THUMBS DOWN

I don't have enough time in a day to do Real Life stuff and all what needs to be done in Creep and Freep land ... LOL

:lol:

With all joking aside, the only thing I am really disappointed with Turbine in the MoM expansion is that we are still in the Moors and not in Moria. I can not tell you how boring it was to slay dev monsters at 1 million+ morale during stress testing.

They really were not playing, they were just tanking.

Where to start. First, I'm totally depressed with what they did to defilers. Monstrel might not recover. The real shocker is just how crazy the damage output by Hunters is. My main freep is Talbot the hunter. Let me just say that at level 50 with a level 11 legendary bow and slotting the Huntsman traitline (I think thats the one, its the one with all the love in Strength Stance) I am getting crits of 1500 with Merciful shot and I've gotten 4 Heartseeker crits of 3400 or better all against level 51 mobs. What's that going to look like in 9 more levels against us?

One hunter is essentially now worth three hunters pre-Moria. And we've got significantly less health and healing output? Wait, what?

I'll tell you what I think it's going to look like, it's going to be a decimated slaughter.

Those leveled up Second Age Bows with all those tasty legacies and runes make Monstrel cry.

I don't have alot of hope right now. This stands to be THE WORST period ever for creeps by a longshot. It'll make the early days look like playschool.

After leveling my LM to 53 and getting well into leveling both my legendary items, my previous optimism about PvMP in MoM is gone. I really think this is going to be brutal for us once there are a bunch of level 60 guys running around. Yeah, if you read the forums, Lore-masters are supposed to be "nerfed" because of the tactical critical chances... but my LM is hitting criticals all the time with devastating criticals being somewhat regular. I had Ents go to War hit for 1152 damage on an at-level mob. As a Lore-master. Crazy.

You really, really feel the BPE change and it makes you super squishy... but man, this is really something else. How is everyone else feeling who are leveling Freeps?

There will always be freeps. I must admit though that I find non-stop PvP considerably more interesting. And I just don't imagine that happening for a while in LOTRO once MoM is released. Your mileage may of course vary, objects may be closer than they appear....

Of note on my MoM pre-buy.... I plan to play it in January/February. When numbers return to the Moors. I figure it'll take at least a month before freeps level themselves to 50, find an epic that makes them happy and have had a chance to level it up as well. It's going to be several months at the very least that I see the Moors being fairly status quo and quiet.

On the flipside, there are a LOT of new games released this month and last. So I have plenty to keep me happy in the meantime.

Have ordered MoM...

Those in the the know, I HOPE will want to do more fellowships...remember, less infamy now while raiding - more in fellows.

Stick to vent and especially the targeting macro's and we should be fine (still not a big fan of skill target forwarding...).
Plus with multiple groups working as if they were a raid, we can as others have pointed out truly focus and take down multiple targets (think 3-4 ranged fellows, 1 stealth, 1-2 melee/interference, and 1 healer group).

My WL is rank 4 and has a few of the poor maps so I may pull him back out if we need it...and have plenty of DP to get the new stuff for him too.

We had a Moors test event on the Beta server today and it was quite interesting. We took Ost to get the relic from the room behind where the CG usually stands, and ran it across the map back to DG (it turned in automatically when the person carrying it got near the Tyrant, didn't have to hand it to anyone).

We then had some creep/freep battles. When in close combat we did quite well, however they had few to no champs, a lot were sub-level 60's, and many were autolevelled characters with cruddy gear. Plus I think we outnumbered them. I noticed with the damage that was being dished out that it was really difficult to keep someone up if they were FFed (not impossible, but certainly extremely hard). One player who was freepside commented: "it was an absolute joke on the freep side. A lot of freeps seemed like they were on a sight-seeing journey (did they realize it was Jurrasic Park-esque out there?)and did not actually care about fighting. People just staying dead everywhere, no communication, no coordination many under 55's."

So while we wiped the freeps a few times, when you take all of the above into the equation, it's not surprising.

There were a few comments from one of the GMs/Dev who was raided with us that people may find of interest:

GM Comment: "From what we've seen, at close range, creeps stack up very well against freeps. It's at range that they have a major advantage that we need to look at and try to adjust."
Player Responses:

• "if this were live, there would be at least 5 Champs, and they'd have a much better time in melee."[/*:m]
• "these guys aren't max level or geared for the most part"[/*:m]
• "lots of wardens... not exactly beneficial for the raid"[/*:m]
• "Without the freeps having top end amour and weapons or being 60 it's not quite a fair fight"[/*:m]
• "Things will probably be different on live where you have the "hardcore" pvpers that will max out for damage and have a better stratagy"[/*:m]

GM Comment: "I wanted to mention, without going into too many details, that post-Moria, MP will be getting a lot of TLC, certainly more then you guys have been accustomed to."
Player Comments: Lots of requests for creep mail
GM Response: "We are looking at mail and more ways to enhance the Creep experience."

