My plan for my F2P Turbine Points

So I posted this question a couple days ago (the poll is still open) but I figured I’d share my plan.  I’m expecting to have at least 5000 Turbine points just counting the Loyalty rewards, but I know I will also get more for the various new deeds that are implemented for Reputation as my 3 mains each have a quite a few factions at kindred rank.  Initially I plan to focus on Captain, Minstrel, and Warden but am sure that my Champ (more about her later) will get some attention too.

I know that the Wardrobe will be a big help to offload some of my storage issues but currently I’m using the Shared Storage as an extension of a couple characters vaults so I will have to end up getting some more Vault space.  I really want to get to a point where I can use shared storage as a replacement for mailing items between toons, but currently it is overflow 😦

On my Captain and Warden I’ll be finishing off Zeal to Rank 10 which is a bit more painful on my Captain but certainly worth it.  They’ll also both be getting a bank space update as their banks are packed and I need the space for crafting.

My Captain and Minstrel are also pretty low on a couple Virtues but mainly Empathy and Innocence so a big chunk of my points will go to max those out.  I will probably look and make sure there aren’t any low hanging traits there that I can grind in game, but Innocence is not one of my favorites to grind out.

The virtues that I’m focusing on I’m doing for two main reasons.  First off, melee defense and armor value are universally important and make a pretty substantial and measurable difference to your characters’ survival.  The second is that in all honesty, they’re a tad painful to grind out as those are mostly quest deeds and even worse they’re the top end of the tiered reward system for quests so I’d have to do 40 some odd quests in a zone to get the virtue.

Hopefully after all that I’ll then have enough leftover points to get at least the riding skill on my Champ such that I can avoid that riding quest 😉  And I might buy a better horse as I’m a bit poor from trying to power through Scholar and Weaponsmith.

After all that, my priorities for my 500 point allowance and whatever else I earn are:

• More Shared Storage
• Stat Tomes
• Larger Wardrobe – I might not need this as I know I have similar items many times across my toons
• Virtues for my Champ
• Cosmetic Items
• Housing Items

But once I go through and clean up all my vaults and such to take advantage of the Wardrobe I might find that all I really need (or want might be a better word) to get are the stat tomes.

So far though, the results of the poll show that I”m quite in the minority in my thought process 🙂  But, if you’re thinking like me, go vote and help me prove to myself that I’m not crazy.

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Dev Diary – Lua Scripting

The long awaited diary on the new Lua Scripting has been posted with some very cool insight from Narrel on the process to get Lua scripting into the game.  Even more exciting is the confirmation that Lua Scripting will be in the game at launch of F2P.  Granted Narrel does put some caveats in there, but assuming all goes well it will be in launch.

I’m always fascinated about how these things progress and appreciate the insight on how the internals of Turbine work.  This certainly sounds like an impressive effort from Narrel, ForsakenArcher, Agiclaw and Frosty with the support of the whole dev team I’m sure.  It was also very encouraging to see the beta community step up and not only try things out but post some pretty darn cool UI scripts.

At the initial launch they will restrict the system to the following areas:

• Quickslots – Allows for the creation and customization of additional quickslots.
• Player self-vitals – Exposes effect information as well as health and morale for only yourself – party member and target vitals did not make it in for this release due to time constraints and will be addressed in a future update.
• Inventory – Allows for custom organization of your inventory. For example, creating a single-bag view of your character inventory.

In addition Narrel is very specific to mention what applications they’re going to avoid, those being “bot-ing,” “macro-ing,” and things like gear score comparisons.  Also, notice in the list below they’re still not allowing you access to damage or healing output so we won’t see any sort of threat, DPS, or healing meters from this system either, which makes me VERY happy.

In addition to the launch features, they also have a few items on the planned list:

• Party member vital information
• Target vitals
• Vault UI
• Mouse cursors
• Chat window customization
• Kinship UI

Feel free to look at my post and video on the system as well as the video from Merric mentioned in this post and especially the posts from Mike mentioned in the comments of that post.

For me, this could be the single most anticipated system of the entire F2P launch 🙂

Important Note Regarding Consignment Quests

While loading the client up this morning, I noticed the following note:

ALERT: If you currently have active crafting consignment quests, please cancel or complete these quests before server maintenance begins on Tuesday, Sept 7.  These quests (available in Overhill, Silverdeep Mine, Combe Lumber Camp, or Duillond) will no longer be available once Volume III, Book 2 goes live.

