Developer Notes: Time required for dungeons & raids?

The question was posed by Vanimar regarding what to expect in terms of time commitment for instances and raids in the game.

Scenario, LOTRO Lead Worldbuilder, answered with the following comments.

One of our efforts in the Instance department was to make them something you could tackle in chunks.

Many of our larger instances have built in by-passes requiring keys. You spend a couple of hours one night, defeat the boss and get the key and can now open doors which will allow you to skip areas you completed the night before.

The Great Barrow, for example, has a quest with the end reward being a key. With that key, you can now get to the point where you left off fairly quickly (though you will still have to deal with enemies along your route to that bypass).

So… you could go through the entire instance from start to finish in one sitting if you wanted to, but there are ways to shortcut available if you don’t want to run the entire instance in that sitting.

With the Shores of Evendim update, we also wanted to provide some interesting gameplay experiences that can be completed in a single sitting. The time to complete would be shorter, but no less challenging than one of our standard 6-man instances.

When asked if keys are like save points, he responds…

Sort of, you will still need to play through the instance up to the point of the door. But once you are at the door, you can use your key to open the shortcut.

Also, not all instances are created equal and the time it takes to get both the key and to get to the shortcut varies from instance to instance (or there may not even be a bypass/key dynamic in the instance if it isn’t considered long enough that one would be worthwhile).

Another post followed later…

My group is running the Great Barrow instance. As we are fighting our way through the twisting tunnels and encounters, we noticed locked doors that we cannot open. The tunnels wrap around so that my group can be on the other side of a locked door, but in a round-about fashion.

With the key, my group could skip the round-about (which could be a couple of hours of play-time depending on the size of the instance) and open the door.

Usage of the key won’t just skip you directly to a specific location, you still have to play your way to that location. You will have significantly less to play through if you have your key.

Time required for dungeons & raids?