Thread: Loot in Fornost?

So a group I was in just finished running all 4 Fornost instances and their challenges and we did not get a single piece of teal loot. In fact, nothing we got was anywhere close to better than what we were currently wearing.

My question is this: Is the loot from the instance bugged, in that we weren't getting the correct loot tables or is it really that terrible?

Some of the loot:

It does seem pretty terrible when compared to something like RoF which requires a similar group and skill level.

I wouldn't expect the loot out of Fornost to be comparable to the loot out of Roots of Fangorn or Foundry. Those are tailored level 75 instances. Fornost is a scalable instance similar to Great Barrows, where the items that drop are the same across all level ranges and are simply scaled to have higher or lower stats depending on the level of the instance. A good comparison for Fornost loot would be to Great Barrows, or School/Library, none of which provide 'good' options for end game gear at 75.

The loot itself is as expected - on par with Great Barrow and Annuminas loot pieces - in other words nowhere near skirmish raid pieces or any teal pieces for that matter. What irked me most is that the challenges don't even give you any teals, just marks and medallions. Come on, Turbine, even GB and Annuminas award seals for challenges at level 75, why wouldn't you at least throw this bone to people doing L75 T2 challenges?

Completed all t2 and challenges also and the loot is garbage. All purple and stats are under 60 on most with 150 morale. A few of the t2 challenges are tough for the junk loot that you get.

Same here..We did challenge mode on every wing but only got 1 chest.. Would only make sense to make another chest spawn when dong Challenge mode ?

Got 1 crystal from the last boss in water wing

Originally Posted by Malachi108

The loot itself is as expected - on par with Great Barrow and Annuminas loot pieces - in other words nowhere near skirmish raid pieces or any teal pieces for that matter. What irked me most is that the challenges don't even give you any teals, just marks and medallions. Come on, Turbine, even GB and Annuminas award seals for challenges at level 75, why wouldn't you at least throw this bone to people doing L75 T2 challenges?

Completing a Challenge mode should reward you with Seals. If you didn't get Seals from one of the four instances, please /bug it.

Originally Posted by RockX

Completing a Challenge mode should reward you with Seals. If you didn't get Seals from one of the four instances, please /bug it.

Geee, Epic! Why go to the trouble of converting it to a scalable instance and then give no reason for end game players to run it?

The loot is so shockingly bad that I doubt anyone will go back after completing the deeds.

Reading the Dev diary, a lot of thought and effort has clearly gone into scaling and breaking up this instance space which was described by the dev as having 'flat-lined' in terms of player interest. Well, let me forecast that you will need to get the defibulator out by next week as the effort/reward at T2 Challenge just isnt worth the cookie. Someone needs to go find the man who sits behind the loot table and smack him over the head with a wet fish.

I hear the comparisons with GB and Library/school. If thats the case its a poor model. Scap it and move on. Mediocrity is not a standard to have to live down to. 9/10 for effort on the instance space. 1/10 for effort/reward replayability. Poor show Turbine. What a shame.

Originally Posted by RockX

Completing a Challenge mode should reward you with Seals. If you didn't get Seals from one of the four instances, please /bug it.

A Good Joke.
Nobody goes second time to Fornost,
because it is too easy, too long and bad Loot.

Bummer, as a relatively new player(dec 2010 start) I've never had a chance to run this instance and was excited for the update. I hopefully will at least see some runs so I can see the content, but if it is like GB/Annúminas it will rarely ever get run while people farm foundry/roots for the much better time/reward ratio.

T2C are quite hard. We made water and earth.

In the water one, we take a looooot of damage. It's really weird for a 6 man. You don't get in T2 fornost like you go in the foundry :x) The difficulty is nearly the same that in roots of fangorn... but with the lag we have in Estel... it made the water challenge nearly impossible *shrugs*

Some nasty bug like :

The cappi and the RK were always in combat. Have to alt F4 and relog.
If you fail one time the challenge, you don't have the chest... but check the challenge deeds.

But yeeah, nothing good so forth in the chest (middle boss and end boss). Just trash things like skirmish rewards without the beautiful jewels.

Originally Posted by RockX

Completing a Challenge mode should reward you with Seals. If you didn't get Seals from one of the four instances, please /bug it.

So we are supposed to get multiple seals for Completing the Challenge requirements? So far in the groups I have done, only 1 seal is being award for completion of the Challenge Quest. No challenge chest either, as has been stated above.

Yea, T2C has been giving about 1 or 2 seals and just a single chest. Hopefully not working as intended.

despite the lame loot, i've actually enjoyed having fornost scaled up it has been fun doing it with my kinnies

Sure, yeah. Fun to see the instance we ran back in the day.

Once.


Very disappointing otherwise. What a bummer...

I don't quite get idea behind this loot-table. It is really hurting the consistancy of the game. I assumed that with the introduction of a tier 2 classic instance, that the rewards would be similar to that of the more recent tier 2 instance.

How do you want the instance finder to be a big hit if the rewards are all over the place?

