Whatcha reading? The Fellowship of the Ring? Dude, Gandalf isn’t really dead. Oh yeah, and Frodo like totally wants to keep the ring at the end but Gollum grabs it and falls into Mount Doom.
Busy busy weekend but I found a little time to play in the Lord of the Rings Online Open Beta. I played a Hobbit minstrel in the stress test; time to check out the other classes to see what they were like.
I wasn’t that pleased with the Minstrel. Minstrels seemed weak on dps, and their healing was really nothing to get excited about. More of a balance issue; would you rather spend your time healing yourself or just take less damage to begin with?
No Hobbits or smelly Dwarves allowed in the Grey Havens!
The Champion is LotRO’s melee damage class, roughly the same as World of Warcraft’s Fury-specced Warrior, EQ2’s Brigand/Swashbuckler or EQ1’s Berserker. Champions can tank, but are at their best when they throw defense out the window and unleash their devastating single target and area attacks. Champions can eventually gain the use of a shield and bend their talents toward tanking, but that job is best left to the Guardian.
Very similar to WoW, Champions use attacks that generate Fervor points, which can then be spent on a number of special abilities; at level six my champ can spend points on a short term haste buff or two high-damage special attacks. She can also enter a special Fervor mode where she trades ALL her defensive moves for an increase in damage and hit percentage. Even solo, this mode takes down groups of mobs fast.
Elves share their newbie instance with the dwarves, and there’s little to say about it other than that at the end of it, you’ve learned how to move and attack, probably picked up some decent armor and possibly have grouped once or twice. The “600 years later…” bit between the introduction and the shared newbie zone is very nicely done. “Hey! Isn’t that the snow troll Elrond defeated outside the gates?”
Yes, yes it is.
Champion strategy note: Champion special attacks are based on the damage of the weapon, not the speed. So get the highest damage one-handed weapons you can find and go crazy.
Quite easy to become lost in the gorgeous vistas of Elfland…
So does it feel any different than the other fantasy games? Worth a shot or just so so to kill some time?
It’s very much a standard MMO that should especially be familiar to any WoW player. That said, past level ten or so, the game takes a surprising turn once you really begin grouping — group play is very different from the MMO norm.
I’ve got my champ to level 6. I’m lagging! I’m liking Vanguard quite a bit atm and that has been keeping me from putting more time into LOTRO. Maybe I need to give it a few more tries.
The narrative based gameplay is not something I thought I would see in an MMO. LotR uses instancing to move a story forward. For example, (spoiler alert!)
…you can start as a Human in a small town with all the other newbie players. You do the typical”kill this”/”fetch that” quests. Then around L6 you get put into a private instance of the entire outdoor zone. The town is on fire! The sweet pie selling quest giver helplessly watches her husband get brutally beaten by the soldier that betrayed the town to agents of the Nazgul! Only you can defeat the traitors, rescue a fallen ranger and face down the leader of the bad guys.
And when you do succeed, you zone out of the instance back to the “normal” zone, only to find that the town is mostly burned down and will remain so. You realize the zone you were in for the first 6 levels was actually the “shared instanced” version and this one is the real one from here on out.
One of the biggest complaints about MMOGs is that player actions don’t have any effect on the world. The narrative gameplay in this game is a huge step in the right direction.
Plus, if you play the dwarf tutorial, you get to meet Gandalf in the first 30secs of gameplay. 🙂
After I wrote the above comment, I wrote a longer post on my blog where I realized I’ve been waiting for this game for 26 years without knowing it. Check it out: http://onedruid.blogspot.com/2007/04/who-says-you-can-never-go-home-again.html