riders of Rohan.
Isengard is split into three locations. The outskirts (Nan Curunir), the area just outside the tower, and the tower itself (accessed through various instances). For me, this is the most interesting set of locations in the game, although the outer terrain is also the most frustrating. There’s nothing worse in my view, than scenery you can see over, but can’t jump over or easily move through (in this cases, fallen trees that you can’t jump). As a consequence, moving around here can be very frustrating, but it’s worth it. It gives an excellent feeling of the bleak and terrible impact Saruman is having on the landscape and contrasts really well against the bright heather-strewn landscape of Dunland.
Rise of Isengard continues and apparently will conclude your journey with the Dunedain that started all those books and epic quests ago. Like Enedwaith, this story basically describes how you help the Rangers travel through hostile land, win over the trust of the native tribes (or not, as the case may be) and how you learn of Saruman’s treachery. There’s not much to say on it to be honest, it feels like a footnote in the epic quest so far, and not that epic, but it’s inoffensive and if you love the Rangers you’ll enjoy interacting with them again. It does have some tongue-in-cheek moments I think, for example, you get to watch the Rangers collecting wood, running errands and gathering apples just like they’ve made you do for the last hundred epic quests.
Outside of the epic specifically, Dunland is a land besieged and under the thrall of Saruman even if the natives don’t realise it. War is coming, none can avoid it, all must choose sides, and as usual you’re the catalyst in that process.
There are two reputations in Rise of Isengard. Men of Dunland and Theodred’s Riders. The early part of the expansion offers mostly Men of Dunland, with the later parts and the later epic providing Theodred’s. You’ll hit Kindred with Men of Dunland by just doing the quests, but you’ll need to work harder with the second reputation, repeating daily quests and doing as many tasks as you can find.
As is common now, both reputations have vendors, but this time the currency is regular money! No odd flowers, or strange branches or lumps of rock. The prices of some of the reputation items (and there are a lot) are quite interesting, some of them over 2gp. I like the new approach, the quests and mob drops give a good cash input, and you can earn cash anywhere else in the game you like and then come and buy reputation items.
The quest rewards are many and varied, and in part, drive the problem I have with itemisation (you’ll read that bit later). Many quests give a choice between three items, it may be 1 piece of jewellery, 1 piece of light armour and 1 cloak, or 1 piece of heavy armour, 1 piece of medium armour and 1 piece of jewellery. Because of the new itemisation, and the move away from 1 x light, 1 x medium, 1 x heavy or 3 pieces of jewellery, you have to pick your quest rewards carefully, plan ahead and hoard what you get in order to successfully use them as upgrades.
Questing in Rise of Isengard for the most part matches the experience in Enedwaith and Mirkwood. Quest hubs provide introduction quests, and then move you around the landscape. There’s a common theme in ROI, where a quest NPC will give you 3 quests, and then another 3 once those are complete. Many of the quests are standard fair, collecting items, killing the enemy, but there are signs that the Turbine team are trying to find new questing experiences. There’s a quest to return lost horses which was quite nice, and some of the instances have new mechanics (specifically where you lead teams of good guys against lots of bad guys). I’ll say no more so I don’t spoil some of the better instances.
The vast majority of the quests are soloable at ‘even con’ (i.e. the same level as you), and the XP gains mean if you do all the quests you’ll level at the right speed. It’s a bit frustrating, I liked the old style quests where they were soloable with a challenge, much easier as a duo or trio, and the last stage tended to require a group. I know they’ve moved away from that format, but I really did prefer it. One very annoying feature in recent expansions is the exact opposite position, where the first few quests are out in the open, and then end in a solo instance. Some of those instances are uneven in difficulty and some classes might struggle, although after one or two goes you learn the best approach. ROI adds a new style of instance which ‘is designed to be solo but can be completed as a duo’. I’m really not sure what the intent was here, one of them configured like that doesn’t even involve any killing and it’s not consistent, some of the hardest are enforced solo, and others seem to randomly allow 2 people.
