Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Isengard Failure, Turbine basiclly rip you off (IMO)
Hexipox
Member UncommonPosts: 241
I’ve played Lotro since it was published. I started only because I’m a huge fan of the Tolkien universe. Turbine, with Angmar made a great trip for us fans, the game lore was right on the point, very well executed. It also had some of the best instances I’ve tried in my 15 years long MMO career. There were things that needed fixing such as classes and gear. Which eventually made me take a break from it. Then they published Mines of Moria. Until that date my favorite expansion for any MMO I’ve tried was Scars of Valious for EQ1. But Moria, where to start? that expansion was beyond good, it was so amazingly handcraft, you really did feel like you were in the never-ending Mines of Moria. They still has class related problem, and item were still only making half-way sense. So they launch a small expansion Mirkwood. Not the best expansion, I admit that, but as they said it was a small one and it was very cheap so I felt I got more than I payed for, so I had a lot of fun for another 3 months and took a break (must admit that is how the majority of the population in this game work, they take breaks, come back for content, take breaks… Turbine has always been very awful to deliver content, but when it was delivered, it was always good).
This time I come back for another expansion The Rise of Isengard. let’s have a look at what they advertise this expansion to have, and then the horrible truth.
[content taken from http://isengard.lotro.com/]
Dunland - Adventure amidst the bright forests in the foothills of the southern Misty Mountains. Beware the Dunland Clans, rugged warriors tempted by the dark promise of power.
- This zone is the only thing in the new expansion which is quite alright, does not have the same feeling to it, as many of the old zones or Mirkwood. But none the less it’s a good level zone with a nice story to it as well.
Gap of Rohan - Battle over the legendary pass between Eriador and the plain of Rohan. This key strategic point must be defended against the ambitions of Sauron.
- Battle this halfway made zone for 5-6 hours of gameplay. The zone is designed fully but it’s easy to see they are not done with what they wanted from this zone. It has as said 5-6hours of quest and it’s done. The book-quest ends before you get to here, I am guessing now, but this zone probably would have been a good part of the book-quest. Guess I already revealed that the book in this expansion is a joke, they say it’s one of the deepest book quest ever. Guess they didn’t play any of their other expansion since this book quest is so bad.
Isengard - Explore Orthanc, one of the iconic Two Towers, as it rises over the once beautiful Isengard valley, now desecrated beyond repair by Saruman the betrayer.
- Now this is the zone everyone had been waiting for, to see Sauromans awesomeness in action! Keep dreaming people, you will rather see Turbines fail in its awesomeness. The zone outside the Ringwall is another 3-4h of question with no points to the story really. After that you get access to the inside of the Ringwall. NOW is the time for what we waited for! *clashing sword against swords* “Let’s hunt some orcs!” … What? oh there is a NPC here, what do he have to say? Oh he has 5 starting quests, cool let’s start! 45 min. later (those apprentice of Sauroman was damn hard to find!) I went to turn them in to get my new once and get to (as they promised) explore Orthanc!! .. WTF?!? no new quests? ohh I can do them again in 24h … Yep that is Isengard for you 3-4h question outside and 5 dailies inside. Of cause you come by it for an hour or two in the book quests.. but seriously? could you possible make a more ridicules joke? I suggest you watch the trailer, since that the most of Orthanc you will see in this expansion.
Advance to Level 75!
Face new challenges and continue to forge your own legend in Middle-earth with all-new epic quests, skills, and deeds as you fight new enemies on your journey to level 75!
- erhm? there is no new challenges, every mob is the same just more levels. New skills, ye! they upgraded 3-4 skills for each classes. That’s such a challenge.
Biggest disapointment about this expansion that I will dare to call “The biggest fail expansion in MMO history, only targeted to milk the cashcow”
There are no new instances. If you want the new gear then you can do the 12-man raid skirmishes that people have been doing the past 1-3 years depending on which you choose, some of them are back from Moria days. or ever before that. Repeat what you have done to boredom for GLORY! Not to add that 90% of these skirmishes are so easy that half the people are AFK in them, more or less impossible to fail it. Doing 3/6 man is more of a challenge.
