Ding! Legendary Weapon Leveling
Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Legendary items rock.
Hearing about it, reading about it, I was just like "hey that's pretty cool" but getting my first Legendary staff (via Volume 2 Book 1) and killing my first mob with it-- and having the item itself gain a level and then train that level-- This had an immediate and pronounced effect on me. There's a great big sheepish grin on my face, like I've just eaten a great key-lime pie and there's no way I should have enjoyed it so much.
It's perfect for me, really. I don't play alts that much and I'm happy to grind gear, rep, whatever at Endgame. More than happy to grind honestly. I just hadn't put much thought to it, but leveling up weapons with my one main character: That's incredibly satisfying.
And hell, now I can ding a whole lot. Ding, ding, ding.
Apr 16, 2009 5:44am
Dark Age of Camelot implemented this for weapons AND armor in their dreaded Trials of Atlantis expansion and it ruined the game. The way they decided to do it is force you to PVE on mobs where these rare scrolls would drop randomly ... and I mean rare. You had to farm for three of them, pages 1 to 3, and one of the scrolls would always be the rarest. Most of the time I'd be farming and have 5 first page scrolls in my bags, 1 page 2 and it'd take forever and a day to farm the last one.
Once you had the scrolls you had to put them together, travel to this island, exchange it for a weapon with an NPC and then head right back out to farm some more to level it. Not only did you have to farm, but you'd have to farm on certain mobs and even then they couldn't make it easy for you. No, there were restrictions on what mobs you needed to kill to gain experience for the item, the even went as far as restricting you so you could only kill certain types of mobs during the day or at night, or some other stupid thing that would keep you tied up in experience grinding.
Now imagine that in order to be competitive in Realm vs. Realm fighting you had to get a full suit of this stuff and weapons on top of that. That is a ton of grinding and you were almost never able to grind and level two or more items at the same time. So 10 levels a dozen times or so! Don't even get me started on the master level program they implemented along side this. Imagine 10 master levels giving you special abilities for RVR that you could only accomplish during a raid of 10 to 20 people performing 10 separate tasks.
So your idea of fun leaves a bad taste in my mouth! LOL
Apr 16, 2009 1:47pm
Ahhh but there's a key difference isn't there? I don't imagine I'd enjoy it much in a PvP situation where I prefer more equal footing and dislike gear-driven disparity overall. I like my competition fair, just like I prefer my PvE gameplay grindy. This is exactly why I dislike PvE<->PvP balance, I think any given game should either pick one or the other, or separate them from each other.
If it's ever a situation where my eyes are too much on the top tier, the mountain seems too large. In contrast, when I'm enjoying the climb I don't want it to turn out to be a little hill.
Apr 16, 2009 8:24pm
Xerb sums up ToA nicely and why it didn't work in a PvP game. However, in a PvE game like LOTRO (and let's face it, it's a PvE game) this seems like a nice feature.
What level are you up to now Rog? (You, not your weapon)
Apr 17, 2009 5:23pm
@Keen: I just hit 50 after I wrote this. Nazrin, Nelg and I are just venturing into Moria tonight for our first time.
I'll have to see if I change my mind later, maybe it'll be too much or too little of a grind, but right now I think it's going to be a bang-on great incentive to dig into any content @ Endgame. This system has legs on it.
Apr 19, 2009 5:43am
[...] To put it simply, Rog likee the legendary weapees. [...]
Apr 19, 2009 7:02am
It's neat for the first few. The first one they give you is really nice. Then you out-level it and need to go through 300 more to find one with good legacies. Then level it with however many million IXP. Given how long it took to find two good 3rd Age items, I am not bothering to try for a good 2nd or 1st age.