The radiance system was introduced with Mines of Moria to build upon the hope/dread system of Shadows of Angmar.
Essentially, certain bosses and environments produce differing amounts of gloom/dread, and unless this is countered with sufficient radiance/hope, your character will take a morale reduction (makes things tricky), at higher levels it causes a stat penalty (makes things difficult), and eventually it forces your character to cower regularly (makes things impossible).
Back in SoA, hope was more an annoyance than anything else. Before major bosses, you just had to remember to pop a consumable Edhelharn token (crafted by Jewellers) to give you a hope buff for the duration of the fight. A few bosses (Thaurlach, Thorog, Mordirith), had the ability to strip these hope buffs, adding a somewhat tedious extra layer of strategy as your fellowship/raid was forced to negotiate its way through various token cooldowns during the encounter.
With MoM, Turbine decided to leverage the hope/dread system as a content gating system, something which I sadly used to praise them for not doing back in SoA. Basically, players can now supplement the hope from Edhelharn tokens with something called radiance. Radiance appears on special armour set pieces, acquired by completing ‘hard mode’ challenges in the various 6-man Moria instances.
Rather than constantly inflating stats like in WoW, this allows Turbine to gate content according to your specific progress through previous content, instead of the actual power of your character. This wouldn’t be a huge issue if the progression was a well balanced and reasonable one, but for various reasons that is not the case:
- Due to what can charitably be described as ‘pretty abysmal QA’, a vast number of players exploited their way through the hard mode challenges before they were eventually fixed, months later, in Book 7, which got the system off to a pretty poor start.
- At least one of the ‘fixed’ hard mode challenges, the Dark Delvings, is now so difficult and unforgiving that only a small minority of players are able to complete it. I was one of the lucky ones that did it when it was just reasonably challenging!
- Completing a hard mode challenge does not guarantee the radiance armour piece for that instance, as only one barter coin drops each time. A fixed group must complete each instance 6 times, so unless you pug and are an extremely lucky roller, you are looking at a minimum of 36 successful instance runs. If you are an unlucky pugger, you could be stuck at this stage indefinitely.
So who cares? Well, up until now, it hasn’t been a huge issue. The only radiance gated content has been the Vile Maw, a lair raid against the Watcher. Anyone can run in there and ‘see’ the content, even if they don’t necessarily survive for every long.
However, Book 8 will see the addition of Dar Narbugud, a large 12-man raid that is the spiritual successor to The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu, arguably LotRO’s most enjoyable and popular piece of pre-MoM content. The difference between Dar Narbugud and the Rift? DN has strict radiance requirements (160 gloom for bosses, no less), whereas pretty much any level-capped player was good to go in the Rift.
Instead of raiding being a collaborative Kinship activity in which even the most casual of members could partake from time to time, it is set to become a luxury for only the most dedicated of players. Those that have the time and persistence to jump through all of the preceding hoops that Turbine have clumsily constructed for them.
The hardcore Kinships, likely representing a minority of players, will not break step, but casual Kinships, probably representing the majority of players, will feel the strain. They’ll have fewer radiance equipped players, and still fewer radiance equipped alts amongst those players to supplement class balance.
Do we really want LotRO to turn into WoW, where guilds more often exist for raiding first, friendship and kinship second? Ironically, LotRO raiding is becoming less accessible at the exact moment that WoW raiding is becoming more so, as if the negative charge of one is repelling the positive charge of the other, and forcing it from the raiding ‘centre ground’.
Even more bizarrely, Turbine have promised a level cap increase before the end of the year, which will bring this new raid to redundancy a good 6 months earlier than occurred with the Rift. A large number of level-capped players will simply not get to experience this content at the appropriate level, simply because they lack the time to bang their heads against a completely arbitrary restriction that Turbine think will prolong a few subscriptions. For shame, Turbine.
So, the advent of Book 8 will be a bittersweet day in my patronage of LotRO. The day when the first true instance progression was introduced, and the day that Turbine firmly cemented their flag in ‘grind for content’ territory. On that day Turbine, I will love you a little less.
June 12, 2009 at 5:34 pm |
It’s a shame to see that Turbine are taking this route, and it would be very interesting to know why they have made such a design decision. If anything, WoW seems to be trying small ideas that attempt to move away from this model of gating content, albeit not terribly successfully at the moment.
It is certainly a perplexing decision from an outside observer’s perspective; I can only reiterate that it would be fascinating to know as to why.
June 12, 2009 at 5:56 pm |
My charitable take is that it is their attempt to keep the older content relevant. If the new content is more enjoyable and rewarding than the older content, then the decision of where one should spend one’s time is an easy one.
My less charitable take is that they are explicitly trying to tailor LotRO more towards the Korean market, where tolerance and expectation of grind is purportedly much higher.