Crafting. They simply forgot to add new recipes that makes any sense. Crafting has always been rather good in Lotro, in this expansion most of the crafting stuff is just useless and not even worth making. Oh they also forgot to make a new level 75 crafted relics for weapons.
Legendary: No new legacies for you weapons. They added a new Tier 7 Relics but forgot to make them work before launch, The old level 65 extraordinary etc are still the best, Tier 7 is useless but added.
The book story is somewhat, while they call it their deepest book-quest ever, I laughed hard at that, it even ends suddenly and the quests says “Will continue in a soon update..”
They forgot moral was actually in the game, making it rather hard to go for the items you should, since you will go so low on HP. Again after how many years? the games items are still so flawed and level 70 items beat level 75 etc, the same old story. Take a hick and fire the guy who makes items he has failed since the game was made…
One boss raid, nothing else.. That raid is so easy that 12 random hardly can fail at it…
The sum-up
If you think about buying this to get back to lotro .. DON’T! I’ve played it 3 weeks now and I’m bored, 2 of the 3 weeks I leveled up. I have already killed the only raid they added. Have the best weapon possible for my class etc .. It’s just Retarded. Turbine lost all respect I had for them with this expansion. It does nothing of what it promised. Basically it’s an expansion that added 10 levels and a area to suport leveling those levels. After that nothing at all, no, nay, nein.. nothing. If I have to say one good thing its they finally got classes fixed to be right, they are really nice now. But that only made a whole lot more problems on the itembase for the game. They called Mirkwood a small expansion which was really cheap, a joke? Mirkwood had twice the content and deepness than this piece of SH….T.
Comments
While I'm still enjoying the expansion (and the game), I have to agree. The expansion is one of the smallest (in terms of pure content) that I've seen in any MMOs. They gave new quests and levels, but not much else, especially not when you reach 75. Honestly, I don't really want to do the same skirmishes again, especially since I'm not a huge fan of skirmishes in the first place. I know they're releasing the instances soon though. But even with those, it's another Mirkwood style limited expansion.
Sadly I must agree, played to lvl 73 with my Guardian and then cancelled my sub... my heart was just not in it.
Currently bored with MMO's.
"Isengard Failure, Turbine basiclly rip you off (IMO)"
lol, you think?
Turbine has been ripping off people ever since. When I bought DDO, it wasn't a complete game there was no open world to explore. Yet they charged a full price plus a sub when I can get more that than buying GW with only box price. Then LotR came out and another ripoff. An open world but empty, no depth, and boring.
I don't know why people still giving them money.
Ready for GW2!!!
Damn. It sounds like I wasted 25% of the free Turbine Points I've accumulated with my lifetime account to buy something thats only going to keep me occupied for 3 weeks.
Then of course there's the people that decided to buy the expac for real money. All they would have got for $29.99 is three weeks worth of new content. I guess they should have bought a typical single player game instead and got about ten hours worth of play for $49.99.
Talking about Moria gave you away. It was worst expansion that was missing whole Lothlorien and multiboss raid (but thats not important right?) that came some 8 months AFTER the Moria expanson.
It introduced legendary grind and radiance (which broke the community and caused biggest cancellation in LOTRO history and one of the main reasons its F2P today - it was so bad that Turbine formally apologized for it).
Items did make sense since you had to use what Turbine said you had to use, crafting was turned utterly useless since ALL best stuff came from farming instances. Not one sigle piece of crafted equipement was even considered.
I was done with Moria quests/leveling in 5 days after which all there was left to do was ad-nauseum farming of same instances to try to get enough people geared. Since it was 180 degrees turn of what LOTRO was before the expansion it crapped out on commnity. And, if you did manage toget that radiance, all you had to do was 1 Raid lair boss. FOR 7-8 MONTHS.
Now you have 17 skirmishes, 4 3-man instances, 6 6-man instances and a raid lair boss that does not require any grind to go to. Now you have decent crafted equipement. Now you have gear that you can actually combine to your desire...
I wonder why so many people have such rose colored glasses, there were fewer quests and general content in Moria than in ROI, completely missed and broken mechanics, no areas/raid that was promised to come with expansion and that needed 8 months to finally come out...instances that were bugged and exploitable to hell, in fact it was hard to find group that DID NOT exploit, and that were fixed 8-10 months AFTER they should have been...