For those of you who haven’t done these (I’ll admit I just started myself) you essentially are paying an NPC to go off and farm materials for you, up to Artisian level.  You travel to the NPC and there will be a few different options for the different skill levels and based on your level you purchase the right one.  Using those items creates a new quest which is essentially a timer and at the end of the timer you return to the NPC and they present you with a key to a chest with the appropriate crafting ingredients.  There isn’t a ton of ingredients but usually a handful of the different types including chances for some of the crit items.  These can be pretty handy for leveling up alts or in augmenting your resource gathering at the lower levels.  They’re also nice for cases where you can’t gather resources for yourself.  Case in point, the Historian includes weapon-smithing but no prospecting, so these quests can help quite a bit.

Two quick notes on these quests:

• You can only have one quest active per resource type
• You can however have multiple resource type quests active (scholar and prospecting for example)

I know I will be doing these quests on all my toons as often as I can in order to try to jump start my Scholar and Weaponsmith that I’m leveling.  So if you have any of your toons with crafting levels at or below Artisian, you might think about grabbing these before they go away.

2 LOTRO Podcasts Returning

I had almost removed them since they hadn’t been updated in so long but I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed new episodes of Ringcast by Lady Sinea and The One True Cast by BadPanda pop into my iTunes.  Both plan to put out new content now that they’re getting spun up on all the F2P news and excitement.  I know there are quite a few LOTRO Podcasts but it is always good to get another perspective on things.

Poll – Plans for F2P Launch?

As I start to plan things out a bit, I was curious what others were thinking of doing with their Turbine points when the system launches.  So I’m tossing out a quick poll for people, and if you have some other thoughts feel free to share them in the comments.  I’ll be sharing my roadmap here shortly.

Today’s update to Bullroarer

As I quoted yesterday, Sapience indicated that some of the items in the store have been tweaked.  Now granted, I will admit I may be a build or two behind on some of these but I did want to talk about a couple of them as there was a new patch up today.  However, nothing earth shattering on the patch with only a few notes in total.

First up, I’m happy that they did add in a helm to the Annuminas Heavy Armor set.  I’m not super excited about the look, but it is nice to have another option including the cloak to get the full 6/6 bonus which this set really needs to be comparable.  I’ve updated my spreadsheet but am really struggling with Google Docs so I’ll probably wait until launch and post a final version.  But certainly take a look below for the stats and looks of it.

I do think the armor set costs might have been dropped a bit (or maybe not as these match this post on the forums) as the Annuminas pieces only need 1 Annuminas mark and 3 of the level 65 special marks with the Helegrod items being 2 and 5 respectively.  However, the pieces are pricy on the normal marks at 1,896 for the Annuminas pieces and 2,370 for the Helegrod pieces.  Considering I can get a few hundred marks per normal single person skirmish it is looking like a piece or so per run through the appropriate instance.  Which when you compare it to normally getting armor pieces this is a MUCH quicker pace as previously you had to not only complete the instance but get lucky on roles and most groups only allow one piece per run per person.

I already talked about the reputation mounts, but you can buy the normal initial mounts for 695 points which I think is a nice option as I know many folks sometimes struggle to save up enough gold for that purchase.

I didn’t notice any real changes on the stat tomes but the Virtue tomes have been changed to all be a constant cost as opposed to a sliding scale.  In total, to max out a virtue from the store it costs the same as it did previously, but now each rank is 295 points versus a small amount for that first rank.  I know I will be topping off a few levels on my toons so this does make it a tad more expensive but I think it makes sense.

I’m still a bit on the fence with the Morale pots as they’re now 300 points for a stack of 10.  These potions stack with the normal potions and with the duration of 20 seconds combined with a 20 second cooldown you can essentially boost your ICMR (or ICPR) by 3600 or 60 points per second.  I can see these during tough boss fights and in all honesty I’m still not sure these are expensive enough.  These potions will essentially allow you to power through a tough transition or stabilize the group for a couple of minutes.  I do think this will make some fight mechanics much easier for certain groups and the potions could become requirements for certain raiding groups.  I guess I’m seeing these as a “crutch” that could be used for raiders in a similar manner to how the various hope quest turn-ins were used back in the day.  I think requiring groups to have those pots purchased is a bad thing, but I’m on the fence as I do like the idea of providing a not totally game breaking crutch to get groups over the hump in certain areas.  As long as Turbine continues to put out challenging fights like BG, and it sounds like the instance revamp will be even more challenging, these could really help folks speed up the learning curve.  After a run or two, I would imagine these pots wouldn’t be as needed until a new instance was attempted.  Oh, and I’m not even going to touch the moors implications as that will just make my head hurt 🙂  However, I don’t see these as a long term issue but a short term emergency tool.

Other than that, the store seems MUCH faster and responsive and they’ve cleaned things up quite a bit, but granted it could be that I just hopped on during a quiet time 🙂

I am starting to formulate my plan for what I’m going to be using the store for and will have a post on that soon.