I would much prefer the Mirkwood approach where the final stage is actually a skirmish and so can be done with 1, 2, 3 or 6 people. My feeling is that Turbine ran out of time, and there are signs of rushed content all over the expansion.
Overall, the quests are like much of the rest of ROI – not hugely challenging and based on the concept of running around a lot.
Like killing Orcs? Like squishing Goblins? Enjoy defeating Trolls with 75k morale? You’ll love Isengard. It’s Orcs, Half-Orcs, Goblins, Trolls and Wargs. The staple diet of the Lord of the Rings enemy list. Those bad guys are interspersed with the usual wolves, some new lizard-like creature, massive turtles, undead, birds and native men. The enemy ranges from level 65 to 75 as you would expect, and I found them generally easier to kill than those in Moria. Some of them have a few tricks (watch out for the nasty fire DOT) but in general, there are few surprises.
The good guys break down into three groups. Native people who you are working with to free from Saruman’s grasp, The Rangers you’ve been travelling with and the newly introduced Riders of Rohan. There’s the odd elf and dwarf thrown in for flavour, but that’s about it.
Covered briefly in the story section above. The epic is okay, some of the quests are quite innovative, adding some functionality we’ve not seen before. There’s a definite sense of the team trying out new styles of quests and new ways to engage the characters. Overall though, it’s pretty boring in terms of actual content, once again we’re being point for the Rangers. I think Turbine recognise this, and they have announced we’ll be leaving the Rangers behind and instead, collecting bandages and digging up treasure troves for the Riders of Rohan going forward.
Isengard adds an entire new level to the crafting scheme, which I’m quite happy about. They’ve also taken the excellent decision to reduce the different kinds of raw craft resources for each craft, and then introduce new recipes to build intermediate ingredients. For example, rather than 3 or 4 types of metal (Khazad Iron, Khazad Tin, Khazad Gold, Khazad Copper) there is just one type – Skarn. That ore can be turned into low quality, medium quality or high quality ingots, using increasing amounts of the raw materials to do so (there’s also a shortcut, which I’ll leave you to discover). The end result is that resource collection is less complex and less frustrating (additionally improved by a huge increase in resource nodes), but recipes still have multiple layers and levels of complexity to work through. I love the new system frankly, and think it has greatly improved the crafting. I’d like to see them retrofit it for the previous levels but appreciate that would be a huge undertaking.
The new recipes are mostly interesting, although they suffer from my dislike of the new itemisation.
Along with the new craft level is a new craft guild reputation level and the associated tokens. That has definitely extended the time taken to move through Isengard because it gives you something else to focus on (some say time sink, others say interesting addition).
Some people are upset that you have to travel to Isengard to be able to complete recipes (I won’t give away why) which makes their tradeskill alts useless. Personally, I think if you’re going to learn how to craft in the style of The Westfold, it makes more sense that you have to travel there to learn it. My craft alts are all of an appropriate level anyway, so personally I think it’s a good thing.
Ten more levels – not much to say except it’s nice to see the XP bar moving again after so long out of Mirkwood. Levelling is trivial, there’s almost no challenge in the game if you start the expansion at level 65, and it’s essentially a matter of just investing time to hit 75. I never died on my Guardian in the entire 10 levels, most of that was solo, and sometimes I found myself just fighting AFK while I made a drink.
The new skills are a mix of nice and boring. Some classes get just upgrades, albeit with some interesting twists (for example, Guardians get no new skills, but their upgrades are interesting), while some classes get new skills which are a bit weak (Wardens get the ability to ‘store’ a gambit, but it’s not particularly exciting in the solo / group game). Isengard is lacking compared to previous expansions, Moria was far more progressive in terms of the new skills. Moria also felt tougher at the outset as well.
I won’t write a whole bunch on this – suffice to say Turbine have rationalised the character stats, and reduced the number of them down to a better level. It was getting crazy with 20 or 30 different statistics. I like the changes, I’m happy with the lumping together of some numbers.
