Brian “Zombie Columbus” continues his series of developer diaries about the new Skirmish system coming in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Siege of Mirkwood™ with Part 5: Rewards. If you’ve missed previous installments you can catch up with Part 1: Overview, Part 2: Story Instances,  Part 3: Randomization and Scaling, and Part 4: Skirmish Soldiers!

Overview

Let’s be honest with ourselves. People play new content for the rewards. Sure, if the content is fun it is more likely to get replayed, but even if we made the hardest, most boring boss fight in the game drop the best loot, a lot of people would still play it. With that in mind, we've tried to design the Skirmish rewards system in as free-form a way as possible, allowing players to play the content they want and receive mostly equivalent rewards. This has its own pitfalls; players can find the Skirmish they believe is the easiest and replay it constantly, which can lead to different kinds of frustration. The system might not force a particular bit of content on the player, but the player’s attempts to maximize their reward gains could lead them to choose to play in an un-fun manner. With all that in mind, let’s get to it.

Monster Loot

In Skirmishes, we have special rules for treasure. Monsters won’t be dropping any items except for Skirmish Marks (more below), nor will they drop coin - with the notable exception of the Boss, who will drop a rather large amount of coin. We wanted to streamline gameplay as much as possible, removing some of the need to loot corpses as you go. Only Lieutenants, Bosses, and optional encounter monsters will have loot, which will be exclusively Marks. Experience and Item Advancement Experience will be gained as normal for monster kills. In addition, the daily quests will give a chunk of XP like most quests do.