Dread of the Witch-king or updates?

Howdy fellow M-e boxers...

This may be coincidental, but...

Last night I was leveling my box team of 1 guard, 4 hunters and a mini through the first half of Angmar. I had just about cleared all the quests in the area and was left with only a few Fellowship quests that are pretty hard on level... up to now I haven't had any troubles with most of the quests - and I hadn't yet experienced a group wipe in Angmar or even a single death - but yesterday....

Yesterday a few things happened...

1. LOTRO did an update...
2. When I opened the ISboxer client - It updated (yes i clicked update instead of remind me later)
3. I got ganked by 4 fire breathing worms in an instance and my whole group wiped...

After recovering from the wipe - I noticed that my team had a debuff on them - "dread of the witch-king" - I popped a hope token but it only took the dread of the toon who had the hope token instead of everyone (like regular dread) - so i decided to wait the 10 minute duration of the W-k dread out instead of wasting 5 more hope tokens... and as i was waiting it out I noticed that my team was unresponsive to all of my skills and mappings...

Movement and follow worked as expected - but none of my DPS triggers or buff triggers or even my mount triggers would work... I inspected my characters hot-keys on the UI and noticed that when i triggered a skill through my main - it would put the "marching ants" around the skill - but instead of firing it would just cancel in a puff of smoke.

By this time I tried another hope token on one of my team members (the first one was on my main - the tank) and when the dread of the Witch king was removed - that toon became responsive to my skill commands while the other W-k dread effected toons would not...

So apparently if toons are effected with the dread of the witch-king debuff they can not induce certain skills until the dread is canceled or removed.

My question is:

1. Is this supposed to be this way?
2. Is this a turbine design on any character (boxer or not)?
3. Is it a side effect of any of the updates (lotro or ISBoxer)

I appreciate any insight on this matter - i honestly never heard of "Dread of the Witch-king" making skill unavailable while under its effect - but then again - there is probably a whole lot of things i never heard.

W.

Hi Wanderlust

I saw your post on the LOTRO forums and don't really have anything constructive to add over what was suggested there. I haven't seen that effect before and I suspect it is a bug or lag-related issue.

I haven't had any problems multi-boxing in LOTRO today, though I only spent my time dragging the team around the Treasure Hunt field, so it wasn't much of a 'test'.

[TonyO]

Wanderlust, It may not help you much but I spent a lot of time boxing a fellowship of 6 through Angmar last week without any problems, so I think you must have had a server lag spike or a bug in the quest you were doing. After the update Monday Sept 17, LOTRO performs better for me than before.

So - yay, I'm still getting this unresponsive (lag?) thing.
I'm almost certain its on LOTRO side because of the "lag fix" they recently implemented and tonight's launcher debacle.

It may be a red herring, but it may be associated with "world or regional" buffs - like the Angmar dread that I mentioned and what happened to me today. After I managed to get the whole team all logged in - there was a world wide "welcome back weekend: 100% experience buff" and 4 out of 6 toons were unresponsive to any skills and mapping except movements and some passive skills.

This is the 2nd time this has happened in 3 days (i played all night last night with out any problems - or dread - or regional buffs) and both times that it bugged - there was a buff. I dont know if its related, but it is coincidental.

Very weird that i've been playing almost daily for the last 2 and a half months boxing this team, from level 28 to 45 and have experienced no issues at all with lag - and then -boom !!!

Hopefully they will get it figured out quickly - its very discouraging to be stuck in the middle of killing trolls in The Arena and have half your team bug out

Seems like the wierdness over at LOTRO has worked itself out - after those few incidents, I have been playing for the past week without issue again - some others have report same or similar issues that also went away after a few days.

However - I'm starting to get burnt on Multi-boxing again and my 3 month sub of innerspace is close to running out - my goal, for this stretch was to get my team from level 30 to level 45 and get their LI's and be ready to start Moria on my next boxing spurt - and i'm almost there!

I was just gifted The Histories of Middle-earth vol 1 through 12 and i can see my free time being consumed by other pleasures for a while - so this maybe my last post for a few months - until i get bitten by the box bug again...

Journey safe and good game guys

Cool, glad to hear it appears to have been a temporary 'glitch' with Lotro itself.

See you in a while