I would like to say that Fornost was actually really fun. Plenty of bossfights, some of which are pretty clever. I did not like the Earth challenge mode. We already got a lot of challenge modes where we are not allowed to kill adds

Try scaling it down and running it solo.

The loot is cr_a_p, but it's kinda fun and can be challenging.

The game doesn't have to be all about loot does it?

There should be no excuses. I am not all too concerned about loot, but I really want the game to get to a point where it has a solid basis.

And it really has no such thing when it comes to instancing. What is the point of spending so much development on creating a interesting, challenging tier 2 scaleable instance if you add zero incentive to run it?

And there 's a lot of stuff that 's wrong about the instance finder. I personally would use it because I quite like meeting new folk through instancing.

But not to derail from the topic. We got Tier 1 instances for the loot that Fornost Tier 2 rewards. Where is the actual tier 2 loot?

What this means is that in two weeks time, once the novelty wears off, Fornost will be dead again just like the revamp never happened. Everyone will continue grinding Foundry ad infinitum with an occasional RoF thrown in.

So much development time wasted just because they still can't get the time/difficulty/reward ratio right.

What .. a .. waste.

Was there last night with kin. Fights are interesting, boss is fun. Reward was subpar. I mean.. rewards are worst than Isen's 3-mans and foundry's purple stuff and its BoA! Of all the runs we did, all the loot stayed in the chest. Most common word in chat was:

"Pass"

Once we've done it once or twice, fornost is back to what it was... a tomb. I know i won't be back. There's absolutely no point in redoing it.

This place needs teals. From what i've seen so far, you can get better stuff leveling in dunland...

Originally Posted by Galahadur

What .. a .. waste.

Was there last night with kin. Fights are interesting, boss is fun. Reward was subpar. I mean.. rewards are worst than Isen's 3-mans and foundry's purple stuff and its BoA! Of all the runs we did, all the loot stayed in the chest. Most common word in chat was:

"Pass"

Once we've done it once or twice, fornost is back to what it was... a tomb. I know i won't be back. There's absolutely no point in redoing it.

This place needs teals. From what i've seen so far, you can get better stuff leveling in dunland...

+rep, like you say not long before the place becomes a ghost town again. What an absolute waste of time.

Besides it being fun, I think the only reason I will do this again will be for star-lit crystal drops.

Here 's some of my suggestions to spice things up and give people incentive to run Fornost:

1. Add relics and IEXP runes to the loottables.
2. Make all the purple gear Bind on Equip.
3. Increase the stats of the items dropped in Tier 2, so that they can be compared to the purples dropped in other Tier 2 instances.
4. Add teal rewards to the tier 2 Challenge Mode.
5. Use unique cosmetics for the actual armor found in the instance, inspired by Fornost. (The same should really be done with Great Barrows and Annuminas.
6. Unique housing items dropped by the bosses, and make them rare.

Another idea is to review the difficulty of instances. It is impossible to make all the tier 2 instances exactly the same difficulty, even though there should be some consistancy here. My idea would be to look at the drop rates of items like Symbols, Star-lit crystals, stat tomes/removal scrolls and let them increase depending on the difficulty of the instance. On top of that you can increase the quality of the overall found relics/IEXP runes and marks/medallions/seals rewarded. Same can be done with skirmishes. It happens quite often that people are really displeased if the game picks one of the tougher/longer skirmishes.

Completed all 4 wings t2c. Fun and challenging fights. They made good job with the way they chopped it into 4, unlike GB and Helegrod. Imo, the old atmosphere (darker, misty, rainy, more evil) was better though. It feels like a warm summer evening now lol.

And yea, Turbine seriously needs to work on the loot. I want to run all the instances in the game, not the same ones over and over again, but this is not possible without good loot.

Originally Posted by RockX

Completing a Challenge mode should reward you with Seals. If you didn't get Seals from one of the four instances, please /bug it.

Proper testing next time?

The loot and difficult:reward ration have been a chronic problem since those moria medalions and grand stair farming. And I kid you not it has been one of the bigger factor to people leave lotro after they reach end game - at least the people in my original kin.

I thought by now the Devs should have come to a solution... My sugestion is why not add a quest that you can do twice/three times a week that you get on entering Fornost and is completed by beating all the 4 T2Challenge modes and reward you with like 40-60 seals and some medallions? Thats hardly 10-15 seals per instance and prevent picking one and running it ad infinitum.

Alas, you could do it to GB, Annuminas and even Helegrod too, that way people would do every scalable instance in game and get seals so they could get all those 3 trait lines armour.

One of my fav. instances of all time. Ran it yesterday, lots of fun.

Won't run it again most likely, because there's 0 incentive. No loot, a very small amount of barter items...

I wish your content devs would talk to the loot guys and work together, because this is a joke.

Originally Posted by Fralin

Proper testing next time?

Surely you jest? TEST is a four letter word. They like 5 letter words, like STORE.

Surely the only thing this instance needs is a guaranteed Crystal in the T2C chest. We'll all be grinding it like a cheap lapdancer.

