The Lord of the Rings Online is continuing to adjust its number of Shadowy Wraith spawns, this time looking into how they can remove them from story instances after player feedback.
As we reported yesterday, Standing Stone Games has already reduced the quantity of Shadowy Wraith spawns within the new Angmar and Mordor Legendary servers, but now they are looking into removing them from another part of the game: story instances. Players have reported encountering Shadowy Wraiths during important story quests, especially in the instanced areas of those quests, and it's not exactly gone down well.
While the Shadowy Wraiths provide something fresh and new to think about during the leveling experience, adding to the overall fun of the new servers, they can get bothersome in the wrong moments. Trying to tail a glacial Sara Oakheart in an instance is not a moment you want to be dealing with a powerful Wraith - especially when you might not have the right skills or mitigations to deal with one solo.
Thankfully, the LotRO dev team is listening to feedback, with community manager Jerry "Cordovan" Snook announcing on the forums late yesterday afternoon that the team intends to "remove Shadowy Wraiths from at least story instances," though it does come with a disclaimer: "if we can."
Cordovan goes on to say that they will have more information once the "actual work" is done, but he wanted to let players know that this is an change the team is intending to make based on feedback.
Note that this is only going to affect the Shadowy Wraith spawns in instances - and Cordovan specifically mentions "story" instances, meaning that other instances like the Great Barrows, Fornost, and even the depths of Carn Dum in Angmar could still see spawns outside of their story quests. It'll be interesting to see if this change affects more than just story instances when the team is done with their work making this change.