Turbine have also added Finesse – a way to bypass your enemies defences. I’m not sure of the value of this for group / solo players, it still seems to be there primarily to make raid targets more challenging without a lot of gear upgrades (i.e. an enemy that has such high Block that you need 12,000 Finesse just to dent it). We’ll see if it survives longer than Radiance.
Ten new levels of legendary items, and another revamp of the stats on relics thanks to the changes to the character stats. Nothing too exciting to cover, many people complained that for non-weapon LI’s there was no reason to upgrade away from their level 65 2nd age item. For weapons, you have to upgrade eventually just to get the DPS increase. Some of the artwork for the new items is quite nice, I prefer the one handed axes to the Mirkwood versions.
It will come as no surprise to my friends from in the game, that I think the itemisation changes in Rise of Isengard are a huge black spot on an other wise okay expansion. Turbine have taken the decision to polarise gear choice. Items now provide large bonuses to a small selection of character stats. For example, you may get +89 Vitality and +54 Might on a breastplate, but almost nothing else, or a neck item will have +50 Will, +50 Vitality and +50 Fate.
Read the developer diaries for the apparent reasoning behind this, the claim is that it makes gear choices more flexible. To me, it makes it significantly harder to manage your equipment choices. In the past, you could consider an item of equipment and compare it to your existing item and decide if it was an upgrade, a sidegrade or a downgrade. You could pretty much do that in isolation. Sure, sometimes you might want to augment a stat that you had lost elsewhere but gear tended to improve all your stats to some extent. Now when you see a chest piece with a huge armour increase, you can’t actually equip it without hugely impacting say your Power or Fate scores. Overall, a single piece might be a downgrade, and it’s only an upgrade if you also move around 3 or 4 other pieces of gear to compensate, or re-trait, or change your relics.
Gear management has become a spreadsheet and calculator affair, rather than something you can just eyeball and get a good feeling about.
You can’t slowly, incremental upgrade your gear. This is especially true switching from pre-Isengard gear to the new structure. Next time it might be different, but this time the change is painfully difficult. If you get a piece of gear as a quest reward, and equip it, you will end up being worse off in some regards, and you will need to compensate. If you are offered the choice between some Power heavy gear or some Morale heavy gear, you need to have a plan in mind otherwise you might choose Power gear only to be need to switch it out later when even more gear brings Power you don’t need. I refer to this as forcing Upgrade Cascades. You need to hoard rewards and gear and crafted items in case you need to radically re-arrange your gear to prevent the loss of some vital stats just to get a gain elsewhere.
What appears as a huge upgrade initially ends up being a trivial upgrade because you need to replace other gear to compensate.
Anyway, if I don’t stop it’ll end up being the whole article. My closing words, maybe I’m in the minority, maybe I think about this stuff too much, but I hate the new itemisation and the amount of work you will need to invest just to work out if a new piece of gear is an actual upgrade, and it has absolutely diminished my enjoyment of both RoI and LOTRO in general.
So, here we are at last. Is it any good? I’ll damn it with faint praise, it’s okay. It’s nowhere near as iconic as Moria, it’s not as well put together as Mirkwood, it’s not as exciting as Moria either. It’s just okay, inoffensive, easy to progress through, offering very little challenge in-game. The greatest challenge is working out how to upgrade your gear. Some of the quests show a spark of originality, some succeed more than others, but many feel rushed and not quite finished.
Two things. Firstly, it’s too easy, there’s just no challenge. Secondly, there’s nothing to come back to later. There are 3- and 6-man instances in Moria and Mirkwood that I have still never finished and want to go back and complete. I’ve finished Isengard twice; everything except the raid. Even casual players will chew it up and then move on to another game.
You get to kill a lot of Orcs.
I wanted much, much more from Rise of Isengard. Instead, I got an extension of Enedwaith; Forochel without the frost.
BT Infinity has dropped down to 32Mbps download / 8Mbps upload, but it’s not disconnected now for about 4 days. I assume therefore it’s been settling to a speed the line quality can handle, and has landed at pretty close to the original BT estimate (34Mbps / 10Mbps).
I’m still happy with that speed, and I’m glad the line has stabilised and stopped disconnecting once a day!