Some Teal items would be nice too. How about a barter-able 2 piece Fornost jewellery (bracelet and ring) set.

TERRIBLE Loot.

You get ONE seal from T2 HM, yes ONE.

No ixp. No relics. No teal jewellery.

ONE, yes again ONE purple jewellery per last boss.

Yeah.. good luck trying to get people to run this after the exciment of "New" wears out of this instance..

Originally Posted by Gardhik

T2C are quite hard. We made water and earth.

In the water one, we take a looooot of damage. It's really weird for a 6 man. You don't get in T2 fornost like you go in the foundry :x) The difficulty is nearly the same that in roots of fangorn... but with the lag we have in Estel... it made the water challenge nearly impossible *shrugs*

/agree

we did T2 Water last night with good group of well geared players. It's a tough instance for zero reward. We gave up on challenge due to the lag, jumping - stopping mid air - hitching - not conducive to staying out of the water...

We finished it (failing challenge) but the loot was deplorable, 5 medallions, a couple hundred marks, T1 relics (EDIT: no the T1 relics were from the new raid skirmish... also a #### reward for a 12 man L75 skirmish) and a purple item that nobody even wanted as vendor trash

The unanimous verdict was "never again" "might do other wings for deed but will never come back a 2nd time"

So all the hard work is for naught, how often do Turbine have to be told that the rewards need to be attractive to encourage replayability. The skirmish raids are a good example of loot which people desire and will re-run the instances many times to get it.

Time is a limited resource for most players so if they have the option of doing something that may have a reward they desire or doing something because it's new, the desire thing will win out after they have experienced the new thing once. If it's new and desirable then you have a winner

Considering the beating Turbine's taking on the forums atm I'd say the "new" factor should end today or tomorrow. At the very latest during the weekend

As predicted, it will be one and done.

Yeah, the loot is terable! But.. except for Water wing, the others are very challenging, first semi boss earth wing or first encounter with a boss in fire wing. I wish they had better loot/rewards (medallions).

But..

for Water Wing, u dont have to chase him at all. Stand on the platforms and randge dps (endurance stance) the boss, 6 or 7 times, and voila done (no need to play -mario).

In the dev diary they made it seem that they were making this on par to the medallion drops in RoF and Foundry which would be somewhere between 400-500 medallions. I didn't keep track from the quests and first 2 bosses but I think maybe I received 100 medallions (this is with the 50% modifier) for T2 water and I think that is being generous. I haven't done the other wings yet, but if they are comparable that means you have to do all 4 wings to get the same reward, so 4 hours instead of 30-45 minutes that it takes to run RoF or Foundry. I assumed we would see purple drops comparable to GB and Annuminas, but they really needed to do a few really nice Teal drops for a T2C chest. There just is absolutely no reason to repeatedly run this content, to make it viable good teal drops need to be added and each wing needs to award the same (if not more) medallions than Foundry and RoF. At least if it had the same number of medallions and some good items it would be something to add into the rotation if you are locked for seals on RoF or Foundry. I love the idea of scaled instances but as long as Turbine treats them as the red headed step child when it comes to loot/barter items the player base will too.

I must say I am pleased with the work Turbine has done on the instances themselves, they're definitely fun. Unfortunately I am not pleased with how they treat incentives in the game. Any economist will tell you that in order for someone to spend resources (time in this case) you need to give them the proper incentives to do so, and more importantly those incentives need to be stronger than the competition (other instances). I made a huge post here of which the incentive aspect can be summarized in the following two ideas.

1) No one would enjoy doing an on-level Rift/Annuminas/Great Barrows/Carn Dum/Fornost consistently if the difficulty is not around where it used to be and the rewards are not of high enough quality relative to the rewards in other content. All of these instances, for their level, had some of the best loot in the game. To get people to consistently run it Turbine needs to keep the quality of loot (including currency) relative to other similar content about equal.

2) Failing the above, Turbine should stop wasting their resources on making instances for which they have no plans to implement and maintain the reward. It's bad for business due to the simple facts that you build up anticipation in the player base and then shatter it causing players to lose interest and by creating content which doesn't hold players in the game you are getting a very very poor return on investment.

Annuminas and GB had a big selling point compared to Fornost: they dropped rare 2nd age symbols and S3M's. Nowadays symbols aren't that rare and S3M's have been replaced with ... measly amount of marks and medallions. If the medallion/seal ratio from scaled instances was in level with Isengard cluster, they would be ran as well. But with these rates? It's back to Foundry.

Originally Posted by Loun

But with these rates? It's back to Foundry.

Shhhhhh! Dont say you will be running Foundry to get some decent reward or they will nerf it to give out 1 Seal and 20 Medallions for T2C to incentive you to run Fornost.

I've not done the challenges here yet, but I understand that the challenge chests are not spawning, is this correct? The nice stuff might be in there.

Either that or the utterly perplexing inability of Turbine to itemise their instances (a problem which has existed at least since Mirkwood) continues.