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Rise of Isengard: Developer Diary: Fellowship Maneuvers

 

 

Conjunction Conjunction, What’s your Function?

 
 
The Fellowship Maneuver is a fun little mechanic that has the potential for some very powerful effects. To start, the Fellowship Maneuver is initiated by stunning the victim. In the case of boss fights, this essentially means that players get to pause the game and give everyone a chance to take stock of what’s going on before jumping back into combat. This alone is very powerful; and it is the beginning of our reasoning for disabling Fellowship Maneuvers on boss creatures over the past couple of instance tiers. Add to this the fact that players have the option to heal themselves, restore power, summon adds to fight at their side, AND deal damage to boot and you have a very powerful mechanic.
 
We disabled Fellowship Maneuvers on significant creatures featured throughout the past two instance tiers, and we did this to ensure that these creatures were sufficiently dangerous to players rather than conjunction piñatas. This decision was met with some resistance externally of course; but we stood our ground and made some real progress on fine tuning raid encounter balance to challenge players based on the more fundamental mechanics of LOTRO.
 
Now that we’re comfortable with challenging players based on those fundamentals, we think it’s time to take another look at Fellowship Maneuvers and how they might directly play into encounter design moving forward.
 

Does this mean Fellowship Maneuvers will be usable in boss fights again?

 
Kinda not really? We don’t mean to tease, but this is looking pretty far into the future of encounter design for LOTROLOTRO. There are, however, two significant features concerning fellowship maneuvers coming down the pipe. The first of these two features is the ability to specify a custom set of Fellowship Maneuvers on a per- creature basis. This new feature will actually be featured in the upcoming Draigoch raid.
 
These custom Fellowship Maneuvers will be featured in a new sub-category of the Fellowship Maneuver UI, complete with their own descriptions. In addition, these new Fellowship Maneuvers can be duplicates of Fellowship Maneuvers that already exist, entirely new, or even be copies of the same sequences you normally perform as fellowships; but with new effects.
 
Expect to do a fair amount of experimentation as your fellowships attempt to discover all of the different possible Fellowship Maneuvers for Draigoch and any future creatures that feature their own sets of Fellowship Maneuvers moving forward.
 

Using Fellowship Maneuvers in Boss Fights

 
We’ll be doing something very unique for Fellowship Maneuvers for Draigoch’s raid. We won’t spoil the details, but you won’t be able to start them whenever you like. Instead, you’ll have to try using them at the correct time. We’ll make it rather obvious as to when that will be, of course.
 
By restricting the use of Fellowship Maneuvers we can design encounters with their use in mind. That means we can let players use them without worrying about the encounter mechanics breaking down. Everyone wins =]
 
Add customized Fellowship Maneuvers to the mix and we can design entire encounters around this mechanic. We might only allow players the opportunity to use a fixed number of Fellowship Maneuvers, allow players to use them often but with detrimental side-effects, or any number of new encounter mechanics that revolve around the use of Fellowship Maneuvers.
 

Future Fellowship Maneuvers

 
We said there were two significant features concerning Fellowship Maneuvers coming down the line, didn’t we? What if, and this is a BIG, “if,” Fellowship Maneuvers didn’t knock the target down?
 
Would players be able to finish them without getting hit? Would getting hit interrupt the Fellowship Maneuver outright? Would it “complete” at its current state? Would that make them cooler since they’d require more skill to execute, especially the six-input sequences?
 
We’ve been talking about other ways in which we can allow the use of Fellowship Maneuvers during boss encounters and this is one possibility we’ve been discussing. It’s still very preliminary discussion, mind you, so please don’t go expecting to use Fellowship Maneuvers at any time come next patch. However, it is something we’re considering for the future.
 
 

Wrap up

 
We’ve definitely moved away from Fellowship Maneuvers in recent years and we agree that it’s time to reincorporate them back into the game. We are certainly concerned with their power, however, and want to make sure that as they become available again they don’t get away from us.
Expect to see us try to challenge players to use Fellowship Maneuvers more strategically, opting for damage or debuffs as often as regeneration (if not more often.) Also expect to see a lot more customized Fellowship Maneuver sets in future encounters.
Perhaps that Fellowship Maneuver you’ve always used as your “go to” will work differently when used in new encounters? Perhaps they’ll even do bad things? (Insert evil laugh here ~_^)