Thread: Dev's: For Your Consideration.

3 years.
+
9 ranks. (11 ranks for the cloak)
+
9 Brilliant Stones dropping from only raid level bosses, gated by pvmp, in an open pvmp zone.
+
12 Tyrants Crests that only drop from two raid level bosses INSIDE a PvMP zone defended by heavy npc's.
+
48 Chieftan's Brooches, that only drop from Chieftans from TWO areas on the PvMP map.

All for this:





This as compared to the best gear combination for my playstyle/build I've been able to put together. Note: no BG gear...which conceptually could have made the difference even worse.

Comparative gear and analysis on next post.

Reserved for number crunching.

-100 Rad...for what that's worth, it could easily be more, but I used my "everyday" gear for the comparison not gear that I wear for 3 fights in one raid every great while.
-645 Morale
-3 Might
-56 Agil
-113 Vit
+27 WIll
+20 Fate
-112 Melee Crit
-170 Armour
-196 Incoming healing
-173 Common Mit
-147 Fire, Frost, Shadow, Lightening Mit
-1713 Acid Mit
+404 Wound Resist
+738 Fear Resist
-226 Disease Resist
+91 Poison Resist
-83 Power
+ 10% increase to Devestate Magnitude buff
+ 10s to Hamstring duration.
-5% AoE Power cost

Now about those last three.

Devs are EXCEEDINGLY rare vs creeps in the moors due to their anti crit builds.
Hamstring due to it's reach via LI legacy is a KEY form of dps and not likely to need to be longer than 20s anyhow.
If I'm running out of power in the moors it's because I'm being drained by mad poisons etc, and no 5% is ever going to matter.

So anyhow.

There you have it.

I think I'm the first person on any server to bother getting all those REDICULOUS PvE materials in a PvMP zone to get such terribly sub-par end game armour that is supposed to be a reward for the highest ranked folks out there.

It's the full tp Champ set + the R11 Cloak.
The set requires R9 to finish.

I'd suggest the bare minimum required to get this set, is on the order of 20-50Xs more effort/time than ANY other gear in the game.
It's certainly the rarest.

And to my knowledge honestly, all that would need to be done is some adjustments to some values in a database to bump it up and make it viable, and change/eliminate the crazy cost for it beyond the admitedly pretty high rank requirement.

I hope actually seeing a direct comparison at work will give it some perspective.

----

To my server. Thanks folks. I NEVER would've gotten this done without a lot of help from a lot of people. In many ways the ranking was the easy part.

Ouch.... Man that stuff sucks

Wow Luc. I'm glad you accomplished your goal of gathering the entire set.

That set is just straight up worthless and I wouldn't buy that from a vendor for coins.

If I were a dev at Turbine, I'd be embarrassed to let that set of armour make its

way to live servers. Shame on you Turbine, just... shame on you.

Luc, I hope you put this in other forums as well. Need to get this out and have as many people see it as possible.

Painful demonstration of what people "sorta knew." But seeing it all in one place makes the lameness of these sets absolutely clear. The irony is that these sets, because they are so specialized and so difficult to obtain, should be at least on par with the best end-game raid items in the game, even if their stats and skill bonus are tweaked for Moors needs.

Originally Posted by Thane9

+27 WIll
+20 Fate

Well, this is nice at least. For a champ. Who is mostly in Fervour.

So that's why you wanted all those stones and crests? You had the idea to make an epic piss and moan thread, but thought you needed a way to try and justify your pissing and moaning and at the same time make the thread that much more epic and colorful.

Originally Posted by Pusher

So that's why you wanted all those stones and crests? You had the idea to make an epic piss and moan thread, but thought you needed a way to try and justify your pissing and moaning and at the same time make the thread that much more epic and colorful.

Welcome to missing the point entirely.

The set doesn't show the most important thing...
The 15-30 second mez that is in effect from your foe being unable to stop staring at your owl-eyes long enough to hit a skill before being slaughtered.

I was incapacitated from "hello"

Originally Posted by Pusher

So that's why you wanted all those stones and crests? You had the idea to make an epic piss and moan thread, but thought you needed a way to try and justify your pissing and moaning and at the same time make the thread that much more epic and colorful.

I r appoint you the douchebag post of the month award.
That said, you didn't have to demonstrate to express how lame the set is. The devs know it's **** and cannot have it as good as PVE gear otherwise you will get the pve carebears ***** and moan as they do best. Better and less constructive than our dear Luc I might add.

Congratulations, you just beat the game. Now you can quit and find a better one.

Originally Posted by lebleh

I r appoint you the douchebag post of the month award.
That said, you didn't have to demonstrate to express how lame the set is. The devs know it's **** and cannot have it as good as PVE gear otherwise you will get the pve carebears ***** and moan as they do best. Better and less constructive than our dear Luc I might add.

