By: Joe 'jwbarry' Barry with Jon 'Rock' Steady

Fornost is next on our upgrade train as we march up through the instances of LOTRO. It's a gigantic instance (I think larger than Rhode Island) with a ton of bosses, 4 tons of trash mobs, a gaggle of quests, a whole lot of lore and story and a very thick layer of dust and cobwebs. This place is both literally and figuratively ancient.

But first I’m going to wander a bit and talk about my perspective on the evolution of dungeons and instances in MMOs, feel free to skip ahead to the directly relevant Fornost stuff a few paragraphs down if you want.

Fornost was designed and built in a different era of MMO. It was our third instance, after Garth Agarwen and Great Barrows, and it was completed before LOTRO shipped. That era was marked by behemoth instances inspired by EverQuest (EQ) style dungeons. The iteration over EQ was that dungeons had become instanced. Now that each group had their own play space, griefing, mob stealing, and other types of negative social play was removed from the equation. What we hadn’t realized, however, was that while Lower Guk was enormous, it was made smaller thanks to having other groups clearing out portions of the dungeon. Our new instanced spaces didn't yet account for that. That fact, combined with rapid expansion of types of players within the player base, the player base moving towards a shorter average session time and a myriad other factors started the next large shift in design and construction. This current iteration is geared towards more manageably sized instance spaces that can be completed in 30-60 minutes of play, while the ancient “monsters of the deep” dungeons get less and less play.

There have already been many other shifts and adjustments, some of which were successful while others failed, but those I think are the big steps.

There’s always been a desire to make sure that dungeons feel epic, grand, and invoke a sense of awe from the player while they are within the space. As instances have changed, the tools and methods for accomplishing those goals have shifted. Epic no longer means spending 6 hours in one dungeon – it’s translated to more custom art, more skills and mechanics, and more intricate set pieces.

It is time for Fornost to join the modern MMO world. The space needs to start getting the time and play numbers a location like this deserves.

What does all this actually mean?

Fornost is now split into four 6-man instances, each playing between 30-45 minutes. The minimum level has been lowered to 30 and the max is 75. They each feature two tiers of difficulties and all have challenges on the final boss fights. Bosses have been redistributed to be an even three per wing. Each space's quests will auto-bestow upon entry. Some of those quests have been repurposed from existing ones, others are all new. Non re-purposed existing quests are still present and available in the existing Fornost camp. Sara Oakheart is still there.

We learned a lot from breaking up the Great Barrow and Helegrod instances. We learned how those upgrades went, how they influenced play and progression through the space, and the feedback and response to some of those decisions. All of that informed Fornost’s split, which has been done in a very linear manner. The goal is that if you played the four spaces back to back, it would feel very similar to having played one giant instance.

The four instances are broken down to match the wraiths: water, earth, fire, and shadow.

Water starts at the entrance and ends in the first tower with the defeat of the water wraith.

Earth starts at the second plateau, takes the players through the goblins and trolls and ends in the second tower with the defeat of the earth wraith.

Fire starts at the top of the earth tower, uses the south half of the upper plateau and ends in the third tower with the fire wraith.

Shadow starts at the exit of the fire tower, wraps across the north half of the upper plateau, then through the orcs and shades there and ends in the final tower with the shadow wraith.

Except for water, each instance is gated by a one-time deed to complete the one before it. There's no advance credit if you've done it before. You don't need to find the entrance to start the water wing.

A token amount of new monsters that we didn't have at the time have been added for additional flavour and variety, but on the whole the monster mix remains the same. The majority of the monster placement (bosses aside) has remained the same. Trash mobs have seen some adjustments. For example, they're not all elites anymore and we’ve made slight AI modifications to introduce a little more gameplay.

Bosses have seen a lot of work. 12 is a ton to have across four related instances and we've done all we can to have them be different and interesting but feel related. The existing fights were used as the foundation for the new fights, we’ve just enhanced and built up the mechanics so bosses now have more than one unique skill each. This presented a challenge to us, however, as Fornost features a large amount of “wave” style fights. We've come up with several ways to make them different from each other and to display the variety of options there.

Our goal with these changes is to make Fornost the second set of 6-man spaces you encounter while leveling up. Great Barrow introduced you to the basics of grouping and bosses and this should expand your knowledge and introduce you to new things in the toolkit, including:

• Player Movement and Positioning
  • Cluster together, separate (distributed damage vs aoe)
  • Jumping and platforming during combat
  • Positional damage

• Player Awareness
  • Interrupting enemy skills
  • Enrage timers
  • Red light/Green light

• Target Movement
  • Auras that buff other monsters

• Wave Fights
  • Boss enters first
  • Boss enters last
  • Few adds with high health/damage
  • Medium adds with medium health/damage
  • Lots of adds with low health/damage
  • Waves that enter on:
    • Timers
    • HP thresholds
    • Previous wave clear
    • Player trigger
    • Combination of above

Hey guys! Rock here! I’m hijacking this dev diary to talk about loot for a bit. Turning the Fornost cluster into scaling spaces gave us a chance to really think about how level-scaling spaces compare to level-assigned spaces, such as the Isengard cluster and Roots of Fangorn instance. The big thing which stood out to us was the difference in currency rewards between our existing scaling spaces and the Isengard cluster / Roots of Fangorn. The amount of currency / hour players could get from the Isengard cluster compared to the scaling spaces heavily encouraged players to focus on running the Isengard cluster. While we want players to run the Isengard cluster and Roots of Fangorn, we don’t want to completely leave the Scaling Instances in the dust. To help address the difference, each auto-bestowed optional quest in Fornost will give Medallions instead of Marks. This should help to even out the currency gaps.

As each wing has three bosses, there will be three chests. Each chest will give players the standard rewards (skirmish bounties, relics, Item Experience Runes, etc). The first and third chests will also give players equipment. Similarly to the Great Barrow, Annúminas, and the other classic instances we’ve given the scaling treatment, Fornost now drops level-scaling items. Just shy of forty new items were created for the Fornost cluster and divided between each space. The new items are intended to help fill some gaps with stat combinations in gear from Scaling Instances, and to help players gear up using Scaling Instances. All the rewards previously found in Fornost are now available on the Classic vendors found at your Skirmish camp of choice.

Now back to your regularly scheduled dev diary.

While we know there are those out there who are loathing Fornost being chopped up, it was something that needed to happen. Every bit of content out there has a target play number and a level of attention that makes it useful and relevant to the game and player base. Fornost was flatlined. Fortunately, after a couple of syringes of adrenaline and a few shots from a defibrillator, we believe it's going to be back into everyone's play rotation.