LOTRO Reputations

In Book 10 Turbine added a new gameplay feature known as “reputation”. Similar to World of Warcraft in many ways, reputation is a number grind to go from neutral to kindred. As you progress through the ranks of reputation you gain access to rewards. Theses rewards can be anything from crafting recipes, armor, weapons, or “fluff” items (hobbits for example get to glow with fireflies or something silly like that). There are several reputations for players to work on and each faction has a dungeon that will drop quest items and have traits to unlock.

Tonight I went into the Sarnur dungeon to work on my Thorin’s Hall faction. I had no real reason to do this other than the idea of grouping with a few guild members seemed like a change of pace. First thing you notice when you enter Sarnur is the design and look of the place is beautiful.  The whole place is this ice covered dwarven mine that so far, by looks alone,  puts other instances to shame. Next thing you notice, probably after killing the first few mobs, is that the respawn in this place is incredibly fast. Even with a full level 50 group you’re going to notice the mobs you just killed are back within 1 minute. And lastly if it hasn’t become obvious yet then look closer; there are others in the instance with you! Yep, the instances are public for all players to share. This means you will be competing for kills, but that’s not too difficult given the respawn rate.

So as my little 4 man group delved deeper into this mine-like instance we found reputation items that drop on a fairly common basis. These rep items are turned in as “tokens” and they gain you reputation in groups of 10. The first 10 you turn in will give 700 reputation and every 10 after that will yield 300. To be friendly(I think that’s the first level) you need 10,000 points. It may seem daunting at first but now let’s talk deeds. In Sarnur I quickly started working on three different slayer deeds… maybe it was four. Wargs, goblins, dourhands, trolls, birds. Okay it was five. The dourhands and birds were very quick and each gave 700 reputation. After completing the first tier of the deed you unlock the “trait” giving +1 to many of the popular trait choices such as Justice.

And lastly tonight I will share with you the neatest addition to these public dungeons. Within each instance is another sub instance. In Sarnur there was a door that after zoning through presented us with a few dozen dwarves and goblins that all had this buff on them. The buff was cryptic and said they were protected from all but one type of weapon. So after attacking one of these simple 2,000hp mobs we found that no one was doing more than 10-20 damage save for me. The reason? I use a light damage weapon! So we have begun to see more purpose behind weapon damage types! This should definitely add an additional level of combat mechanics if Turbine runs with this idea. Imagine having to carry a weapon of each type and swap on different monsters in order to complete a dungeon. Sounds cool to me.

So over all I like the fact that you can earn rewards for just going in and kicking some butt in these beautiful places. It’s a great addition to the game for any play style and most importantly I believe we have content that will last more than 2 months. Kudos Turbine.