So, my problem is not with the progression as such, but the excessive time requirement (and content repetition!) that the progression entails. It is simply beyond a great proportion of LotRO players. Players that would no doubt thoroughly enjoy exploring a new raid with their Kinship, but will probably not get the chance to do so until months down the line, if at all.
June 12, 2009 at 7:34 pm |
At the same time it’s good to remember that the new 3-man and 6-man instances have a new 3-piece +15 radiance armor set. It will be also easier to acquire since every member will get a barter item drops.
More about it here:
http://my.lotro.com/amlug/book-8-instances-raids-and-you/
June 12, 2009 at 7:55 pm |
That’s true, but there is no replacement for the Dark Delvings piece yet, which is the biggest sticking point for most casual players. The chances of getting that piece by farming the turtle once or twice a week is very slim!
June 13, 2009 at 12:46 am |
You sir are dead on with this post. I did post on this earlier than you but you explain it a lot more clearly and I commend you for it.
July 15, 2009 at 4:23 pm |
[...] Unradiant Raid Progression By unwize The Radiance system in LotRO is Turbine’s attempt at a raid progression. It necessitates that a player spends a certain [...]
September 9, 2009 at 10:32 pm |
I have seen many posts that try and sum up what LOTRO’s problem is however this has to be the most clear and concise I have ever seen.
I lead a kin in the UK and we have suffered many players leaving our casual-based kin for the raiding kinships.
Friendships have since become just passing /emotes.
I pay a monthly fee for a game that I simply cannot even access.
The cause of this? Radiance, radiance… radiance.
September 18, 2009 at 9:56 am |
If you complete the deed in Shire “Life of a bounder” (advanced) – doing all quests in Shire you get the vice Sherriffs hat with 20 radiance. That´s a good alternative if you can´t get the DD head-piece.
September 18, 2009 at 10:07 am |
Unfortunately, the Bounder Sheriff’s Cap doesn’t stack with hope tokens, which pretty much negates its usefulness for the Watcher and the DN bosses.
October 21, 2009 at 12:40 am |
“Ignorant and unwashed”? You must be a complete braindead idiot for thinking that there are players playing Lotro who havn’t played other MMOs. Face it, the unresponsiveness of the combat system is obvious to anybody with above average IQ (That counts you out) and its good they are listening to the non-fanboi players (i.e. NOT people like you) to fix this obvious problem with lotro.
October 21, 2009 at 8:26 am |
Ah, I believe you must be referring to a comment I made in this post:
http://pearlsofunwisdom.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/lotro-siege-of-mirkwood-impressions/
I’m sorry you were unable to detect the irony in my comment. Perhaps the wink wasn’t clue enough?
Rest assured, I do not actually believe that players of other MMOs (myself having dabbled in a few) are the ‘ignorant and unwashed’.
I was alluding to the fact that many players used primarily to a global cooldown system, rather than LotRO’s skill queue system, tend to complain that the combat is unresponsive without really understanding the huge differences in how the system works.
In essence, a skill animation cannot begin until the previous skill animation has fully completed, and slower weapons produce longer animations.
It’s a system with many subtleties, and which many players actually prefer to the ubiquitous global cooldown system. Indeed, if you look at the official LotRO forums over the last few years, you are likely only to find a small handful of posts complaining about combat responsiveness, because once players actually acclimatise to the system, it becomes a non-issue.
If you have insurmountable problems with combat responsiveness in LotRO, the addition of interruptible auto-attacks is probably not going to change your mind.
October 31, 2009 at 2:55 pm |
Just to be clear, I don’t defend the radiance requirement Turbine has created. But it is possible to get past it with hard work, planning and a little luck. Exploiting is not (nor has ever) been needed to get your gear.
That said, radiance is only needed for two raids currently in game: Watcher and Dar Narbugud. Siege of Mirkwood is expected to add a third raid. For truly casual players who don’t want to raid, radiance gear is completely optional for enjoying the rest of the content in the game.
For those who want radiance gear, be sure to run the turtle every lock (twice a week) for a chance at radiance coins. If you don’t win the helm coin lottery, the Book 8 version of DD becomes vastly easier if all of your group members have a “shadow set” and Rank 10 fidelity for the shadow mitigation. Most, if not all of Gurvand’s attacks are shadow based, which means a shadow set is almost required of the tank. The adds casts roots which are a shadow dot, so everyone in the group will benefit from a shadow set.
There are 3 ways to meet the shadow mitigation requirement. If you have Rift gear from pre-Moria days, popping the gloves should be enough. The second way is to collect the 3-piece gold coin set for your class. The gold coins drop from boss chests in Moria instances. The third way is to collect the 3-piece +15 rad set from Book 8 instances.
The final fight in DD is a lot like the turtle in that it is a race between your health and Gurvand’s, but unlike the turtle in that it is a HEALING race, not a DPS race. If you want your healers to win, get your shadow set and they’ll have less to heal.