O yah, there were two new classes. And great world design. Since world design is still great all ROI is missing are new classes.
And i dont really know what you talk about items, Turbine is on good way to finally go back to (expanded) SoA days where you had to choose your equipement carefully, not just be led by hand by Turbine with big sign "use THIS armor here with THIS jewellery here". Guess you havent really given it ANY tought, just decided to whine about...stuff *shrug*
HexiPox i think you are just growing old and long in the tooth. Of course it can not ba as good as it once was.. we are in a finanacially unstable time and the market is getting over-stuffed with games... So it is naturally that Turbine is trying to re-define what goes in to a expansion.
That is the MMO market for you. Heck the only ones that have a set in stone formula for expansion is Blizzard and maybe Sony with EQ but i never played that for very long so gheck if i know.
This have been a good conversation
Its not only about skrmishes, 3-mans, 6-mans, raid skirmishes, lair raids are run regualrly, theres actual economy going on after looooong time (since Moria really) i can actually craft and sell stuff to everyones surprise.
Thats what happens when theres actual good gear system, and not just "run this isntances ad-nauseam and then raid lair boss ad-nauseam and you must use this particualr set and nothing else" like in Moria.
Run what you want, build your character how you want. Turbine actually did good job on this, hopefully it will continue and new instance cluster wont be "ultimate gear experience" like Moria but more of different gear that might or might not fit in with your build, horizontal expansion of gear not vertical.
I was also dissapointed.. but you seem a bit biased. Especially since you forgot to mention that Turbine said that before the end of the year, 7 new instances will be released with update 5 and will be free to all people who purchased RoI.
..Cake..
I got 11 hours out of Warhammer 40000 Space Marine. Some 300 hours out of Oblivion. 550 hours out of X3: Terran Conflict. Several thousands of hours out of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
While Space Marine was 11 hours of intense fun to me because I love the WH40K universe, it's obvious to me that buying the shooter-of-the-month isn't a good way to spend your money if that's what you're concerned about.
Needless to say, preordering Skyrim was a no-brainer to me and when X: Rebirth comes out, I'll get that as well. I'm sure both games will give me way more than 10 hours and will be a much better investment for me than Isengard could ever hope to provide.
In short, it all depends on which single player game you get. I supposed Space Marine is what you mean by typical single player game, but I just don't get why that justifies Isengard being a poor excuse for an expansion.
I'm a big ol' fluffy carewolf. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Are you sure you played through the Epic quests? You see the inside of Orthanc before you even get to the Gap of Rohan.
Largely disagree with just about all you said, but I do agree about the Gap. Its "unfinishedness" is glaring. In the mine for example, you would fall through the mine rails even when walking dead center of them. They fixed that in the last build, though.
Although ROI has grown a bit on me since I first started playing (The initial parts of Dunland felt pretty much like a rehash of what I had already been doing for months in Endewaith)..... however I am still very underwhelmed by the expansion.
For the first, supposedly, big paid expansion the game has had in a long time (since F2P)...they really needed to make it much more substantial then it was.
I didn't really like alot of the directions they chose to go with Moria but at least in terms of substance Moria seemed to offer enough content and additions to the game system to warrant being called a paid expansion.
ROI is more of an "expansion lite" as far as I'm concerned. There are some things to like about ROI. I really think they did a good job with the style of how they presented the Rohirrim..... and gameplay wise, I actualy think some of the steps they made actualy did help correct previous missteps that they had made. But in terms of substance, it really didn't seem to add more to the game then alot of the regular FREE content updates we used to get with our subs back in the SOA days (Forochel for example).
Also, for the love of Eru, I wish they would stop making 99.99% of the content geared toward solo play. At least SOME of the quests, leveling areas and gameplay while leveling should be geared toward Fellowship or at least Small Fellowship play. It's ok if you don't want to make any of those gatekeepers to advance the story...but damn...at least make some OPTIONAL quests/story arcs geared toward groups. So far in playing all through Dunland and into the Gap, I've counted exactly 1 quest that actualy required a group (The Culling Pit). Not only that but the rest of the gameplay is so easy that if you tried to even duo it...you might as well be asleep at your keyboard.