Firstly, let’s make this very, very clear. I pretty much knew what I was getting into when I decided to move to BT Infinity. When I first picked an ADSL provider I chose Nildram. I did so because they had a reputation for not touching your traffic. They were a data carrier, they didn’t try and intercept traffic or ‘offer value add services’.
Over the years, I got moved to other more ‘consumer grade’ ADSL services. I knew when I chose to move to BT with BT Infinity that I would be at the mercy of BT policy. I don’t like it, but I wanted to move from TalkTalk (who are no better) and at least Infinity is better, faster technology.
So how’s the move been?
Installation was a dream, literally. This is our house, and it’s my network and I’m not happy with people coming in and messing with it, so I always get a bit bristly. My existing ADSL service stayed live until the BT Engineer called from the cabinet. He said, “I’m going to disconnect you and them come round”, the cabinet is a street away. The line dropped, the phone line was working within 5 minutes and he turned up 5 minutes after that.
My ADSL router was a fair distance from the master socket, connected via an rj11 cable. Normally, ADSL providers hate you doing that claiming shocking performance reduction and instability, but it had been fine for years. I knew that Infinity needed a cable modem (essentially), and the BT Home Hub. I thought the cable modem had to be near the master socket, but the Home Hub could be further away, and I was ready for a ‘discussion’ with the engineer to make that happen.
Turns out, the cable modem sits on an rj11 cable to the socket – and the engineer was more than happy to place it exactly where my old ADSL router had been. Win! No cable changes required. The Home Hub sits just in front of the modem. This was a huge relief for me, I had visions of trying to run cabling everywhere and I was really pleased the engineer took the time to look at what I had and work with it.
Total time from engineer call to BT Infinity installed and working – 27 minutes.
He said it sometimes takes longer if there’s a lot of cabling to do – but I was pretty impressed.
I have to say, performance exceeds all my expectations, at present. The line runs around 34-37Mbps download and 8-9Mbps upload consistently. There’s some variation and I’m not sure if that’s the line negotiating a different speed, contention or just network throughput. Either way – I’m super happy.
I have a minor issue at the moment with reliability. The connection is dropping once a day at the moment, late at night or early in the morning, for about a minute. This might seem trivial, but it bugs the hell out of me, and it’s obvious it’s happened for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t run a ‘normal’ consumer style network config here, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on with permanent ‘net connections so I can see it’s dropped. Secondly, because the IP address is also changing on each reset, TweetDeck is getting its knickers in a twist with SSL certificates and moaning. This might be a bug in TweetDeck being exposed by the IP change, but it’s annoying none-the-less.
These were issues I was expecting, I’m listing them here in case you might not, or in case you run the kind of stuff I do.
I’m really pleased overall with BT Infinity. The speed is higher presently than the estimate, it’s consistent at present, and the installation was significantly less complex than I thought it would be. The issues aren’t unexpected, and for most home users won’t be a problem (the e-mail one is the one that will get most folk who don’t use webmail).
Download ~35Mbps, upload ~8Mbps and the engineer was here about 20 minutes. Very, very happy.
BT parcel arrived today (I think it’s the Home Hub), and I’m still expecting the engineer on Wednesday. Our connection will go dark sometime on the 9th but hopefully be back the same day.
Fingers crossed.
In our previous house, we had a cable modem, but despite there being a green Cable box right outside the wall of the new house, there’s no cable service in our street. I checked with Virgin Cable but it wasn’t commercially viable to do the street any more. So we signed up for ADSL. At the time, I wanted a reliable service, and I’d heard good things about Nildram, so I signed up with them.
It wasn’t the cheapest option, by a long chalk, but it was reliable, in four years we had no noticeable outage. Nildram was eventually purchased by Pipex but nothing really changed. Then Pipex were bought up by Tiscali, and not much changed. Then Tiscali were bought up by Opal. who may have been part of TalkTalk or were later renamed to TalkTalk business or something like that. Once that happened, the service went downhill.
