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Obsoleting Content

Friday, August 14, 2009

With Book 8 Patch one, a set of level 60 bounty quests have shown up in Esteldin. A new Dwarven NPC will issue 5 different repeatable bounty quests to kill a particular named mob in five different locations in Middle-Earth. From these quest you get a set amount of item xp, plus a heritage rune with more ixp.

Yesterday I set out with a couple of my kinmates to do these quests. Three are soloable but two require a small fellowship. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm came through right then and blew out the power and I didn't get them done. (Amazing lightning strike right across the street, by the way.) Today I jumped back in to complete the three solo quests. From those three quests I managed to level my legendary weapon from 30 to 33. It would take considerably longer grinding the xp through kills and deconstructing trash legendaries. Or even running the ixp quest circuit in Moria.

These five quests have singlehandedly made obsolete all other methods of accruing item xp. I'm not complaining that I can get some mucho item leveling done (15 hour cool downs) but I have to wonder if these quests aren't a little "overpowered". New content is one thing, but when the new content completely invalidates the older content, I have to wonder.

Certainly the level 60 raids have made the level 50 raids useless in terms of tangible reward, but even then these raids are worth doing if you're a player who simply likes to see the content. Run through them once, or as many times as it takes to complete the quests. Repeatable content is a different animal.

Okay, maybe the ixp quests in Moria aren't totally useless. They do give you the weapon/class item modifiers, so if you need one of those, run that quest. I might suggest raising the rewards from those quest by giving out heritage runes as well so they can compete. I'll let the devs decide what value these runes would be to balance with the bounty quests vs time to complete, effort involved, etc. But I think they need a little beefing up. Or a scaling back of the bounty rewards just a bit to be more in line with the effort required.

Wait... Seriously... Did I just ask for a nerf?

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