Were those PvE carebears *****ing and moaning about it in book 12 through moria?

(I didn't read the forums at all before MoM.)

Note: this isn't a complaint thread. (and I should know, I've "penned" more than my share over the years)

This is a thread that lays the facts out there in plain and simple terms.

The costs are documented.
The rareness of the costs are documented.

The benefits are documented.
The relative values of the benefits are documented.

It's up to the devs to respond, or not, or act, or not based on those facts.

I hope that they improve this gear as well as PvMP as a whole.

Until then, this account will remain inactive.

Go Freeps! This game is so worth paying for!

Thanks for posting that info.

I'd be interested in how the stats look when you put that Pendevig-clog (I'm assuming) back on. I understand your point about how the cloaks are useless, but from what I can remember they weren't that great at level 50 either. They really seem like they are more of a "fluff" item to equip as a cosmetic even though I too would like to see them have an actual use.

From doing number crunching before I've always thought these gear sets would be great for the moors if they only had mitigation bonuses. Adding a 6 piece bonus on heavy armor of +1000 to all non-common damage types would be reasonable to me considering the time and effort people put into getting the ranks and collecting the items to barter for the set. They could also step it up as well such as having fire at 4, acid at 5, and shadow at 6.

I completely agree that in their current form the armor sets aren't worth it.

Great job hanging in there Luc.

I hope your point is made.

I'm glad you demonstrated how craptastic the armour set is, sadly I doubt you will get a reply from a dev. Bottom line is they couldn't care less how much it sucks and how much of a PITA it is to get.

Originally Posted by Sid'heru

I'm glad you demonstrated how craptastic the armour set is, sadly I doubt you will get a reply from a dev. Bottom line is they could care less how much it sucks and how much of a PITA it is to get.

Despite most evidence being to the contrary, I honestly CANNOT bring myself to actually believe the developers of this game don't care about every last person playing their game.

Obviously ALL development must be done with the idea that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one and there are CERTAINLY issues in the moors that we'd all choose to be addressed before some lousy gear.

But here's my point.

This isn't a debugging issue.
This isn't an issue of making something special for PvMP mechanics.

This is just numerical data on a gear set.

A set they already went to all the effort of creating vendors for and creating and establishing loot tables for.

All they need to do is just change the numbers.

I'd suggest leaving the rank requirement but removing all cost.
I'd further suggest bumping the stats SIGNIFICANTLY.

In a perfect world the gear would be moors only equipable and SIGNIFICANTLY sculpted just for PvMP issues and power levels.

But I'd be happy just seeing it be a reasonably equipable set without gimping yourself.

It just strikes me as odd that it was put in so haphazardly and not balanced even a teensy bit with respect to cost/benefit.

IMHO it's the #1 shining example of how itemization in this game is in dire need of some refocused attention.

I don't know if the devs are afraid of PvE players complaining if the PvMP set is better than what they get in PvE land, but if it could only be equiped in the 'Moors, wouldn't that eliminate any complaints?

Unfortunately, the stats on the 'moors set makes about as much sense as the stats on the Lothlorien set. The only reason to get the Loth set is so that you can get past the radiance gating to get to bigger and badder bad guys, but the set they give you with the better radiance has worse stats. It's like putting up a sign that says "you must be this tall to enter, but you must also cut off your right hand because we need to make our new bad guys challenging".

P.S. I love the fact that Owlman has no secret identity in the 'Moors since cosmetics are disabled - if the stats had been any good on that gear most people would die of embarassment wearing it.

Originally Posted by Sid'heru

I'm glad you demonstrated how craptastic the armour set is, sadly I doubt you will get a reply from a dev. Bottom line is they could care less how much it sucks and how much of a PITA it is to get.

If they could care less, they should.

The fact that there is no rad on the gear should keep the strictly PvE folks from whining about the accessibility to it even if it was on par to the raid gear. There is no possible excuse as to why the stats on it suck whatsoever other than complete negligence and uncaring by the devs.( other than maybe not wanting a book 12 repeat is the only thing I can logically come up with) Then on top of it you have a ridiculous PvE grind (arguably worse than raids) to obtain it. A big slap in the face IMHO.

Hopefully they will address this in the future, but I am not holding my breath.

Without radiance the set would still be of use to PvE folks, just not in raids where eadiance is required, I run around with ~50% of total radiance just because the stats of a mixed set are better than the full top radiance set.

About the PvMP set, it really should be better, but then, its so dificult to get, why bother?

I mean, dificult not in the killings, nor in the ranking (its time and it will come eventually), but really, I never saw a group forming to go after these rewards, to kill the bosses that drop the stuff.

And the real dificult is in there, in finding a raid to go after these things. I understand why Luc said the ranking was the easist part of it.

IMO, the set should be better, but also be more accessible, maybe a barter system where you could barter the keet taking tokens for the stones/whatever, or trading in destiny points, wich are gained thru killing creeps.