Overnight disconnects, variable performance, disconnects during the day, etc. However, if you’ve met me you know that I am super resistant to change. Not because I don’t think change can be good, but because I’m basically lazy. I’ll tolerate ‘good enough’ vs ‘much better’ if good enough involves no effort. Eventually though, there’s a tipping point and I’ll initiate change.
I’ve been looking at BT Infinity since it was first announced – cable-like speeds using VDSL. It’s still variable speed, because your distance from the cabinet has an impact but it’s significantly better than most ADSL. My ADSL connection is 6-7Mbps, BT Infinity suggested I might get 34Mbps.
So anyway – about 3 weeks ago we noticed the ‘net connection was being a bit odd. Sending tweets wouldn’t work, web pages would half load, some stuff wouldn’t connect first time. Throughput was okay once you got a connection, I could still get 5-600KB/s, but it would sometimes reqiure two or three page refreshes to load a full web page.
It came to a head when I worked at home one day, and my VPN connection to the office was atrocious. I couldn’t send or receive any mail and got about 2KB/s transfer when trying to send and receive files. Clearly, the underlying VPN connection suffered more from whatever was causing the connection issues in general.
Did I call TalkTalk? No. For two reasons. Firstly, someone else at work mentioned exactly the same behaviour on their TalkTalk connection, and they knew of 1 other person with the same issue as well. At the same point, I found someone living in a completely different part of the country on TalkTalk who had the same problem. The second reason, and you can lambaste me if you like, is that I knew how the conversation would go.
Me: I’m having an issue – description of problem.
Customer Service Rep: Okay, I have a checklist of things you’ve already done, such as rebooting your ADSL router, taking all other devices out of the equation, etc., etc.
Me: But I know other people with the exact same issue around the country, and I’ve tried those things, and it feels to me like packet loss or traffic shaping gone bad, and my line quality values haven’t changed because I track them.
Customer Service Rep: Okay, but can you please work through this checklist of things.
Me: Sigh.
I spend my job fixing technical issues, and advising other people how to fix them, and I know very well how critical it is that you follow a logical investigative process and make no assumptions. But when I ring a call centre I don’t want to hear that shit, I want to speak to someone technical so we can talk about it. I know I can’t, I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.
It’s like being a retired garage mechanic and taking your car to your local garage, and having to try and explain why you know what the problem is while they ask you what colour the paintwork is.
So no, I didn’t call TalkTalk, but I did decide to move to BT Infinity. Ten minutes through the Infinity signup and I remembered I needed my MAC. To give them their due, TalkTalk provided it well within the 5 working day estimate. On Tuesday of this week I ordered BT Infinity and they gave me a delivery and installation date of next Wednesday!
So I’m excited but of course, because of who I am, I’m also planning! I used to have a fixed IP address with Nildram but that’s going to go, so I’ll need to re-work the security on my VPS and web sites. I’ll need to either run a long cat5 cable between the VDSL modem and the BT Home Hub, or get a new network switch, or maybe both. Is there going to be room for both boxes near the phone? Will the engineer be helpful and put the Home Hub in a different room? Argh!
So, all change to something many people consider a luxury, but for many reasons, something we consider vital. I’ll let you know how it goes, over 3G if it goes badly.
Normally when I stop writing blog posts, it’s because I’m going through a low period emotionally. It’s been quiet around here for a while and although some of that is absolutely related to my mood, a greater part of it is because I’m just busier than I have been for a while in the evenings.
Three trips to the gym a week might not sound like much, but we’re there for 2 to 2 and a half hours, so during the week that eats up virtually all of the evening. When we get back we’ve got to eat, and then we’ve got to catch up on TV. On the days we’re not at the gym we’ve either been playing Lord of the Rings Online more often again, or we’re recovering from the gym and catching up on TV!
On top of that, in the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of people visiting, family and friends, and that takes up time and emotional energy. So it’s been a bit sparse around here other than gym updates.
I’m not sure if that will change any time soon, we’ve got visitors this weekend, we’ve had a lot of stress about cars and the house, and I’m in a pretty low place mood wise, but let’s see what happens.