So…What is Inspired Greatness?

Inspired Greatness is a set of buffs that reduce all incoming damage, improve all outgoing damage, boost in-combat and out-of-combat morale and power regeneration and provide increases to morale and power. Through Inspired Greatness, players can experience being a truly elite Hero, which will enable them to complete group-based content within the Volume I Epic storyline even while playing solo.

A Tenuous Balance

The dialogue with LOTRO players from that first blog posting showed that changes meant to improve accessibility for the lower level populace created a tenuous balancing act. On one hand, many players seem to genuinely enjoy the fact that they can play through quests and not be blocked by fellowship requirements. On the other hand, the reduction of fellowship quests in the game is perceived as a reduction in the game’s challenge. Both stances have merit in my eyes, and as a designer I need to do what I can to support both avenues of game play and advancement.

Revising Volume 1 was an exercise in trying to satisfy as many play styles as possible. To that end, I first needed to revise Inspired Greatness. The concept of Inspired Greatness was introduced in Volume I, Book 2 at the end of Weathertop and the Passage to Agamaur quests. This implementation allowed players to choose between a solo version of each quest instance or the full fellowship version. This was not without some consequences; completing the solo version locks players from accessing the fellowship version of the instance at Reflecting Pools, and anyone who completed the fellowship version can never do the solo version, so that needed to be fixed. In addition, the feedback was clearly split on whether or not the entirety of the Epic Story should be solo. So the revision of Inspired Greatness was underway.