In the latest Cord of the Rings, the Lord of the Rings Online team pulled the veil back on some upcoming content for the long-running MMO, including new legendary servers with an interesting-sounding event.
The stream, which saw community manager Cordovan interview the MMO's executive producer, Rob Ciccolini, shared the news that new legendary servers are coming to The Lord of the Rings Online. The Angmar and Mordor servers will be launching at the same time in July, with the Mordor server hosted on the European datacenter. The legendary servers will once again be restricted to VIP players only, and the servers will not include the Ettenmoors for balancing reasons and will progress at a normal pace - unlike the previous Shadowfax and Treebeard progression servers.
Interestingly enough, the servers will be getting a new event called the Veil of the Nine. This Ringwrait-themed event will see players attacked by the Nazgul. Ciccolini described an event where players who hold a "special Ring" will be able to take on greater wraiths, though there will only be twelve of such Rings on a server.
Ciccolini describes a situation where it effectively turns the encounter into a world boss, where it will require a group of "50 players" to effectively take on. However, should a player carrying one of these special Rings show up, it'll make the fight easier as it strips the Wraith of their invulnerability.
"What will happen is this will create this creature that the server has to come together to defeat," Ciccolini explained. He continued, "For the greater wraith, which don't happen that often, there are Rings that drop in the world that will break their invulnerability. Without that, even 50 people jumping on may not be enough to take them down because they take so little damage. But if someone shows up with one of these special Rings, it'll break their invulnerability and they become kind of like a raid boss. Well, not a raid boss, but a world boss. So it'd be much easier to defeat them. But there's online twelve Rings, twelve on the whole server."
Ciccolini explains that these Rings will stay with a player for ten days before they lose it.
In addition to the new servers and world event, we learned that there is an Elf Avatar update planned for the Fall, and talked about 64-bit servers and how the team is combatting the lag and performance issues in the aged MMO. You can check out the full stream in the embed below.
