Glinghant

The final Annúminas space was Glinghant, and we realized it would need the most work. The first thing we did was to rip out the lever puzzle. It was never well-communicated what was going on, like when you succeeded or when you failed, and the final nail was that it enforced having six people to play the instance. That’s not consistent with the rest of the game, where if you are skilled enough you can 4- or 5-man a Fellowship instance. The second adjustment was to the behaviors of the darkwaters. They all had auras, buffs, or debuffs that were intended to make the fights more difficult, but some of them only succeeded in making them more irritating and take longer. The same design could be kept, with just a switch on the behavior. Auras that slow your enemies now become auras that haste your friends with the same overall net effect, a far less frustrating and time consuming game experience. We also switched an aura from being a constant power drain to being an increased multiplier on the amount of power your skills use. So instead of constantly losing power, you’re choosing to and how often by activating a skill. The final large change in this space was to the final boss fight. Previously the boss would spawn in, and after a minute or two would bring in a wave of darkwaters. The problem with this is that a heavily focused DPS group could eliminate the boss before the adds even showed up, thus trivializing the boss fight. Now, when the boss enters the first thing he does is summon one of each type of darkwater, and then the battle begins. There are no further waves or respawns. Take everything you’ve learned about their auras and what they do and apply it all at once.

Once all of the changes were in, we ripped out the gating requirement of the camps in Annúminas city. Requiring areas to be in Free Player control in order to access these spaces was a serious damper on the number of attempts at these instances and was dramatically increasing the time commitment to play them. If kept, this would have invalidated adding the spaces to Instance Join.

Eregion Cluster

The School and Library at Tham Mírdain were the next spaces we looked at. We had created a solid foundation for the system with Annúminas, and we wanted to ensure we had some Small Fellowship content as an offering as well. The School and Library were the initial 3-mans added to the game, and the designs were solid and stable. They had also been well reviewed and were well liked.

These spaces were also well reviewed by our Qualitative group and only required small amounts of bugfixing and polish. Overall they were solid experiences, and the scaling again held up.

But just when you think things were going smoothly, you liked what you were eating, you take a big bite and realize it might just be a little too much…

Coming Next Time

Ancient Undead Dragons! What all did we do to Helegrod and why? There’s a lot, and I’ll tell you about it in the next installment next week!

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