I had a chance to run the most recent six man instance in LOTRO last week – Sammath Gul (thanks to everyone who came along, especially Arbitrary for being so patient with us.)
I thought it was a really fun instance, and definitely a style of fight and layout from which WoW is moving away. We had to be careful with the pulls and use crowd control where it was available, we had to pay attention to the surroundings to avoid summoning extra adds in the middle of fights, and boss fights were long and (sometimes) intricate.
For example, here’s a handy diagram from someone explaining strategies on one of the bosses. If you think that it looks more like a WoW raid fight than an instance fight, you’d be correct. Even though we used a less demanding strategy, just standing still and beating him down wasn’t an option.
So, it was a lot of fun. More demanding than current WoW instances, partly because I’m still a bit new and awkward with grouping in LOTRO whereas I know WoW like the back of my hand. But still I find that some MMO skills are transferable and helped me to at least hold my end up and not fail totally.
For example: Moving out of the fire. Spotting when a boss has cast a debuff on you and getting out of the way as required. Bunching up quickly. Avoiding other stuff on floor. Applying burst damage to a mob, as given by the kill order. Use of interrupts. Use of crowd control.
You don’t realise that these are transferable skills until you play with someone who isn’t used to doing those things in a game at all. Other skills I find handy are gauging the local economy and making some in game gold. The LOTRO in game economy is borked in many ways, but being able to spot quickly that gathering pays well and knowing how to use the auction house will help you get up to speed.
If you play multiple MMOs, do you find that skills are transferable?
And it’s off to the con
I’ve never really been a convention person, but wish me luck, I’m off to Eastercon this weekend.
So hopefully more on that next week.
Welcome to Spinksville! 