Thread: New skirmish ideas: Battle of Lorien and Aughaire

These two repeatable quest instances would lend themselves well to adaptation as skirmishes. They already have an established script and characters. Aughaire would make an excellent defensive skirmish, and Lorien could be offensive.

In addition, neither the Council of the North nor Galadhrim factions currently have skirmishes associated with them. Aughaire could be available at level 50 (there are currently no new skirmishes at level 50), and Lorien at level 60.

I think this would be a good way to make this content more accessible to players who might otherwise never experience it.

I agree, they would both be good as skirmishes.

I was a little surprised that the repeatable instances in Great River weren't made as skirmishes. The epic quest instances around Theodred's assault on Isengard would also have been good candidates.

I can't help wondering if skirmishes have joined various other flavour-of-the-month ideas on Turbine's back burner.

Wulf's cleft would have been a good skirmish option as well I reckon.

You used to get galadhrim rep from one of the early mirkwood skirms but that went away a while back when they started messing with rewards from skirms and never came back.

I agree! \ol

BoL actually has the potential to be an offensive, a defensive or even a survival skirmish, because the actual instance has varied degrees of all these objectives. It is a really good instance. It all depends on how they decide to transform it, if they ever will. I would like to see it come back in some form, provided it is not overly simplified.

Originally Posted by Tarmas_Eldar

I can't help wondering if skirmishes have joined various other flavour-of-the-month ideas on Turbine's back burner.

I always thought that skirmishes would end up being forgotten by developers, remembered merely as the foundation of the instance scaling system. Considering it has been over 10 months (3 updates) since we last got any new skirmishes or scaled instances, I believe I was wrong. It is possible that they have both been forgotten.

I'd love to see all of the battle instances as skirmishes.

..And perhaps a new skirmish for dunland and beyond!

When the Skirmish System was first introduced, people really wanted to see the Battle instances converted over. Their was some small talk from the devs along the lines of "converting an instance to a skirmish is harder than just making up a new skirmish".

That being said, I really wish they would look at this again. The third Aughaire battle instance is hands down one of the funnest instances in this game, but almost no one has done it because of the gating mechanic and its low level.

Originally Posted by phillbvi2

... Their was some small talk from the devs along the lines of "converting an instance to a skirmish is harder than just making up a new skirmish". ...

That is somehow silly. All the skirmishes are not really instances anyway in the closest sense; they just take an existing part of landscape and work it into a battleground.
Using one of the existing, never-done battles as a basis is not a worse idea than making just something else up. AND there is already the lore and associated quests available. I guess the main reason is that these things are not well scaleable from solo- to raid-size.

Perhaps or could be something as simple as barter items. Aughaire give barter items that can be turned into a token that in turn can be turned into an armorpiece... well, no one do this any more since it takess too long time to grind the tokens needed, but the option is there. Still it seems odd in a sense, just delete any quest associated with the instance rework any questchain, remove barter tokens (and the 50 armor moving it to skirmish instead). Then create some new scripts etc. Besides Aughaire is based on the same principle as Gondamon (3 defense points and one boss defense point)

Originally Posted by Fralin

Besides Aughaire is based on the same principle as Gondamon (3 defense points and one boss defense point)

The First Aughaire quest yes, but the Second and Third Aughaire instances along with the Battle of Lorien are a bit different from your current offensive skirmishes. They are much more of a 50/50 offensive and defensive mix. They are designed for you to split your party into two groups, one to defend points on a timer basis and the other group to take control points/kill mini bosses.

Their are a number of mechanics within each of those as well. If the defensive group takes too long to push back a wave or if the instance in general takes too long, Tyrants start spawning that can easily crush a control point. Which brings up control points... in skirmishes the need/benefit to defending a control point is minimal, in a battle instance, failing to defend a control point means you fail the instance. Also in Lorien their is a number of Semi controllable NPCs that can be enhanced with consumable items.

Also, unless you completely rewrite the mechanics of the instances, they would not be doable in anything short of a fellowship or raid.

On the surface, it seems like they should be easily turned into skirmishes, but the more you dig down and examine them you quickly realize that they do not fit into the skirmish mold. But that is not to say they shouldn't be scaled...

I realize that a lot of the scripted mechanics would be inappropriate for skirmishes or impossible to scale to different group sizes. I don't expect that the action in the skirmishes would much resemble the original battle instances. I suppose some parts could be turned into optional encounters. However, there are still interesting settings and characters already available for these stories, and those are what I'd most like to see reused.

Another drawback is that these battle instances have rather unique deeds and rewards associated with them. There might be a handful of people out there working on them who would be upset if these were replaced with skirmish versions.

Originally Posted by Fredelas

Another drawback is that these battle instances have rather unique deeds and rewards associated with them. There might be a handful of people out there working on them who would be upset if these were replaced with skirmish versions.

The existing instances, accessible through the quest-bestowing NPCs, could perfectly well be left in place while new skirmish versions, accessed via instance finder, were added.

This seems to be a problem Turbine has with almost all it's,often very good, ideas. They have created several systems that are either very good or have the potential to be very good

Skirmishes, scaled instances, the original designs for Radiance and LIs and then either fail to implement they in the best possible way (to the point of being hated by much of the player base) or be largely forgotten.

I'm sure 99% of this is due to time and resource constraints. Given time and money, there is no real good reason that many solo book or other instance couldn't have been a skirmish. The book during SoM introduced 4 skirmishes and the system seemed like it would continue through future books, but converting V2B5C5 aside, there's been no more book skirmishes. Scaled instances were added with F2P and the In Their Absence instances were released 6 months or so later and again the assumption would be that these and all future instances would be designed with scaling in mind during their development, but nope, In The Absence is still lvl 65 and pretty much used for farming relics now. Will the Isengard and RoF instances scale? We won't know until RoR, but my guess is that they won't.

It does seem that Fornost is going to get the scaling treatment, but the rate that instances are converted currently means that they will never catch up top the point where all instances will scale.