Should we really expect anything else than what we're getting with this set?

It's been a long while since effort actually equaled reward for gear in this game. It seems as if the developers are actually attempting to keep most players within a certain range of each other statistically. The only exception to that is Li's.

I dont mind that way of thinking in certain ways, but in others it highly offends me. If we're all the same or roughly the same with stats, talent will rise to the top. That is, if we were sparring each other. But the fact remains that we arent. We're fighting creeps.

The BG armor is a downgrade at best in many instances so should we really expect our PvMP gear top be any different? Make no mistake, the gear was made this way intentionally. My only hope is that with the WB acquisition, more employees + cashflow = more time spent considering these things.

Originally Posted by leekofthewood

Make no mistake, the gear was made this way intentionally..

If this is true, then I still believe the issue is in examining the cost/benefit of these rewards.

If there's such a huge concern about making it "too good" then fine, keep it as it is. But don't make it cost items that represent months and months of PvE grinding ON TOP of R9 grinding.

The whole thing makes no sense. None. And the cloaks are an even worse example.

Originally Posted by Garan

P.S. I love the fact that Owlman has no secret identity in the 'Moors since cosmetics are disabled - if the stats had been any good on that gear most people would die of embarassment wearing it.

I, for one, wouldnt be embarrassed at all by wearing it because of the looks as evidenced by having two of the peices myself. It looks much much better than the Angmar era champ set ever did. At the very least the helm is more pleasing to the eye, there's really no questioning that.

The sad fact is, I'm not going to wear it in the moors other than the occasional gag because I sacrifice 20% of my morale pool to do so. It's THAT far off.

Originally Posted by Thane9

If this is true, then I still believe the issue is in examining the cost/benefit of these rewards.

If there's such a huge concern about making it "too good" then fine, keep it as it is. But don't make it cost items that represent months and months of PvE grinding ON TOP of R9 grinding.

The whole thing makes no sense. None. And the cloaks are an even worse example.

Oh I think we all agree the timesink for the reward is just silly. The same goes for cosmetic at best cloaks. In fact, I havent even bought the rank 11 cloak. What's the use? They arent even dyeable.

I had an idea about a year ago, and this totally unrelated btw, to have the ability for kinship cloaks.

You could overlay the stats of your favorite cloak, pay for your kinship logo to be put onto them and voila, you've got yourself some dynamic, easily identifyable gear for the moors. It would be a coup for cash flow for Turbine. Alas, we cant even get them to examine the things they put into the game already.

/facepalms

Thanks to the OP for grinding out to at least try to get the devs' attention, but in the fall of this year, it will be TWO YEARS of us complaining about this awful, unobtainable gear and I don't think I've ever once seen a developer even once acknowledge they know the situation exists. Personally I've moved on and assume we'll never get back to where we were in SoA B12-14. Screw 'em.

P.S.: Seriously, be honest, swap in your favourite cloak and the comparison won't look nearly as bad.

Originally Posted by leekofthewood

The sad fact is, I'm not going to wear it in the moors other than the occasional gag because I sacrifice 20% of my morale pool to do so. It's THAT far off.

Truth. Please note trusty readers...I did NOT run in a morale/vit build. A Champ who does is going to notice an even larger hit to those values.

Originally Posted by leekofthewood

Oh I think we all agree the timesink for the reward is just silly. The same goes for cosmetic at best cloaks. In fact, I havent even bought the rank 11 cloak. What's the use? They arent even dyeable.

I had an idea about a year ago, and this totally unrelated btw, to have the ability for kinship cloaks.

You could overlay the stats of your favorite cloak, pay for your kinship logo to be put onto them and voila, you've got yourself some dynamic, easily identifyable gear for the moors. It would be a coup for cash flow for Turbine. Alas, we cant even get them to examine the things they put into the game already.

/facepalms

The cloak issue actually pains me to think about. THE reward for ranking in the moors is utterly unusable in the moors. Crazy.

As for the kin cloaks...it's my understanding that the way LotRO handles art and textures is too complicated to allow for that level of customization. It'd just be too much on the loads. /shrug. Different engine, different issues.

And as aggrivating as that is, I'm ok with that. I'm MORE than ok with the assertion that a> there are hardware limitations or b> there are development time limitations.

But this is an example of gear/itemizations that were MADE. Developers had to make this stuff and put it in the game, and put it on vendors, and give it costs. Why were these values/costs so screwed up in the first place? And why haven't they managed to fix them in all these months/years?

That's really what I'd like to hear from the devs.

http://forums.lotro.com/forumdisplay.php?f=122

P.s. Luc, your shadow defense is sorta fail.

Originally Posted by FajaSailors

P.S.: Seriously, be honest, swap in your favourite cloak and the comparison won't look nearly as bad.

It's still VERY bad.

