Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Legendary Items and General Improvements

Ten Ton Hammer: Legendary Items - weapons that essentially grow in power as characters level - are a very unique and interesting LotRO. They’re also one of the most complex and misunderstood aspects of the game. Could you explain why Turbine is revisiting Legendary Items with Siege of Mirkwood and briefly outline the changes you’re making?

Jeffrey Steefel: Some of the reason for the changes was to grant more extensibility - there’s more opportunities for advancement and it makes the whole thing feel a lot less grindy. I know a lot of players are afraid of having to do the whole grind over again, but that is not the intention. In a lot of cases, items are going to gain addtional levels, because the legendary points are being reset for all the items because of some rebalancing and releveling we’ve done on all of them.

In most cases, that item is going to level up on day one of Mirkwood [the fix applies whether or not you purchase Siege of Mirkwood]. If that experience causes you to gain some reforges, those’ll be saved. In other words, you’ll have those available at the forgemaster even if you’ve leveled past the forge, and all of this has to do with releveling and altering the way the tables work for legendary items so that we can keep them moving for a long time to come.

We also felt the need to change how reforging works. One of the biggest things, too, was to address the fact that identification and reforging needed to change because you had so little information going forward that you could get all the way to the end, having ground your way there and deconstruct it and not get pretty much anything you wanted. Which wasn’t fun. So we still wanted to have a bunch of randomization, but we changed it a little bit.

The initial legacies that you get at identification are only pulled from the best legacies. We broke legacies into pools, we did a lot of polling of players to figure out which were the legacies that were really kind of useless and which were the most valuable, and we’re making sure that the initial legacies that you get are pulled only from the best legacies and you can make a good guess about where it’s worthwhile to spend leveling.

Another thing is that Legendary Items are just going to level more easily. For the first 30 levels, it’s going to be the same experience table. After that, the item experience you need to level has changed. This is dependent on the age of the Legendary Item. A Third Age takes less experience per level, a Second Age takes a little bit more, and a First Age takes the most.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’ve also given players some new options in terms of how those weapons can be upgraded, correct?

Jeffrey Steefel: Yep, we’ve added in the fourth rune slot, and that’s huge for a number of reasons. First, just having that fourth slot is pretty huge. Secondly, this gives master crafters a very important role in the legendary item system. This slot only takes this new type of crafting relics. Unlike other relics, these can only be made by crafters. You can’t combine them and tier them up like other relics. Every craft has the ability to make relics, and they give bonuses to a particular stat or morale or power. And then there are greater crafted relics that masters can craft.

Ten Ton Hammer: Reading through the forums some players have expressed their concern that current legendary items will essentially become obsolete with the release of Mirkwood, but those items will still be viable, right?

Jeffrey Steefel: There are a couple of things with that actually. First, if you deconstruct them you’ll get a certain amount of item XP that you can apply to constructing newer weapons. There are also the runes that you’ll be getting when you deconstruct them in order to move them forward.

So you will be able to keep the items, but what’s more likely is that people are going to want to break them down and take the components from those items and build them into more useful items moving forward. The whole point though is that you’re not taking that item wholesale and throwing it out. The components that it’s comprised of become the materials that you’re using to continue to move forward.