In the secret places of Lord of the Rings Online, the developers of legend dug too deep and unleashed a slew of antiquated instances that are about to become the new progression servers’ endgame. To shore up the situation, the studio is revamping its Mines of Moria instances for the upcoming Update 42.2.
SSG explains that it’s beefing up health, mitigations, and damage for the instance clusters, as player “power creep” overtook the originally intended difficulty.
As the game’s systems designer explains, “The biggest challenge with Moria content (as with Angmar/50) is that there was not yet a difficulty/tier system in place. Adding tiers was unfortunately outside the scope of what we were able to do this year, so I’ve maintained the same goal here that group content should require a group to complete.” The good news for players is that this revamp also includes “a partial (not comprehensive) pass on instance rewards” for better loot. The patch notes clarify:
“For the release of Moria on the new Legendary Servers, we’ve updated the endgame group content a little more robustly. Base Health, Mitigations, and Damage have been increased for most monsters found within level 52-60 endgame instances, including those from the Mines of Moria and Lothlorien content clusters. In a handful of boss fights, more targeted adjustments were made to improve the gameplay experience. This is intended to combat player power creep over the years, and should help make those instances harder to complete without full groups when played on-level.​”
If you’re hoping to take a peek at Bullroarer while it’s open, note that it’s closing tomorrow at 5 p.m. EST, but patch notes are up.