Commander's Cloak: 282 Armour, +90 Morale, +90 Power, +30 Might
Pendevig-clog: 355 Armour, +20 Agility, +40 Might, +20 Vitality, +8 Will, +126.0 Acid Defence, +183 Maximum Morale

Differences: 73 armour, 93 morale, +90 Power, 10 Might, 20 Agil, 8 Will, 126 Acid.

For a net affect to my initial post between Moors and My personal Optimum gear:

-100 Rad...for what that's worth, it could easily be more, but I used my "everyday" gear for the comparison not gear that I wear for 3 fights in one raid every great while.
-552 Morale
+7 Might
-36 Agil
-113 Vit
+35 Will
+20 Fate
-112 Melee Crit
-97 Armour
-196 Incoming healing
-173 Common Mit
-147 Fire, Frost, Shadow, Lightening Mit
-1587 Acid Mit
+404 Wound Resist
+738 Fear Resist
-226 Disease Resist
-173 Power
+91 Poison Resist
+ 10% increase to Devestate Magnitude buff
+ 10s to Hamstring duration.
-5% AoE Power cost

Originally Posted by leekofthewood

P.s. Luc, your shadow defense is sorta fail.

Yeah, it's really the biggest "cost" of my choosen build.

I decided that I'm not going to hot-swap gear sets in the moors. With that decision came a series of decisions about my gear, about how I deal with each class and how my gear will either optimize those fights or hinder them.

I sacrificed shadow for a> piece of mind and not swapping several different gear pieces every fight and b> my overall build and it's affectiveness vs the population at large.

I've come to a conclusion about wargs lately.

If the fight goes one way, there's nearly nothing you can do about it, so build becomes moot.

If the fight goes another way, I can generally get by with a nice margin of victory. So again, build is less important.

If I spec'd differently overall maybe I'd have more "middle of the road" fights with wargs...but in my experience those fights USUALLY end up with a hips or sprint and no kills anyhow.

So meh. A death or a foe escaping...they're both not kills.

So if I run into more deaths so that I can get more OTHER kills...then it's worth it to me.

More or less everything about my build, my attack stragegies, and my playstyle are about killing, not avoiding being killed.

Gratz Luc on finally getting your PvMP set! LOL

All I want are the RK robes and I pretty much gave up just going for that one piece because the PvE requirements are so ridiculous. I hope you posted this in the general PvMP section as well.

The PvMP set should be the best for Moors action bar none. In my opinion, Turbine was on track in this regard in Book 12. Why they deviated so badly with MoM is beyond me.

And it's not just the sets that should rock. The cloaks should be epic as well. I know this would be difficult to do since the cloaks are not class specific, but using the Cloak of Shadow and Flame as an example, it wouldn't be that hard to template an epic cloak that gets better with Rank. There's absolutely no reason why someone that got lucky on a roll in an epic book quest should have a better cloak than a R7+ player in the Moors.

What is more ridiculous is that the best armor isn't crafted.

Originally Posted by Olympic

What is more ridiculous is that the best armor isn't crafted.

It doesn't even need to be the best.

There's no reason that there can't be multiple sets, that are on par in terms of total points allocated (using whatever metric turbine uses), but very different.

I want the moors set to be on par with the best sets out there, but different, specially enhancing pvmp used skills. I want the BG set to be on par, but different, specifically enhancing raid stats/resistances. I want top ended crafting sets on par, but specifically enhancing something different.

I want to see characters mixing and matching again to get a cool build.

I want I want I want

I honestly don't care what the "best" armour is, or where it comes from.

My issue is that it should be a fundamental piece of ANY game design to have appropriate risk/reward-cost/benefit analysis.

And currently that doesn't exist. Not even close.

"Best" is very subjective. But I think it's reasonable to suggest that NO gear should take the hoops that the PvMP stuff requires.

I think it's also reasonable to suggest that different paths of effort, raiding/crafting/instance/rare drops/PvMp ranks etc should yield reasonably beneficial rewards.

IMHO that currently doesn't exist. Not even close.

I was in the SoM beta, and started a couple threads about this issue in the beta forums.

Unfortunately, the threads received no developer input, despite the fact that people highlighted exactly the same issues that Luc is highlighting here -- i.e., even the level 60 Moria/Watcher sets are arguably better than the level 65 Moors sets and take far, far, far less effort to acquire.

Simple solution is to make the Moors set stats on par with (or better than!) the best pve gear but just make the gear usable only in the Moors.

What's really sad about this is that they have a PvMP buff that is only applied to characters when they are in the PvMP zone. Mostly they use this to DISABLE game features for players in the zone.

Would it really be so difficult to add some bonuses to the PvMP armor that ONLY WORK IN PvMP AREAS so that these can outshine crafted and raiding gear IN THE ONE PLACE THEY ABSOLUTELY OUGHT TO?