I purposefully skipped most of Galtrev's quests so that I could hit other quests/areas at 2 levels under the reccomended level for them....and I still breezed through 95% of them without hardly straining any of my characters ability. C'mon Turbine...do you really need to make things THAT easy for us?
/shrug.
I returned to the game about a month ago at level 47. I played through most of angmar - had several really fun (and mostly level appropriate) groups through its instances and then moved into Moria where i have now adventured up to lvl 59.
I'm having a lot of fun, even though i'm not at cap, i'm running instances (not skirmishes) with groups almost every day and I'm selling a lot of stuff on the AH every day, which tells me the economy is pretty healthy. I'm also finding NEW level-appropriate items to buy.
I know i'm not up to Isengard nor at cap level, but the game is plenty fun and alive for me as I get closer. i understand that people who have waited 3 years for an expac are probably somewhat disappointed, but for those of us looking in, it's still a very fun game. (Also do see tons of cap level stuff happening all the time in GLFF, so it gets me excited to get up that level and participate.)
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
I re-started LOTRO again the other night -- dwarf. I was surprised to see the starting quest changed AGAIN, 3rd iteration now isn't it? You know there's something wrong with your game if you've had to revamp the starting quests 3 times in nearly as many years.
As I played the quests, I found myself falling asleep, lol. Literally. It was so boring, I couldn't keep my eyes open. I logged out and played Civ 4 instead.
Maybe the problem is that LoTRo was painted into a corner from the very begining.
You get to Mordor... then what? You win the game? Game over?
So they have to stretch out the in between content in order to keep pushing back players arriving in Mordor. Instead of releasing a big expansion evey two years, they release a small one that gets you just a little bit farther along in middle earth.
Seems that all that feedback didnt work - since they released Moria, and we all know how that ended up, and there was no evil WB to do evil stuff. After that they released Mrkwood. Still no evil WB to do evil stuff...
No, they try to get back to SoA track after they did totally wrong turn with Moria.
I was lvl60 in 5 days(didnt even rush it), reading and doing all quests, after which i was left with radiance grind, legendary grind, and 1 lair raid boss for 7-8 months. And of course i had to deal with total brakdown of the community and mass quitage of people cause of radiance issue. After wihich there was really no point of playing any more cause community went away, there was absolutely stale content that was bugged/exploited to hell...
Yah, every persons dream. Take off rose-colored galsses. Logged in on few "welcome back weeks" before Mirkwood. It was sad affair. Thats how good Moria was.
Of course if you play 1 hour/week it lasted...for a while.
Moria was great, some parts of Mirkwood expansion were fine, especially skirmishes which I played to my hearts content. After that it went downhill. I do like to think that LOTRO best days are yet to be seen, however.
For me Lotros always been my back up mmo . I play maybe an hour a day every other day and do a handful of quests . I have a lifetime sub which I got at half price a few years ago . I've yet to experiance Isengard yet but I was a little concerned about it . The promiced new PVP area failed to marterialise and so did the improvements to housing . Theres still nothing wrong with the community and the game is as busy as ever but content wise its still quite lacking in regards to the expansions beyond Moria . I'm going to wait rather than spend my points on the expansion now ( as I'm still in Mirkwood ) because I think it will be on offer at some point in the new year .
In the store there should be expansion bundle available when update 5 hits live (supposedly december), so if you are in no hurry prolly best to wait for that. Dont think web purchase will be any cheaper anytime soon.
Lets see if that happens. Atm they have a beyond mesure bugged raid event. Only content they added and it so bugged. We usually kill it in 30min. Yestoday we failed 3 time in a row to i just bug out in final phase. Ticket a GM and we get auto replies ..
Nah this game had turned into shit. Rlease 7 instances without bugs before 2012, i doubt that will happens. They'll prob release them, yes. but bugged as hell. Like moria instances where there was a trick to every damn boss to bug it out..
Yes i did see the dungeons of Orthanc, 1-2h of running from A to B getting bored and hoping to find an orc to kill to get run speed. Ye i did it all. I was grimar for a few mins which was the best part of the whole story.
Go back to Angmar and do the whole book there and see what level of details it use to have, not this get x shield x meet.