Promising news from Turbine Regarding Horses in F2P Store

So there’s been some talk on this one by both Mordor or Bust and Casual Stroll to Mordor but I did want to post the confirmation post from Sapience:

Reputation mounts were removed based on beta player feedback.

For those of you who think betas or our feedback don’t matter, here’s another case where they do.  I’m quite happy that they’ve been removed, although I would’ve been ok if they figured out a way to make them gated behind reputation.  A couple posts down Sapience continues to mention that they’re still tweaking prices based on player feedback and there will be another update before launch.  Good stuff and I’m happy to see the direction they’re moving in to try and balance the store out.

Developer Diary – Vault Changes

I’ll keep this quick as I just wanted to make a couple comments on the latest Dev Diary on the new Vault. I really like the new vault and since I will most likely be buying more slots it will become much more useful.  With all the icons, it can get hard to find things sometimes so the filters really do help.

However the part that I really wanted to point out was the discussion on the beta feedback.  This new vault caused a HUGE uproar and I was quite impressed by how Turbine not only responded but let the players vent.  This to me is the main reason why there are NDA’s as if that news had hit live, people would’ve gone even more ballistic and many would have not come back or at least the damage would have been done before Turbine had a chance to flesh out the system.  In addition (I know this will come off as me being a fan-boi) but Turbine does seem to be more than willing to let people disagree with them and that the main reason they shut down threads is do to flaming.  They didn’t completely change their course but I think their compromise shown below is a very good attempt to satisfy everyone.

It will take a bit to get used to the new vault, but overall it will be a more flexible and scalable system.

More LOTRO Video Resources

There’s been a number of new (or maybe just new to me) videos posted over the past few days that I wanted to comment on and share.

First up, I know many of you are interested in the Lua scripting so in addition to the video and information I posted previously Merric from a Casual Stroll to Mordor has put up a great video.  His video focuses on just a couple plugins and seems to hint that he’ll be doing more of them, this review touches on the Plugin Manager and Hunter Travel Window.  I think the Hunter Travel window will definitely be one of the must-haves for any Hunter or Warden.

Next up for those of you looking for tips or hints from running the various Instances, Middle Earth Chronicles has started a new section of the blog with a good collection of videos.  Go check out their Instance page and make sure to send in any videos you may have.

In addition check out Carlosjuero’s video showing some of the new UI tweaks over at LOTRO Reporter.  Many I had seen, but I totally missed that you can now color code your quest helper on the map overlay.  Good stuff and really walks through all the new tweaks available.

And finally but certainly not least I’ve been quite enjoying the video podcast published by the Uruk Hunter.  Not only some good information but he also does comment his videos quite well.

Go check those sites out if you haven’t already, and I’ve also updated my Blog roll appropriately.

Recent Developer Diaries

Turbine has continued to pump out Dev diaries and I’m a bit behind I’ll admit.  But since the NDA has been lifted, I think much of this information is out there but it is always good to see how the Devs see things and get a little more insight on their process.

First up from last week was the Volume 3 Book 2 Quest Line diary talking about that portion of the epic line.  I specifically didn’t do these quests on Bullroarer as I wanted to save them for live.  I’m pretty excited about this portion of the story as not only do we get to follow the rangers path but also get to learn more about their stories.  And of course, there’s the Ranger Session play that’s always enjoyable 🙂  The new technology to show and hide people based on your quest log sounds really cool and I’d love for them to roll that out everywhere as it is a bit lore-breaking to see folks in the wrong areas.  The other big news item in this diary is the announcement that we’ll be able to re-play all the various session plays as much as we want.  There are some really fun ones, so I quite like this idea for quick play-sessions.

The other diary was today’s release of the Wardrobe System, which for me is one of my favorite features of the F2P roll-out.  I probably have a few bags on all my toons that are purely cosmetic and many are storing the same items.  This will not only allow for more storage of useful items but another way to share items between characters.  I’m glad they walked through the usage of the system as I’ll admit it took me a bit to figure it out – putting items in is easy as you just drag the item and it puts a copy into the wardrobe.  You can then feel free to delete the one in your inventory if you want.  To equip though, you need to drag the item directly to the slot on your character panel and not to your inventory.  It is also nice that you can store various color variations using one slot and just use a pull-down to select which color as opposed to each color taking up a slot.  And finally, the requirements to wear the cosmetic items have been loosened such that you don’t need the level or reputation to wear them but you will be limited to armor types.  For instance, you won’t be able to deck your Minstrel out in heavy armor but your Captain will be able to cosmetically equip your Champion’s Rift Set.