Home » Member News » Another view on Raids
I've been posting here since early beta of SoA, and I've seen lots of posts on raids, and why some people dont raid, casual versus hardcore players, etc. It seems the most common reason for not raiding is lack of time. But I wanted to add another perspective, and see if there are others like me.
The main reason i dont enjoy raids that much is because they are so different from the rest of the game, in terms of immersion in middle-earth. When I play the levelling content and related quests solo or in small groups, I really feel immersed in middle-earth. Turbine did an outstanding job in bringing middle-earth to life, and they deserve a lot of credit for that. But the moment I enter end-game content like raids, that feeling of immersion seems to disappear.
Why? Mainly because the instances seem gimmicky. Like a puzzle, but a puzzle thats not very fun, and where someone else is giving you the answers so you wont wipe in 30 seconds. 'Stand over here, do this, dont do that, then in phase 2, we move over there, and do something else'. Yikes. The bosses dont seem at all like middle-earth creatures, they seem like a superhero nemesis from a Marvel comic. I mean, isnt it in HoC where the boss stands on one of four different coloured squares, that change his abilities? The first time I saw that, I thought: they cant be serious. As a result, raids and some other end-game instances dont seem like the rest of LotRO but with a group, they feel like a.totally.different.game. Like someone took a WoW raid and slapped LotRO skin on the mobs and said, 'here ya go!'. And I find myself being turned off by the LotRO raids for the same reason that I quit WoW after a few months after it came out, when I hit max level and saw that all i had left to do was those silly raids over and over.
Dont get me wrong. I like LotRO, and I even like grouping. I just dont like the end-game grouping content. My favorite all-time group battle in LotRO wasnt an end-game instance, it was killing trolls in Sarnur, when someone new joined the group and brought over about 6 elite mobs... on top of the 4 we were already fighting. What an awesome battle! No script, no puzzle being force-fed, just each player improvising and playing their character in mass chaos. That felt more like a true middle-earth battle than any end-game instance I can recall.
When I think of the battles in the books and movies, I dont think of puzzle-bosses, and Gandalf spending 20 minutes explaining to the rest of the fellowship 'ok here is what each of you are going to do...'. Rather, the orcs and trolls came, and the fellowship slaughtered them! (not mindless hack'n'slash where you always win, mind you, but each character had to do what it does best in order to allow the group to survive).
It seems like Turbine feels they need to replicate WoW's end-game content, because that is what many raiders 'expect'. IMO that view is mistaken. Instead of one puzzle-boss, whats wrong with 8 or 10 elite trolls? Whats wrong with waves of a dozen signature orcs? To me that feels a lot more like middle-earth, and can be just as challenging. Instead, we get puzzle-boss after puzzle-boss, each boss more puzzle-y than the last, lest folks think the raids are not getting 'harder'. When in fact the vast majority of players never even try to solve the puzzle anyway, they just let someone who has already solved the puzzle explain to them what they need to do.
I guess my point is, mix things up Turbine! There are other ways to make end-game instances challenging, besides just more and more complex puzzle-bosses. Change the paradigm, and dont feel you have to out-WoW WoW. Try something else for a change, and see how people react. If they're like me, they would love a change.