Player Comment: "ever thought of makin the reinforcement quest inraid?"
GM Response: "That is changed, although not in this particular build"

Player Comment: Wanted to know if hounding fear was being looked at as it was ridiculous that they were a high level creep and got hounding fear from trees (or something along those lines)
GM Response: "heh-not my favorite debuff either" "That's on the list to examine-and yeah, it doesn;'t make much sense."

A few interesting points to note also:

• When the outposts are neutral, the mobs guarding them drop dulls and glimmerings. So in theory you could farm stones from a neutral outpost if we don't have Delving access.[/*:m]
• There has been some talk about whether you get elite status when you hit R9 and have all your passives. I have seen with my own two eyes that yes this IS the case. You get the eye and the glowy ring instead of a plain red circle ;-)[/*:m]
• No more green rings when you eat food.[/*:m]

After todays Moors test event I am feeling a less despondent about how things are going to turn out. It may be tough for a while, but it sounds like we have some good things in store. And even though it will be a lot harder to take down experienced L60 PvPers with full gear and Legendaries, at least we will have more ranked creeps and a more structured organisation to work with.

So, what to do what to do.... My BA and WL are the 2 r6s. I need to decide on one and focus I guess.

Whichever one will be the first with good Isen! LOL!

To my comment on r9 is the new r5...With the new benifits of rank past r6 and r7 trying to focus on 1 toon has its benifits. I doubt I'll get Stickeye to r9 and im only 75k away..only lol. I was not trying to make anyone feel usless, just to encourage folks to pick a toon and rank it and forget about trying to rank 2 or 3 toons at once.

As for wargs, the bottom line is wargs are not raid built and having more than 2-4 wargs in a raid just weakens the raid. They have major disadvantages in going into the freeps and trying to get pounces off. Granted that scouting, target picking, the alpha strike pounce and finishing off the low health runner are great for wargs but with all that freep AOE.../sadface.

Snifff.....that right there made me feel useless since there is no way I am getting rank 9 anytime soon. ./wargpout

If I may adapt your statement there, rank helps a lot but I find it helps more to have competent and reliable people behind the toon moreso than their rank.

Playing a warg is easy to do, stealth/pounce/claw. Playing a warg to it's max potential, not so easy to do. I don't claim to be all the great but I think I am above average. I think the draw to warg for most is the stealth, and well speaking from personal experience. I liked hunting wargs on my freep back in book 9/10/11 so I wanted to get a better understanding of the class and what they can do. My plan kinda backfired when I started having fun on my warg and had no desire to go back to freepside. I'll gladly accept a B/P/E boost though, aoe attacks, while you are at it maybe a ranged attack like maybe a ranged howl to scare the freepsies.

It will be painful but less painful than what the cd was in earlier beta.

Although I haven't got to do much freep fighting in the Moors due to lack of folks being out there, I'd give it a sideways thumb. Some good, some bad. Freep dps hurts. Freep cc still hurts (champ's horn and RK=ouch). NPC's hurt more than on live (can't just ignore them anymore it seems). Burgs can still get their evade fairly high, just not as high as currently able.

Honestly, if I was looking at whether or not to buy MoM based purely on PvMP there's no way I would buy it. Then again this is not a PvP focused game so it'll probably never be as good as we'd like it to be. As a note, you don't have to buy MoM to be 60 and experience the new Moors. You do have to buy it to get access to the new skills/passives, from what I understand.

I think one of the bigger issues that have slipped under the radar on the LOTRO forums is the nerfing of the CC pots from a one minute CD to a two minute CD. That is really going to hurt us badly, especially considering the new CC freeps are getting. That is going to be painful.

The one big positive that I've read about is that the B/P/E and critical nerfs hurt the freeps far more than they hurt us. Burgs won't be able to have those huge evade chances, hunters will have considerable more DPS, but criticals will be harder to come by for all freep classes, etc. And of course, that includes healing criticals from minstrels and captains. While we're not getting a great increase in DPS at first glance, it appears that what we do put out there will land more frequently... which is more important. A smaller positive is that the Ettenmoors gear come Moria is utter garbage, so you won't see people going to the 'moors in order to obtain good gear.

I think it's a slight thumbs up when you consider that the map changes will freshen up the experience for a few months, and by that time they'll probably end up doing their random dance of nerfing and buffing anew.